Abstract The place of technology in the development of coherent educational responses to environmental and socio-economic disruption is here placed under scrutiny. One emerging area of interest is the role of technology in addressing more complex learning futures, and more especially in facilitating individual and social resilience, or the ability to manage and overcome disruption. However, the extent to which higher education practitioners can utilise technology to this end is framed by their approaches to the curriculum, and the socio-cultural practices within which they are located. This paper discusses how open education might enable learners to engage with uncertainty through social action within a form of higher education that is more resilient to economic, environmental and energy-related disruption. It asks whether open higher education can be (re)claimed by users and communities within specific contexts and curricula, in order to engage with an uncertain world. p. 1

It has been contended that the ability of users to integrate a range of institutional and non-institutional networks, content and tools, extends their reflexivity and identity as students and citizens (Hall and Hall, 2010; University of Reading, 2010). p. 2

A developing critique of techno-essentialism highlights that educational technology must be seen as socially, culturally and politically-grounded. In this view, some of the opportunities for the reinvention of HE are being lost as the radical effects of technology are neutralised (Feenberg, 1999; FutureLab, 2009; Hemmi et al., 2009; Selwyn, 2010). p. 2

The hopeful possibilities of open education include:

• enhancing our ability to create spaces for reflecting upon our participation in the activity and labour of (self-) discovery and (self-) invention (Attwell, 2010);
• catalysing a culture and set of values that offer spaces for cultural reinvention; and
• re-fashioning democratic and participative social relationships. p. 4

However, participation is an often co-opted word, de-based to a form of therapeutic engagement between individuals whose power-to govern and create in a situation/activity is markedly different (Anstein, 1969; Hall, 2006). p. 4

This is also true for the development of open education in the form of open educational resources (OERs), which appear to be innovatory, only to be a re-hashing and reinforcement of many of the defining attributes of mass production: automation and standardisation; efficiency; and the reification of the resource as product. This is strangely regressive and promotes pedagogy-asproduction, curricula-as-distribution and learning-as-consumption. In this institutionalised form, OERs-as-open-education refer to the free movement and regeneration of reified commodities protected by liberal property laws (Creative Commons) that guarantee a level of autonomy to digital objects over and above the rights of teaching (labour) and learning (apprenticeship) from which they are abstracted. In parallel the labour that produced them is placed under the control and supervision of quality assurance, through impact measures. Here technology is the cause of our educational provision rather than being a variable of its production (Noble 1984). p. 4

For Hopkins (2009), resilience is “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks”. This focuses upon defining problems and framing solutions contextually, around our abilities to change and adapt rather than control and manage p. 5

Hopkins (2009) identifies three elements to resilience, with implications for the relationship between technology and open education. Firstly, resilience comes through diversity within networks or associations, and encompasses a broad base of livelihoods, skills and capabilities, resource use, and access to human and energy systems. Secondly, modularity within communities or networks underpins increased self-reliance. Thus, the ability of communities to tap into ‘surge protectors’, such as diverse areas of expertise or resource-supply, can help them to achieve their aims. Thirdly, tightness of feedback loops, so that people are not divorced from the outcomes of their decisionmaking and actions, ensures enhanced planning and delivery. p. 6

Sharing as a means of overcoming crises is founded upon co-governance, and this should be central to the development of openness in the idea of the twenty-first century university. This is exemplified by:

• the Really Open University’s (ROU) emphasis on the need for praxis, in re-asserting the idea of the university as a site for critical action, resistance and opposition, led by students (ROU, 2010); and
• the Peer to Peer University’s (2010) approach to sharing and accreditation. p. 6

A critique of the interplay between technology and open education, and the development of an open curriculum for resilience, highlights four risks. p. 6

1. There is a risk that individual rather than social empowerment is laid bare, and that within a libertarian educational structure, the focus is placed on access to technology as the driver for individual, economic emancipation. In this view, there is a need for constant innovation in technology and technological practices, in order to empower ever more diverse groups of learners, including those in developing countries (OpenCourseware, 2010; Rossini, 2010; Seeley Brown and Adler, 2008). 2. There is a risk that open technological solutions simply replicate or re-produce a dominant political economy in education, in-line with an ideology of business-as-usual (HEA/JISC, 2010). As a result, that which is claimed as innovatory becomes subservient to a dominant mode of production and merely enables institutions to have new power-over products and labour. 3. Academics and students risk fetishising the outcomes/products of their labour as a form of currency (Pfaffenberger,1988). This is especially true in the case of both OERs and personal learning environments, which risk being disconnected from a deeper critique of open, higher education. 4. Academics and administrators risk fetishising students as autonomous agents, able to engage in an environment, using specific tools and interacting with specific OERs, rather than seeing engagement as socially emergent and negotiated (Hall, 2010). p. 7

Bibliographic references p. 9