We have a 4 week streak going for the monday-connect topics! Please share and reply, often Today we are asking to consider something you have recently read in an article, post, paper, or heard in a podcast or video, that is a strong statement about openness.
It could be from someone “famous” but even more interesting, would be something you heard from an educator or a student.
For me I am almost done reading This is For Everyone about the invention of the World Wide Web by the inventor himself, Tim Berners-Lee. On page 286, he shares a quote said at the 30th anniversary of the web celebration at CERN:
The web has become a public square, a library, a doctor’s office, a shop, a school, a design studio, an office, a cinema, a bank, and so much more. Of course with every new feature, every new website, the divide between those who are online and those who are not increases, making it all the more imperative to make the web available for everyone.
This jumped out at me because we are framing this year’s Open Education Week as the “town square for open education” and we still hold those hopes to keep the web not only available for everyone, but open for everyone.
Got an upbeat quote? Share with the reply button below. Include the source with a link, please! and tell us why you chose it to share.
I’m not sure if this is “upbeat” but I think it’s critically important at this point in time. This quote is from Eliot Higgins, founder of open source intelligence group Bellingcat, writing on Bluesky about the importance of open source citizen journalism:
We need to equip journalists, civil society actors, researchers, and the public with shared methods for collecting evidence, testing claims, correcting errors, and showing their work openly.
Crucially, this has to happen in networks, not as isolated projects. No single organisation can match the velocity of modern narrative formation. But distributed networks working in parallel, using common standards and transparent methods, can introduce constraint early enough to matter.
We have many strong statements and reflections on openness that we would love to share. Much of this work, however, is currently available in Arabic, coming from educators, librarians, and learners in our local context. We see this as an opportunity to highlight the richness of perspectives on openness beyond English and hope to contribute translated excerpts or summaries in the future to broaden the conversation.
We welcome discussions here in your preferred language, and we invite you to write in Arabic.
We have no requirement here to write in only Englishm and in fact are exploring the plugins for this platform that can make translations occur in real time.
That said, Wisal, I would very much welcome seeing your shared quotations in Arabic!
Today we are asking to consider something you have recently read in an article, post, paper, or heard in a podcast or video, that is a strong statement about openness.
