Some quotes from Gardner Campbell‘s Ecologies of Yearning talk at OpenEd12:

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are

…I was struck and deeply moved to think that I have seen, I have listened to students and colleagues who describe their own relationship with the institution we call Higher Education as one determined primarily by paranoia, hebephrenia or catatonia.

…open is not a simply quality to adopt or a direction to pursue.  Open is an certain attitude towards systems and the desires those systems empower and focus.

We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

– T.S. Eliot

I share in part what Gardner say about the current state of MOOCs.  I agree that was not what I had in mind, yet that is our reality.  It’s worth saying that in Latin America the MOOC-rush has yet to reach its tipping point, just like happened with OCW a decade ago.  Yet the risks are exactly the same English commentators and practitioners talk about.

The thing is, as Gardner suggests, that it’s difficult to take a stand. Does cheap access to top content matters? I’d say it does. Is that enough? I think that’s a question each one of us have to answer, but we have to keep in mind that ‘enough’ is relative to the values and interests of a society and, at large scale, it would seem that for most of our societies, feeding content might be enough to *survive* the education experience.  So why bother with all those pesky questions?

It seems to me, as time goes by, that delusion might be a requirement if we intend to keep our sanity and be coherent with the things we believe in, considering that the world at large and what constitues the statu quo seems to be going somewhere else.

As usual, very provocative talk by Gardner.