All posts by @phb256

Open Participants, Syndicated

So little time, so much to do

I never get to participate in Open Learning as much as I want to. Mostly it’s because I’m so slow to get my thoughts together in any coherent format, I think. But a simple activity came up today, So I’m dipping a toe in.

The suggestion was to annotate Barbara Fister’s article on the 30th anniversary of the Web. She’s in my pantheon, so I always watch for her work. I can’t really add anything meaningful to it, but I did throw in a couple annotations as a way of adding connections, which may inspire others to try the same.

Hypothesis lets you add your thoughts on a web page. That by itself is cool, but you can also add tags and hyperlinks in your annotations, building a web within the web. And each of those annotations has a web address, so they can become nodes. As an example of the latter, I annotated a Berners-Lee Wikiquote and hyperlinked that in my annotation of one of his quotes in the article. Another line in the article reminded me of an old saying, so I annotated it with a link to an article about the saying.

I don’t know my little associative trails will do much for anyone, but I thought it might be useful to provide the examples. Fister mentions Maria Popova and Brain Pickings as an example of trailblazing. Like cross-references in an encyclopedia, the links and connections we make on the Web give us and others way to expand our knowledge. Tools like blogs and Hypothesis give us ways to make the web our own. The way it was meant to be all along.

Open Participants, Syndicated

Thoughts on some OER FAQs

In advocating for OER on my campus, I’ve run into many misconceptions. I’ve also found a few people in influential positions, with influential reputations, who are actively spreading these misconceptions. This FAQ is a useful document for addressing some of them.

OER help “to ensure that resources are up-to-date”

How up-to-date are commercial textbooks? There is an investment of time and money that goes into revisions and printing new editions, so publishers don’t want to do that any more than necessary. They also have a vested interest in eliminating the market for used books, so there is a financial benefit to updating editions frequently. Faculty can OER whenever they please, due to the Creative Commons permissions. Some may see this as a drawback, if they would rather have someone else be responsible for keeping materials current. I can see benefits to building the updating process into a course though. Students could look to current research, events and issues to see how they intersect with course subject matter, and be charged with proposing revisions. This type of an assignment would have them actively thinking about the relevance of what they’re learning, how they are learning it, and how to get ideas and concepts across to others. Students would gain experience in managing their own learning processes at the some time as they learn the course content.

“Can OER be high quality if it is free?”

Are commercial textbooks high quality because they’re expensive? What kind of review process do they actually go through? How do we rate quality anyway? What factors are considered important? What matters is student learning and student success. Writing, editing and design will have an impact on that. So will accessibility and cost. I imagine it is relatively easy to compare textbook A to textbook B and decide which is better based on content and presentation. It would be more difficult to determine if textbook A is $100 better than textbook B, or if students would derive $100 more of value from it. Due to CC permissions, OER can be modified to fit the needs of an institution, a department, an instructor, and a group of students. They can be continually modified to improve student success.

Open Participants, Syndicated

Open and info lit

Today I woke up to find Digital literacy and democracy

I wish my hastily-made blog posts could be this good. Democracy and civilization need an informed citizenry. Efforts at mis- and disinformation then, are uncivilized and antidemocratic. And immoral in their casual disregard for honesty, ethics and truth. It’s not enough to call these things out though. That may not even be productive. What matters is that people be empowered to ask questions and to access and use information. It’s also important to challenge our assumptions, or to have our assumptions challenged, to self-reflect and self-evaluate. This is basic information literacy as I see it, as well as basic learning and growth.

This week in OpenLearning17 we’re looking at digital literacy in general, and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in particular. Some see information literacy as an element of digital literacy, like JISC. I take a more expansive view. Information comes in many forms and flows through many channels. Information literacy then is an umbrella term, and things like media literacy, visual literacy and digital literacy delve into the forms and channels. A problem with that view is that information literacy becomes too big to know, as Belshaw pointed out.

I find it interesting that very little of the discussion around the Framework seems to tie to open education. I see a deep and long term connection between the two, and have been harping on it for a while.

It makes me wonder if this is just so obvious that it’s not worth talking about, or if I’m seeing a mirage. But I think it’s a matter of two movements on parallel tracks, not really connecting with each other. I’m sure the terminological issues play no small part in that disconnect. The Framework is ambitious and aspirational though, and as a framework, offers opportunity for connections. It won’t solve the problems of the world, but we can use it to find a path forward.

Open Participants, Syndicated

Creativity – the gift that keeps on giving

I remember watching Gardner Campbell’s interview with Ted Nelson (YT). Along with a related interview with Alan Kay (YT), it made quite an impression on me. Even the edited, half-hour version (YT) is packed with information and insights. I started to take a few notes, but really couldn’t keep up with what he had to say, what I needed to look up, and what it inspired in me. So I will be coming back to it eventually.

The early part (YT), discussing his ideas on General Wrongfulness stood out to me. Our system of education “greatly reduces the human potential and the human spirit,” he says. This doesn’t exactly speak well of my chosen profession, although I like to think that as a librarian, I’m in a liberating sector of higher ed. But Nelson has a vision of open education, one shared by others at the time and worth remembering today, that involves making students empowered rather than compliant, by “mak[ing] the process and products of education more transparent, understandable, and available to all the people involved.” I think that this empowerment is what we are trying to do when we promote information literacy – to help people learn how to learn, to engage in informed learning.

Is your motivation to get a degree and a dumb job? Or is your motivation to be a learned person? (YT)

It’s that matter of motivation – bringing the students’ motivations into the system, and letting them guide and drive the learning activities -none of which is easy to do within the systems that we have.

That other thing I loved about it was Nelson’s Nothing magazine. There is a freedom in the simple technology – trailing edge technology – because it is not encumbered by complexity, because it is so physically manipulable. Perhaps we forget that sometimes.

I’m fascinated by handmade magazines anyway, because we had a pile of them in my house when I was growing up. My father made these things when he was ten years old or so, and somehow managed to hold on to them. I digitized them and used them as an excuse to play with Omeka. They may be child-like, but there is a sophistication in the humor they contain and in the commitment they represent. Maybe that’s why they were preserved for so long. I think they’re valuable anyway, as products of creativity, and I can try to make something out of them. Creativity – the gift that keeps on giving. That’s also one of the points of DoOO, in that it lets students document what they make and preserve their creations. The record makes learning and creativity persistent, so we can still learn from and build upon ideas from decades past.

Open Participants, Syndicated

One for the hippie hub

You better think (think)
Think about what you’re trying to do to me
Think (think, think)
Let your mind go, let yourself be free

Think by Aretha Franklin and Ted White

Our “flower child hub director, Gardner” sent a nice message reminding me to do some OpenLearning17 blogging, so here goes.

When I went back to look at Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” a few days ago, I was happy to see a few annotations from some former ds106ers, from when I tried to get them on the annotation train. We also used the article back when we did The Internet Course, and I did a primitive Cmap breakdown of some of my thoughts and reactions to it.

One of the things that struck me about it was Bush’s background. He founded defense contractor behemoth Raytheon, headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development during WWII, and was instrumental in the creation of the National Science Foundation. He was pretty much the embodiment of the military-industrial complex in his day. But as windham notes in annotation, Bush’s “humanitarian optimism” inspired both the essay and the many minds behind the development of the Internet.

He recognized that there is something more important than the money to be made – humanity over profit. I imagine that might have been obvious in the wake of WWII, but it has long since been forgotten in military-industrial complex, and it no longer seems to matter to the powers that be in information technology. The Web was meant to connect people, in Berners-Lee’s view, rather than to disrupt them. A way to let your mind grow and let yourself be free.

People walking around everyday
Playing games, taking score
Trying to make other people lose their minds
Ah, be careful you don’t lose yours, oh

It can be hard to maintain that sense of humanitarian optimism in this age of disruption, creative destruction, and weaponized information. When I looked up the lyrics to Aretha’s song, the third line above stood out to me – the definition of gaslighting. That’s quite the opposite of informing, isn’t it? The tool that Bush envisioned and humankind built is not being used to connect people, or to organize information, or to help us think better, but quite the opposite. This has to do with the social, political, economic and technological environment we have created and the way information is generated and distributed within it.

If we work to understand the hows and whys of information creation and flow, what I would call information literacy, then presumably we will be better able to review our shady present. That would elevate my spirit. Until then, there’s always Aretha:

Open Participants, Syndicated

Opening lines

Image from page 30 of “British sanatoria for the open-air treatment of tuberculosis : with numerous illustrations ; [reprinted with additions and alterations from the “West London Medical Journal.”]” (1899)

It’s been a while since I joined a MOOC. Mostly that’s because I recognize that I don’t have the time. #OpenLearning17 is hard to pass up though, because of the format, the great people involved, and the topic, which means a lot to me. Hopefully I will find some openings in my schedule so I can put something in and get something out of it.

I’m thinking about my journey to open education. I’ve always been a heavy library user, and the library represents a form of open education although I never thought of it that way. Fifteen years ago or so I enrolled in a distance ed masters program in digital printing and publishing. It taught me to get out of the printing industry, but I learned some other lessons as well. I noticed that almost all of the tools, readings and materials we used were freely available online.  What we were paying for in the program was mainly the selection and organization of the materials, and some occasional feedback and interaction. Thinking there might be more of a payoff in learning about the selection and organization of information, I dropped that program and entered one in library science.

Then, as I was transitioning from a K-12 librarian to academia, I found out about MOOCs. I thought this was a brilliant innovation.  Siemens and Downes opened their course to learner input, and at the same time opened it up to the public, sharing the learning experience with the world and seeing what the world could add to it. This became addictive, and eventually I got sucked into ds106 and never escaped. (ds106 is 4life, you know.) So I’ve been thinking about the value of open resources and the potential of open pedagogy and practices, trying to talk the talk and hoping to walk the walk, to get better at it and do it more.  OpenLearning17 can be another step on the journey.