Through little more than serendipity and circumstance, I’ve come to realize that the combination of my childhood, having grown up at 10,000 ft. in the wilderness of Colorado, and my first big-boy job out of college, combined to set me on an inevitable path towards an honest embrace of openness; a path I still proudly walk today, but also one I’m continuously (re)carving and crafting as new (and often frightening) pedagogies and digital affordances continue to emerge and evolve before us.
Growing up in the (still undiscovered at the time) mountains of Colorado, I developed a boundless understanding of reality. There was always something and somewhere new to explore, always freedom to be found in the seemingly endless natural expanse around me. As a child, the things I created were never entirely mine, but instead, extensions of myself and connections to a broader landscape of ecological playgrounds and possibility.
Years later (in 2005), I would land my first job working for the Library of Congress; a job rife with rewarding contradictions at every turn and one I would remain invested in for nearly a decade. Somehow I had found myself working for one of the most structured, bureaucratic, red-tape-ridden organizations in existence, on projects involving unencumbered imagination, the dissolving of barriers, and a goal of ultimately opening doors and eyes to the largest digital library in the world (*in less than 2 years, the LOC stores, and makes publicly available, a petabyte of data). This project, originally (and aptly) called An Adventure of the American Mind, (re)infused in me an ethos of pedagogical (and now androgogical) openness that I’ve only recently come to truly embrace. For a decade of my life, I helped expose teachers to the single most powerful OER in the world, I simply didn’t think of it in those terms at the time.
Today, as an instructional designer (one proud to have been forged from a foundation of physical and digital openness), I get to implicitly share my story with faculty; building open partnerships and co-creating learning experiences that are powerful, affordable, and responsive to a new era of students with ever-evolving opportunities and expectations.
My story of opting open is in many ways accidental, but the more I come to understand who I am and where I came from, the more I wonder if the path could have been carved any other way.
* The Petabyte Perspective
- If you counted all the bits in one petabyte at one bit per second, it would take 285 million years.
- Most estimate that on average there are 100 trillion cells in the human body, so if one bit of info is equivalent to a cell, you’re talking about 90 people.
