ABSTRACT
Open-source culture and the notion of “open networks” have led to important shifts in the ways that professional learning, collaboration, and invention occur in fields ranging from science to journalism to business. However, limited work has explored how education might leverage notions of “open” work practices as ways to build collaborative learning networks among educators. Ideas around open work and open networks can provide a much-needed alternative picture of what educator learning can look like. This is a contrast to an education landscape in which teacher deprofessionalization is ongoing, where creativity and collaboration take a back-seat to accountability, and where professional learning is too often just as didactic as the “stand and deliver” pedagogies that progressive education aims to challenge. In this chapter, I explore how a designed organizational network of more than 70 informal learning organizations, Mozilla Hive NYC Learning Network, drew on open-source cultural practices as a means to promote socially driven collaborative learning among its educators. I explore the notion of “Working in the Open,” a set of work practices that value transparency, an experimental stance and open contribution and collaboration by large communities, and argue that it represents a departure from existing industrial influences of scientific management and Taylorism in education. I share how these practices are distinctive in their emphasis on promoting open participation in learning and design activities by educators in a network—an approach that emphasizes the development of strong social ties across distributed institutional settings. Finally, I describe how Working Open practices were enculturated and supported within the Hive NYC Learning Network.
