Against ‘openness’

From The Monsters of Educational Technology, by Audrey Watters, loc 1530:

We act at our peril as if “open” is politically neutral, let alone politically good or progressive. Indeed, we sometimes use the word to stand in place of a politics of participatory democracy. We presume that, because something is “open” that it necessarily contains all the conditions for equality or freedom or justice. We use “open” as though it is free of ideology, ignoring how much “openness,” particularly as it’s used by technologists, is closely intertwined with “meritocracy” – this notion, a false one, that “open” wipes away inequalities, institutions, biases, history, that “open” “levels the playing field.”

Can we reclaim the ideal of the ‘open’ from this ideological morass or must we abandon it? As Watters observes on loc 1578, the idea of openness is often attached to ambitions for problem solving. If only we had more data, tricky  social problems would melt away:

The current administration is interested in more than just data at the school, district, and state level. It’s actively promoting the collection and analysis of student at the individual level, arguing that if we just have more data –if we “open up” the classroom, the software, the databases, the educational practices –that we will unlock the secrets of how every student learns. We can then build software that caters to that, something that will make learning more efficient and more personalized. Or that’s the argument at least. We should remember that this is mostly speculative. And we should recognize here that words like “personalization” function much like “open.” That is, they sound great in press releases, but they should prompt us to ask more questions rather than assume that they’re necessarily good.