Issues of open education, openess in education, and education of all have been discussed throughout history of pedagoy. From Plato’s elitist concept of education for the ruling class to recent strategic efforts of the UNESCO to improve the quality of education, from Commenius’ call for education for everyone to (post-)modern educational theory (Bildungstheorie) needs of access, social justice, creativity, knowledge sharing, innovation, and capacity building as well as the relation of private and public issues and its relevance for educational processes have been highlighted repeatedly and in various ways. However, the role of media and media dynamics has been widely underestimated in this context. Only recently after the digital turn the focus of the debates has changed. In the past few years manifold initiatives aiming at opening up education on various levels using digital communications technologies and Creative Commons licenses as well as massive open online courses (moocs) have been developed. Today, Open Educational Resources (OER) is widely used as an umbrella term for free content creation initiatives, OER Commons (http://www.oercommons.org/), Open Course­ware (OCW), OER repositories, OCW search facilities, University OCW initiatives, and related activities. Among others, collections of shared resources such as Connxions (http://cnx.org), WikiEducator (http://wikieducator.org) or Curriki (www.curriki.org) have an ever-increasing number of visitors and contributors to the site.

On the one hand, old motives of education for all are being taken up again in respective debates and practices. On the other hand, notions of ‘openness’ and ‘sharing’ play a crucial role in open content and open education strategies. The paper starts (1) with an outline of selected understandings these notions in educational contexts, followed (2) by a discussion of their relevance for OER developments by way of contrastification and relationing conceptual dimensions. Finally (3), the contribution aims at a deliberative appreciation of them in OER contexts.

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