Empower and Include

It's been a busy time. I finally did manage to pass my driving test (a very kind examiner, the winter chill and empty roads helped me overcome my mind numbing fear of tests!). Tremendously liberating. Still don't have a car, but it's nice knowing that there is now no other bar to mobility. So Empowering!

So, today, I focus on Empowerment.

And if and how global learning assets and open source education can be used to foster empowerment.

"The idea of empowerment is that those who have little or no influence, such as excluded people, are able to develop informed opinions, to take initiative, make independent choices and influence change...

It also means that those with influence actively change their attitudes and rules and change the way decisions are made through involving excluded people."

Source: The EQUAL Community Initiative (whose activities have now been completed).

Empowerment is the opposite of Powerlessness, which is described in the Voices of the Poor: Crying out for Change as "the core of the bad life", manifesting in "the inability to control what happens, the inability to plan for the future, and the imperative of focusing on the present". Read this global study by the World Bank published as a three part series "Voices of the Poor".

Powerlessness is a serious constraint on the ability to pursue happiness. Its antidote, true empowerment, must be preceded by a recognition of the need for some degree of equality. And for that there must be a change in attitudes and a fundamental shift in how education and learning is offered and made available, accessible and inclusive. It means turning things upside down and inside out. It means Open Education.

As a launch pad into the study of this immensely exciting arena, read Michaeil Feldstein's primer on The History of Open Education here.

Today, every institution that offers education must seriously assess their responsibility to the marginalised and the excluded and think about how they can empower the powerless. And how they can share their assets and benefit from the amazing possibilities for exchange.