Stephen Downes

Lorna Campbell reflects on the controversies and changes at OpenEd this year, reflects on how different the U.S. experience of 'open' is from her British context, and wonders about the centrality of OpenEd as compared to other such conferences. In my experience there's no one 'open education community' (though each of a number of them sees themselves that way). There's the OpenEd community, the ALT community, the UNESCO community, the ICDE community, and many others. Mostly they don't talk to each other. Different communities are focused on different issues, ranging from cost to access to diversity to quality to pedagogy. This is a good thing. I wouldn't want there to be just one community. But it would be nice if the different communities would begin to recognize each others' existence.