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Whether we consider ourselves to be open education practitioners or researchers, advocates or critics, wonderers or agnostics, our motivating questions regarding openness are likely to be different, often very different. For example: How can we minimize the cost of textbooks? How can we help students to build, own, and manage their digital content? How might we support and empower learners in making informed choices about their digital identities and digital engagement? How might we build knowledge as a collective endeavor? And, how can we broaden access to education, particularly in ways that do not reinforce existing inequalities? Open educational practices can help us in achieving these aims. However, engaging with the complexity and contextuality of openness is vitally important if we wish to be keepers not only of openness but also of hope, equality, and justice. 1

At present, open practices sit somewhat uneasily and unevenly within higher education. As Bonnie Stewart notes:“The word ‘open’signals a broad, de-centralized constellation of practices that skirt the institutional structures and roles by which formal learning has been organized for generations.” 2 Teaching and pedagogical interactions typically occur in higher education in one or more of the spaces illustrated in figure 1: physical spaces; bounded online spaces; and open online spaces. This is a simplification, of course, but useful for the purpose of comparison. There are good reasons for teaching and learning to occur in each of these spaces, depending on our particular aims and context. However, if we limit ourselves to the first two spaces, it is difficult to share our …