From August 5th, participants in the “Why Open” course by P2PU are going to explore questions around the meaning and practice of openness. Facilitated by Christina Hendricks, Simeon Oriko, Jeanette Lee, and Jane Park, this course will include discussions on various platforms and culminate in a final project : a story of openness.
I am happy to be on board for this 4-week intellectual adventure !
Who’s talking?
Online, I am frequently referred to as hardcorekancil (@hardcorekancil), a compound name for hardcore + kancil. This happens to be an oxymoron; if you’ve ever seen a kancil, you know what I’m talking about.
Yeah, I’m hardcore! Photo by B.C. Tørrissen under CC-BY-SA 3.0
I have a bit of formal education (B.Sc. Physics, PGDE) but my insatiable curiosity has led me down numerous unexpected paths, usually along the lines of languages + linguistics, education, spirituality, social movements. A far cry from my initial mathematics-oriented university days!
The concept of openness came to my attention through the debates over creative commons vs. copyright which in turn had me discover open educational resources, open knowledge, open science. Now, I can’t stop reading about it! ‘Open’ has entered my realm.
Traces of my writing can be found here (in French) and infrequently here (in English). I also translate for Global Voices Online.
Survey: What does open mean to you?
Even if you’re not intending to take the course, it would be wonderful if you could fill out a short survey about what ‘open’ means to you. The results will be discussed by participants and thus serve to enrich the course material. Make sure you give your 2 cents before Monday 5th August!
Why Open by @hardcorekancil 
Great to meet you! Thanks for giving us a bit of background and links to some of your other writing! A thought that came to me as I read your post…it would be useful to create an “about” page so people can see who you are, get your name (if you want, that is), etc., in case they miss this first post. Just go to “Pages,” and then “create new,” and write up a bit about your self on a page that you could call something like “about,” or something else along those lines. Then others in the course can see a bit about you even if they didn’t see your first post!
Also, just FYI, there are actually four of us facilitating the course–Simeon, Jeannette, Jane and me (see the “people” page, here: https://p2pu.org/en/courses/588/people/ I’ve just been the one who has written up a lot of the instructions so far, but we’ve all collaborated on the course content, and we’ll each be taking one week!
Hi Christina and thanks for posting the very first comment on this blog ! You’re right about the “About me” page. I’ll make sure I create one today 🙂
I’ve rectified the names of facilitators. Jeannette, Jane and Simeon: sorry for overlooking you…
There are some popular tales about Kancil in Indonesia/Java. You may know one of them, like “Kancil Nyolong Timun” (Javanese), or “Kancil Mencuri Timun” (Indonesian), or “Kancil Steals Cucumber”.
No, I did not know the stories but I’ve just looked them up and found this :
* Outwitting a crocodile: http://www.topics-mag.com/folk-tales/folk-tale-cleverness-mayl.htm
* Sang Kancil and the King of the Jungle: http://leverettfolktales.blogspot.fr/2012/06/sang-kancil-and-king-of-jungle.html
There’s even a short Wikipedia article about Kancil stories! Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sang_Kancil
Thanks for pointing that out to me.
@hardcorekancil nice to read about you and your name! (I’m a bit late on the homework as you may see). Good to have another physicist in the group 🙂
Hi dpshelio! Thanks for showing up at my desk today, fellow physicist 😉