POLITICAL AND INDIGENOUS MEANING OF OPENNESS

My colleague, Kabello Sebolai, a linguist, shared a selection of writings by Steve Biko, I write what I like, edited by Aelred Stubbs C.R. published by Picador Africa. He inter alia referred to Biko's words on p.131: "...whether you speak English or not, your values are affected by your culture..." According to my colleague and the history of Blacks to struggle for political freedom, politics are so integrated with language per se, that it is very difficult to separate specific meanings. Subsequently, the word Open, means political freedom for Blacks in a post apartheid era. "Open universities" for example, do not carry exactly the same academic meaning as the Open University of Hong Kong. Open access means that it was formerly historically white universities which were closed for Blacks but that it is now open for Black students to enroll. The cultural meaning of "openness" in Africa means "to share" a commodity with all people (Ibid. p. 47). In this respect, the academic concept of Open Universities is also to share knowledge and resources which could or may be simulated (Cf. Rumble,G., 1989. 'Open Learning', 'distance learning', and the misuse of language.UNISA Study Guide1 for CDEPO1-Q, 2007).

However, the Africanised concept of "open" could be regarded as indigenous knowledge since it is part and parcel of their culture. When Steve Biko started the South African Student's Organisation (SASO) in 1969 at the University of the North, it actually derived from political interferences of the former SA Government in the affairs of the historically Black university of Fort Hare. In 1959 this university was brought under direct government control. Hence the long enclosed isolation for Black students and academe commenced until 1994 when it became open within the new political dispensation. During this "closed" period, wrote Biko: "one of the most talked-about topics was the position of the black students in the 'open' organisations like NUSAS...Some people amongst the black communities felt that the best approach would be a black take-over of the 'open' student organisations..."(Ibid. pp. 10;11) (own italics and my bold highlighting). Although Black students distrusted the open idea to join the white liberal organisations, they realised that "further isolation of the Black intelligentsia from the rest of the black society is a disadvantage to black people as a whole"(Ibid. pp. 18-19).

When comparing the research problem of an indigenous African culture of sharing open resources (Cf. Ibid. p.46), to the British idea of open universities, political nomenclature such as 'socialism' cannot be ignored. Political meaning of Communist socialism versus British concepts of the term differ totally from Black indigenous interpretations of sharing resources. Consequently, it still needs further research, however, according to my estimation at this stage, the terms Open Higher Education and Open Education Resources have already been part and parcel of African academe.

TRENDS TOWARDS OPEN LEARNING RESOURCES

My colleague, Nico Baird, writes in his weekly tech column :THE whole world is moving to open source software. Every week I read online about another
government moving over from proprietary software to some type of open format. Even the South
African government has announced that they will start to implement open source software in the
future,
Programmes like OpenOffice which has a spreadsheet (like Excell), a presentation component
[like PowerPoint), Writer (like Microsoft Word) and other components are available online and is
free to download, use and distribute.
These programmes are used more and more in business and yet for some strange reason I have not seen any institution which offers training programmes for these applications. In a year or two most government departments will be using these free programmes and the users would have been trained on commercial programmes.
Is it not time that schools, universities and other training institutions install these free programmes and start to train students to use them? The advantage is that students/users are able to download and install these programmes on their own computers legally. Students usually do not have thousands of rands to spend on software packages and using free software will empower these students to reach new heights.
As an example I can can give you Mark Shuttleworth. When at university he used free open source software to build the company which he sold for millions.
I know that many people feel that if they do not pay for a product il is of poor quality, and this may be true in many cases, but With the Open Source Community growing each and every day this is no longer the case.