50 shades of openness

It hits me so often and so hard how different the same word can elicit so many assorted meanings depending on the person that writes or reads, or even the moment in which the same person writes or reads.

This sort-of polysemy in regular, traditional words like chair, suit, watch and others becomes shocking when we talk about new concepts, adopted from the regular language, but applied to this World 2.0 that contaminates us 24/7. The educational community is not impermeable to this situation.

“In the project there are 50 people (at least) are involved, and 50 notions of “openness”.

Teacher, learner, classroom, textbook and other well-consolidated terms along the centuries turn into a new, reinvented and redefined meaning, from 20 years ago until now.

Internet shows the paradox of making people feel closer although they are in separate spots of the World, and at the same time, making people feel isolated when they focus on the mobile screen instead of chatting with the others surrounding, just one physical feet away.

Internet also reverses the stress into the learning chain. The learner does not seem to be the enrolled student, the teacher does not seem to be the docent in a payroll, and the resources do not seem to be just the aged, full-of-dust textbook, beaten up year after year.