Open Participants, Syndicated

#OpenLearning19: Paper-like OERs

How are Open Access or OER similar and how do they differ? This is a question of this week of #OpenLearning19, and I found it very worthwile to think about it.

Both research and teaching materials have in common that copying them does no longer cause expenses. But both need to have some added benefit for being widely shared. For Open Access research, such an additional incentive exists since almost 350 years, as Suber’s chapter on the reading list impressively shows: writing for impact. For OER teaching materials, by contrast, merely transforming paper copies to gratis online copies, is probably not a sufficient benefit for them to flourish.

While the problem of OERs is certainly a lot more complex, there is one simple aspect where paper properties are still perpetuated into the digital world. It is the doctrine of the so-called Split Attention Effect which demands that an annotation needs to be close to the item it refers to.

Of course, for a paper resource, e.g. a diagram of a plant with all of its components, it is very plausible that it costs too much effort to scan the entire page to find the appropriate description item. (The older ones among us might remember former crossword puzzles that had little numbers referring to a text column, and how cumbersome it was to look up “5 down” or “6 across”, before the cue texts were integrated into the grid cells).

But OERs might implement some interactivity and display the descriptions upon clicking an item? Why isn’t this done much more frequently? IMHO this is because it is done by popup windows and delayed hovering labels, and these are distracting and intrusive and just annoying. But the doctrine of proximity demands that they are close to the items being described, because this doctrine has been carried over from the paper world into the digital world — as if a horseless carriage still needed a nosebag full of oats.

Motor carriage

Horseless carriage (Wikimedia, public domain)

Instead, descriptions could be displayed in a fixed location, one at a time. And the student could write their annotations into this location, as well, which would add even more interactivity.

Open Participants, Syndicated

Introductions

Hi, my name is Elizabeth.

I am starting this blog as part of the #OpenLearning19 MOOC, but hope to expand beyond the course.

I have been an academic librarian for 6 months now, but was a public librarian for almost 5 years before then. Being an advocate for open access in higher education has come natural for me transitioning from public librarianship. It is also a huge component of my current job description.

As I blog more I hope to get to know those of you in the open community better and we can continue to work together to help improve open education!

Open Participants, Syndicated

#OpenLearning19 Pre-Week

Our task for OpenLearning19 is to annotate this text about the ’30th birthday’ of the web, and to reflect here on the annotations.

What I picked for annotation, are two keywords (Gopher, and Virtual Library curation) of the web history because I am grateful that the text mentions these things that seem almost forgotten already.

Many accounts of the web history sound like the story about a Saint, or as if the web had arrived on a single day like an asteroid. In my memory it was a collective effort of many people and a gradual development of the infrastructures. And I think it is useful to remember this when we are now supposed to collectively fix it.

Here are two older blog posts about my differing experience of this history,

  • one about gopher vs. early www,
  • another about the virtual library.

If you want more, here is a picture from 1994 (archived later), showing how a browseable ‘virtual’ library catalog could appear much more ‘real’ than a merely searchable card catalog. Index cards, a basement rack storage, a bookshelf and database symbols.

Open Participants, Syndicated

Opening up, one more time

900 words

#openlearning19

I am looking forward to taking part in the “open learning” cMOOC, mediated in part through http://openlearninghub.net/. It has been 2 years since my first participation in this project, in its 2017 iteration. (And, quite frankly, at that time, I was obligated to drop out about halfway through the semester-long process.)

It is a shorter and more intense iteration this time. I’m bringing different strengths and weaknesses to it this time around. But I’m hopeful that I’ll be a better and more productive participation this time.

One of the outcomes of that first, abortive, participation is that as a teacher and a scholar, I continue to think, almost continually, about “open”; I reflect on the many facets and dimensions that it implies. As part of my ongoing intellectual development, I will be more critical of openness, not in a counterproductive way, but by challenging and questioning some of the parameters, some of the promises and the, for lack of a better word, the closed-ness of openness. I come to the conversation a bit better armed with questions and with theoretical framings, with concrete and specific projects. My part in the conversation and what I will get out of it are likely to be richer, more conflicted and more nuanced than what my superficial and enthusiastic participation generated in January and February 2017.

So… I’m ready to go. Sort of. I’ll do my best to stay open-minded, even as I pose difficult questions, push back, present high levels of expectation relative to the general notion of openness.

So let me start right now with a few questions. What do we mean by “open”? It sounds great, suggesting open-mindedness, the opening of doors, the opening up of opportunities. But is open education all of those things? Is open access a real thing? Is open scholarship truly as free, as transparent, and as productive as the “open” label would seem to suggest? And, finally, and I’m not asking this only to be a hard-nosed contrarian, is open faculty development truly possible, truly sustainable, truly worthwhile? I think that the answer to those questions, if “yes,” must be a qualified affirmative at best.

Open education would seem to imply that the educational processes, the potential for learning, and the associated educational benefits can belong to anyone who is willing to take part and to work hard. Unfortunately, we know that that is not quite true. First, because of the digital divide, many folks cannot truly take part in these conversations, exchanges and other learning processes. Beyond that, not everyone is prepared for “open learning.” There are many whose digital literacy or whose literacy full stop is grossly inadequate. Those of us who are taking part in #openlearning19 are, I am certain, part of the “happy few.” We are a privileged, highly resourced, Western (mostly), and an intellectual élite attuned to a certain way of thinking about things. The ostensibly “open door of opportunity for learning” is not even visible to certain folks whose intelligence, whose native curiosity, and whose personal work ethic might otherwise make them good candidates for a learning experience along these lines.

Granted, this is a faculty development opportunity intended largely for folks associated with VCU and other institutions. But if it’s called “open” doesn’t that mean that it ought to be open to anyone and everyone? (To answer my own question: No, open does not necessarily mean open to everyone in the universe. That would be impossible! What a silly question.) So… coming to a synthesis with myself, I must ask just how “open” “open learning” happens to be? Obviously, no one who enrolls properly will be turned away or rejected. So in one sense, it’s completely open. But is it really? And when we talk about “open” whatever, shouldn’t we be worrying about this issue? Just how open are we? What are we doing to ensure that the underprivileged and the underserved of this world also have the opportunity to take part in such opportunities? Just how widely and welcomingly are we opening the door of learning opportunity?

(I might note that this is a question that I have posed regarding xMOOCs and the hype about access and offering “free” high-quality learning experiences to the globally underserved, which was part of the rhetoric used by Stanford, UPenn, Harvard and MIT in 2012 and afterward.)

Again, my tough questions are not intended to shut down conversation or to discourage anyone, but to pique the conscience of all and to get us to engage in a real conversation about the openness of openness. Is not saying no to anyone who knocks at the door sufficient to call an effort “open” in the broadest and best sense of that word?

I’ll ask a few other questions in coming days, but this first round of interrogation is confined the the question that I consider the most important one to ask of “open.” To wit: is it, in fact, truly, radically, sincerely, world-changingly “open”?

Open Participants, Syndicated

#OpenLearning19

Here I am again, a year later, and jumping back into OpenLearning19! When I started last year, I was anxious because I did not feel comfortable being out in the open, doing things like blogging and tweeting, but I was ready to try something new and outside of “my box.” To be honest, I cannot say that my experience in OpenLearning18 made me totally comfortable with working in the open, but I really enjoyed my experience. It made me think differently about learning, networks for learning and access to learning.

I am hoping that by participating again, I will continue my journey of baby steps into the Open. One thing is for sure–I am certain that I will meet amazing new colleagues that will make me think and learn. Looking forward to meeting you all in the Open!

Open Participants, Syndicated

#OpenLearning19 has begun and I’m already shook…

YA’LL,  the Internet is ONLY 30 YEARS OLD!

I know right!… I’m having a hard time right now too.

But let’s get back on track… we were annotating Adulting for the Web as our first assignment.  I’m supposed to tell you how I chose the places where I left notes, did I leave more then one kind, and if so what kinds.

So for OpenLearning19 we use hypothes.is to annotate.  I used this last year and it was wonderful.  I comment to other peoples notes primarily and I used links where I thought appropriate.  I did try to use an image in hypothes.is, but it didn’t’ work so I linked instead.  Annotating this way leads to greater understanding and a place to ask questions for clarification.  It’s like blogging and chatting asynchronously on something someone else wrote.

Now… what did I learn from the blog post?..  The internet is younger than me and has had a much bigger impact on the world than I ever will.  And I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.

Don’t get me wrong it does a lot … but it is a tool… and like every other tool, it is only as useful as the user/operator.  And not enough people take the time to understand what it is and how it works to use it well.  I’m an advocate for education, but as an adult educator, many people don’t want to know how it works… They just want it to work.

The more dependent we become on our electronics to “do it” for us without the understanding or knowledge of how and why it works, the closer we come to Ray Bradbury’s dystopian Fahrenheit 451, where all information is given by the government and any knowledge outside of the given is punished and burned.

For a librarian/educator/truth seeker, that is a future I don’t want to live in.

And now I’m sad…

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Considering the Internet: Annotation Activity

Though there is that feeling of “vulnerability” in a group annotation activity, it helps to remember that the participants who commented before me offered me insights to mull over before making my own comments. I didn’t judge them negatively; rather I respect their views and appreciate their own public leap. I look forward to sharing more and gaining confidence voicing my thoughts online.

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.

The network is the deliverable