Martin Weller is Professor at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. He is the Director of the OER Hub, a research unit examining the impact of open education. He is the author of the books The Digital Scholar and The Battle for Open, both available under Creative Commons licences. He blogs at edtechie.net.
If the Enlightenment can be characterised as a belief in the pursuit of knowledge and truth, then the current climate in which experts are compared to soothsayers, and inexperience is preferred in some quarters to expertise, can be classified as a form of ‘unenlightenment’. In this talk the evidence for such a sentiment is explored and the contributing factors which might have given rise to it are considered. The impact of this on open education in particular, and what its response should be, will be examined.