Tag Archives: Open Learning

Other AAC&U Group, Syndicated

Digital Footprint

As part of the 23 Things MOOC from the University of Edinburgh, I did a little bit of searching today to see what my digital footprint looks like. 

I have an extremely common name, so most of what I found with a Google search was links for information about Jon Stewart and links for the Green Lantern. There are various important historical John Stewarts (John Stewart Mill for one), so my footprint is buried.

However, if you Google search John Stewart OU, you’ll find a lot more about me. Most of the Google results from my computer (influenced by my Google search history and all of the other data Google has on me) pointed at my blog and my other professional profiles.

I have taught workshops on how to manage your digital presence, so this pretty well fit with my expectations. In these presentations, I stress that you should create a digital presence that you control rather than letting people stumble upon your old photos from Facebook. While it’s still possible to find pictures of me doing dumb things as an undergrad, most people will click instead on my blog or LinkedIn account or other, professional profiles. 

I am interested in the multiple personas/facets that we each present out on the internet. You might have an Instagram persona – the you that lives your best life. You might even have multiple Instagram personas. There might be a different you on Facebook that your parents and grandparents can deal with. On Twitter, we might find the the media critic version of you that watches Netflix all day and shares some thoughts. There are probably some professional profiles and some less than professional relics of earlier days floating around. Perhaps one day, we’ll have a centralized collection of our stuff that we can mete out to people based on which version of ourselves we want them to see, hiding the other personas behind a wall. For now though, if you post it online, assume that your mom, your grandparents, and your future employer will all find it.

Other AAC&U Group, Syndicated

Digital Knowledge MOOC

This week I registered for an open, online class called 23 Things for Digital Knowledge offered out of the University of Edinburgh.

I’m currently planning out my own digital literacy course for next summer, so I signed up mostly to see what they’ve focused on and how they tie it all together. For my own class, my early and very partial list of stuff that I want students to work on includes:

  • media literacy – critically evaluating the sources, biases, and rhetoric of the information they’re getting
  • the digital divide – investigate the reasons why power structures are reflected in access to and control of digital knowledge systems
  • web literacy – what are the different types of sites (blogs, wikis, forums, databases, static sites, etc.) and how do you build them
  • information systems – how to structure data in a csv, how to harvest data, how to clean data, how to analyze and visualize it
  • digital privacy – what kind of data are we leaking, how do businesses collect it, what do they do with it, and how do we mitigate all of this
  • digital security
  • digital citizenship
  • technological diffusion
  • algorithms (of oppression)
  • the funding of technological innovation
  • governmental use of technology

If we somehow built all of these skills and discussed the history of technology and the construction of cultures of knowledge, there would still be whole fields of psychological, sociological, educational, rhetorical, and economic analysis that we could delve into. 

The first of 23 Things’ asynchronous blogging assignments asks what you hope to get out of the MOOC. I’m hoping just to see how they managed to narrow the scope of Digital Knowledge to 23 things. 

Open Participants, Syndicated

Squad Goal Number One – Met

This is the Ontario Extend 9x9x25 Challenge post #…2? for the Squad Goals Network Team

Do you want in? Okay, you’re in.

I’m a new member of the Squad Goals Network. I’m grateful to have been invited in  by John Stewart (but you don’t need an invitation) when we connected to record an episode of my podcast. He told me about this group of folks doing this strange thing… working to bring people together, share each other’s stories, and (more than anything) lift each other up. It shouldn’t be so strange, but it is a little.

It’s is a bit like a PLN (professional learning network) already built for you because guess what? According to Squad Goals Network member Angela Gunder, as soon as you think you want to be involved, you are a lifelong member. And what does membership get you? Access to people who may have some of the experience you could use right now. People who can answer your questions and point you in good directions. People who can lead you to other people that you can learn from. And what we get from you is the same. We get access to you, your experience. We would be lucky to have you.

Now what is this “met” squad goal I mention in the title of this post? It’s my own goal: to truly connect with one of the members. I already knew John Stewart and Keegan Long-Wheeler and have connected on Twitter with more, (including Ryan Straight, who is masterfully leading the spooky Squad Goals Network social media for October) but to actually have a chat with someone is a big step to being truly connected. So I asked Angela to come on to my “Gettin’ Air” podcast. She was kind enough to spend her lunch hour at the Global Online Learning Summit to chat about her work, and the squad. I also seem to remember being roped in to running the Squad Goals Twitter for November. If you want to hear more about the squad, have a listen!  It will be published here on Friday. Also, if you’ve read this far, that means you have read the words “Squad Goals Network” over three times. and you are now a member of the squad. It’s kind of like Beetlejuice that way.

Come and be strange with us.

In fact, if you want to hear the podcast right now, sneak on in here and listen to it, or read the (editing in progress) transcript before it comes out!

Photo by Adam Jang on Unsplash

featured photo: “Goal” flickr photo by mripp https://flickr.com/photos/56218409@N03/32007742921 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Open Participants, Syndicated

Hark! An #OpenEd18 Reflection

Last week the Open Education Conference was held in Niagara Falls, New York. I am going to hark back on my experience there for my third post of the Ontario Extend 9x9x25 Reflective Writing Challenge.

I had a barrel of fun, but I am going to reflect on things I wish I did differently while there. I’ve been lucky enough to attend the last three Open Education Conferences. I’ve also been lucky enough to meet and become friends with many people in the community. I get excited to see them and eager to catch up.

So here is the first thing I wish I did differently: I wish I did not skip the speed networking that followed Jess Mitchell’s very, very wonderful keynote on the opening day. And I wasn’t the only OpenEd “veteran” to do so. In my haste to see some people I already knew, I missed the chance to connect and help people newer to the movement. I could be a helpful node in your Open Education network, and I missed a chance to offer that help. Maybe it’s not too late though, if you’re reading this and want to connect, please do!

OpenEd is truly full of people who would LOVE to chat with anyone interested, would LOVE to bring more people in to the fold. It’s been billed as the family reunion of Open Education. Which can be great, but can also seem like a club that is hard to get in to. And “club members” may say that you just need to say hi and we are happy to get to know you, but that is intimidating, and frankly kind of hard to pick the right time when someone you want to meet is deeply engrossed with catching up with an old friend. I will do better to offer up my network connectivity status to others in the future.

Another thing I wish I’d done differently is a more long-term missing out. I can’t believe it has taken me this long to truly recognize the importance of Wikipedia in Open Education. I got the opportunity to try to contribute a little bit to Wikipedia in an edit-a-thon run by Bonnie Stewart and Amy Collier. The prep work that went in to this was unbelievable.

The simplest (simple, but not easy) way to introduce a non-disposable assignment to your class was sitting right there the whole time! Add to Wikipedia. Believe me, the process is academic as heck. As Robert Cummings said in his session on teaching with Wikipedia: (paraphrasing here) Academic writing is too often writing what you think and then finding things to support that. Wikipedia writing flips that so that you are working  with nothing but truth. This is probably so obvious to most, but I’ve been busy looking at other ways to embed open in our teaching and learning. Wikipedia was just too “already there” for me to think hard enough about. Not anymore. So what I wish I did differently at #OpenEd18 is to learn more directly from Amy Collier and Bonnie Stewart about how to Wikipedia while I was in the same room as them. Luckily though, Daniel Lynds is hard core and has already pushed me to meet with him on a regular basis going forward to finish what we started.

Which takes me to the final thing that I wish I did differently while there.  I wish I thought and acted more directly about what to do next. Make not just connections, but plans to connect and take action. It all comes at you so fast, but making solid plans to do something with someone holds more weight when you make those plans in person. I saw others taking action. Ken Bauer and Joe Murphy promised to complete their patches of The Open Faculty Patchbook for me (woot woot!). It’s not like I have no plans, I just wish I made more direct plans with people while I was there. One thing I did nail down is that I will be interviewing Billy Meinke for my podcast! NICE.

We can make a huge impact with each other. Maybe it would be cool to try to have a daily theme at a future conference. Day One, helping newcomers feel welcome and connected, Day Two: normal conference day stuff, Day three: plan for action together. And sprinkled all throughout, making connections to those who couldn’t be there a la Virtually Connecting.

We’re going to need a really big barrel to fit us all in together as we go over the falls.

Photo by Elevate on Unsplash

Open Participants, Syndicated

The Ghost of Questions Not Asked

This is IDIGOntario‘s 2nd post of the #9x9x25 Challenge

When I signed up to be on the IDIG team I very vaguely said that I would like to write something about the “Front End Analysis” phase of Instructional Design. Also known as the “what are we doing and why” part.

If you do this part well you can avoid making big mistakes down the road. You might even realize that you shouldn’t even do it at all. You also tend have that “come on, come on, let’s get going!” feeling buzzing around you. I am feeling that right now as we prepare to try a new way of delivering Ontario Extend in January. But no matter how many angles you try to anticipate, something will surprise you when you implement it.

A good example of this came from the scholarly project I worked on to complete my Master’s of Instructional Design. I created an instructional Alternate Reality Game (ARG). It was designed to help youth identify problem gambling behaviours and to know how to reduce their harm. I completed a lengthy front-end analysis in which I tried to anticipate who the learners would be and what needs I should meet to help them complete the game. I never considered that some kids might not be up for suspending their disbelief in what was meant to be a fun way to learn.

Tyra aka Chance the “missing” dog

The first test went great, with a group of ninth grade students who were asked to participate and agreed of their own accord. They had fun and were successful in taking the story to its conclusion. The final test run, however, was a different story. In working with the program facilitator for the gambling awareness group, we chose to bring the game to test it out on an entire class of (I think) 11th grade students at an “alternative” high school. I don’t recall too much about the make up of the class or the reasons they had enrolled in a “different” kind of high school. In general you could say that the students were rightfully kind of pissed off about how their education was going so far.

They didn’t want to pretend. They didn’t want to suspend disbelief. They didn’t give a damn about rescuing a fake dog. They completed the game activities, but it would have probably served them better to give them a handout describing the harm reduction strategies and to just have a frank discussion about how these things have affected their lives. I remember clearly the look one student gave me when he realized I was trying to trick him into playing along. That’s when I knew that this program was not even close to the right thing to bring to them. It was utterly deflating.

The results of the test run were that yes, students reached the objectives. Learning was measured to have happened. But the feeling in the room was not the fun buzz I was working toward in the back of my mind. It was a stark opposite.

I’m going way over 25 sentences by digging in to that anecdote. My point is that I did not anticipate, at all, that this idea of learning via a game would resonate so poorly with these students. I didn’t ask the right, or enough, questions in my front-end analysis. JR Dingwall’s post in which he did ask the right questions to help bring about a great result, is what got me thinking about what questions to ask in the beginning.

So I ask you, what are the big questions you ask yourself and others when you first sit down to analyze a potential ID project? How can you avoid making something that leaves students feeling flat and misunderstood?

“Question?” flickr photo by spi516 https://flickr.com/photos/spi/2113651310 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Open Participants, Syndicated

Pitter Patter

Soon you’ll be hearing the pitter-patter of little feet is a bit of a weird saying when anticipating the birth of a child. You hear a lot of other stuff for months before any footfalls. Maybe it should be the screamy- shouty of little lungs.

Speaking of pitter-patter, it’s time for me to get back at ‘er. I’ve been off on parental leave since early June with our third daughter, Hattie. It’s been a fantastic, sleep-deprived, caffeine-fueled, tear-and-some-giggles-filled summer. But today I return to the team of Program Managers at eCampusOntario which is also wonderful and caffeine-fueled with some giggles (less tears, for sure).

This post is written for me to get my head around where to go from here. Below I will list the challenges I put to myself for the foreseeable future. If you have any thoughts or would like to wrestle any of these challenges with me, let me know.

Ontario Extend

Ontario Extend is a program designed to help educators better use technology to enable learning experiences. It has a set of modules as well as a suite of websites designed to connect Extend community members together to share what they are learning. It’s good fun and it requires daily care to keep it growing.

So, two fun challenges for me here:

One is that Extend had Alan Levine running the show all summer, showing Extenders how to take it to the next level with weekly meet ups and a Domain Camp. A series of weekly posts Alan made has left us with some fantastic fundamental resources for educators who want to stake their claim to  their digital teaching and learning spaces. I plan to catch up on all that he has done and keep building from here. The GIF below represents what I hope not to do here.


A second challenge with Extend is that David Porter and Valerie Lopes are zeroing in on completing some research about the Extend Community. Which means we will learn about what works and what doesn’t. Which means we will get the chance to do some revising to make it better. A great opportunity.

Gettin’ Air

This is my podcast on voicEd Radio. It’s time to kick off Season 2! On the show I chat with those working in open and technology-enabled learning. The idea is for people to ‘get some air’ time to share what they do in the hopes that some people listen and get inspired to try new things or even share what they do as well. I challenge myself to increase the diversity of the voices coming on the show. The show has focused mostly on chatting with those working in Ontario, since we are here to serve Ontario Post-Secondary. But now I think that hearing what is happening outside of Ontario will serve us well to hear, too. Look for a mix of Ontario educators as well as some more global voices this season. If you want to chat with me on air, I want to chat with you! Let me know by commenting below.

The Catch & The Pitch

These two blogs are designed to regularly share quick snippets of goings-on in open and technology-enabled learning in Ontario. The Catch is focused on things from an educator’s perspective while The Pitch will collect the stories of learning with technology.  The Catch ran all last year, but The Pitch is yet to throw its first post out there into the great wide open. Stay tuned for posts from both soon. The challenge is to get these two working off of each other and connecting the stories and people from both perspectives.

The Open Patchbooks

The Open Learner Patchbook and The Open Faculty Patchbook are ongoing projects to collect stories/how-to advice for teaching and learning and putting them together into something resembling a bigger picture. My challenge is to get more contributions, especially for the Learner Patchbook, and put them together and publish it as an open book in Pressbooks (or maybe the sequel for the faculty one!) If you have any thoughts or know anyone who might want to contribute, let me know in the comments below! I am very excited to get to speak on this topic at OpenEd18 next month. Maybe I will see you there!

Now, time to dig in to these challenges.

featured image: Hattie’s itty-bitty feet.

Other AAC&U Group, Syndicated

Why Domain

As part of his work in introducing Domain of One’s Own at Ontario Extend, Alan Levine posted the questions that I answer below. I haven’t been blogging enough recently, so I thought this was a good chance to document some of my own DoOO thoughts and kickstart my writing.

What is your domain name and what is the story, meaning behind your choice of that as a name?

My domain name is https://johnastewart.org. From front to back, the difference between https and http is a security certificate. Our partners at Reclaim Hosting make it dead easy to get an SSL certificate, and I think all of the internet search engines are going to increasingly favor sites with security certificates over the next few years.

My domain name itself is just my name. John Stewart is an incredibly common name, so I threw in my middle initial for some small degree of disambiguation.

I chose .org rather than .com because of their historical significance. Originally, .com meant that you were visiting a commercial website, and .org signified a non-profit organizational site. I work for a university, and when I set up my site, I was an adjunct lecturer, which is about as non-profit as it gets. I still advocate open pedagogy, OER, open note-taking, open coding, and a general distrust of capitalism, so I think it fits.

What was your understanding, experience with domains before you got one? Where were you publishing online before having one of your own?

I had been trying to set up a couple of .php based websites for a few years before I started this domain. Early in my grad career, I tried to start an online, open journal for publishing work by graduate students studying the History of Science. At the time, my university only offered 5MB of webspace and only supported HTML in that space. Eventually, I registered both that journal and a separate Digital Humanities project (situatingchemistry.org) with a corporate web host.

In 2013, the University of Oklahoma launched the pilot for OU Create, a Domain of One’s Own initiative. I went to the initial pitch by Jim Groom and Adam Croom, and was user number #13 with this domain.

What was a compelling feature, reason, motivation for you to get and use a domain? When you started what did you think you would put there?

I really wanted to be able to run modern CMS apps, particularly Drupal. Both my Situating Chemistry site and the Open Journal System I built are built on Drupal and require a LAMP environment. With this site, I wanted to start blogging – or thinking out loud as Laura Gogia and others in the DoOO community call(ed) it.

What kinds of sites have you set up one your domain since then? How are you using them? Please share URLs!

I’m currently the project manager for OU Create. We have about 5000 users and 6000 websites, so I feel like all of them are part of my current work on domains. You can see recent posts on our Feed WordPress site, community.oucreate.com/activity and you can get a sense of what type of sites people are using at community.oucreate.com/sites.

I have about 30 sites up and running on my domain. Most are demonstration sites that I use when introducing DoOO to either classes or faculty development groups. My larger projects include the Situating Chemistry site and subdomains like my Wiki faculty development workshop: flc.johnastewart.org. I also have designed sites for faculty projects on the history of education in Oklahoma (docnarr.oucreate.com):

Screen shot of docnarr.oucreate.com

and progettovitaliano.com:

Screen Shot 2017-12-04 of progettovitaliano.com

What helped you or would have helped you more when you started using your domain? What do you still struggle with?

I really like sites like cog.dog. I think these simple sites built in HTML are faster and more elegant than most WordPress based sites. If I had to do it over again, I’d build my main site using an HTML5up.net landing page with lots of other projects in subdomains.

What kind of future plans to you have for your domain?

I think I will probably do what I said above. I think I can move the blog feed into a subdirectory (johnastewart.org/blog), leave all the posts where they are, and create a space for a nice landing site.

For OU Create more broadly, we are playing with what DoOO v2 looks like. We are trying to figure out how to help people get into the apps they want to use more quickly, how to support non-SQL based systems (MongoDB, node.js, etc), and how to keep costs as low as possible.

What would you say to other educators about the value, reason why to have a domain of your own? What will it take them to get going with their own domain?

My usual pitch centers on the superabundance of information available to us now. When I start a research project or try to figure out some new system, I search the  internet. There’s a cornucopia of resources, so I generally find a ton of great information, and I quickly start working through my project. If you’re not on the internet, if you don’t have a website, there’s a roughly 0% chance I will come across your work. It doesn’t matter if you’ve written 5 books and 20 great articles, if you and they are not online, I’m not going out of my way to find them. But if I come across one of your articles, and I can look you up and find your other work, I will do a deep dive into everything you’ve ever said. Your discoverability as a teacher is also vital to attracting grad students who want to know what you’re researching.

Open Participants, Syndicated

Might as Well Get Weird With It

This past weekend saw Toronto host, for the second year in a row, the 2018 Creative Commons Global Summit.

I attended last year as a participant but this year I wanted to do a little more by submitting a proposal to run a session about The Open Patchbooks. Rumour has it that my proposal arrived to CC as the very first submission. Fact has it that my session was accepted (YAY!) and slotted in as the very last presentation. Sunday evening at 5 p.m. (LOL!)

I’d been having fun throughout the weekend claiming that, technically, I am one of the headliners of the event. Like Beyonce at Coachella.

On the other hand I realized that in reality most people would be on their way home when my session occurred. Not to mention that the weather outside was utter nonsense.

Anyway, I figured I might as well get a little weird with it. I very much appreciate the eight of you who did attend. You are my heroes. You’re weird too, though.

The 31 embedded tweets below should explain things

image credit: “Warning Strange Dog” flickr photo by bixentro https://flickr.com/photos/bixentro/319724127 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Open Participants, Syndicated

Thoughts on Open Faculty Development

In catching up on the materials from Open Learning 18 in the past few weeks, I find myself thinking about the claim in the week 7 syllabus that “open faculty development in higher education offers a vital, unique, and uniquely effective opportunity for shared learning in the digital age.” I wanted to reflect on my own learning outcomes from this experience because I think I will draw on them for future faculty development opportunities I’ll create as an instructional designer.

I never realized how many rich conversations take place on Twitter and how valuable they can be for my own learning. I’m not really sure I had a strong opinion of Twitter. I knew it had been a powerful (if not contested) tool for social activism and I had even taught a few sessions on social media activism in my “environmental activism” course, but I didn’t really know what it was all about since I had never participated in this space myself. Once I joined Twitter a few months ago in part for Open Learning 18, I realized that there are actually really deep, rich and thoughtful conversations going on in this space. Also I never knew about Twitter Chats, but learned it was a really great way to be connected with others around a topic in a really short amount of time.

I’m still learning how to manage the flow of information from the web and there was a whole ton of information flowing from Open Learning 18. I excelled at managing information while writing my dissertation almost 2 years ago, but those skills have waned as the nature of my work changed (part-time teaching/stay at home mom-ing). Now that I find myself back in front of a computer for most days at work, I need those skills to stay focused. During one of the Twitter chats, I opened a bunch of new browser tabs with articles people had linked to. I forget what I searched for to discover the Tab Snooze browser extension, but I now use it to save browser tabs for when I’m ready to read. I’ve been using this tool regularly since that Twitter chat, as well as regularly opening lots of new tabs from what I see on Twitter. Now that  Twitter has become another portal for information in addition to Feedly, list-servs, etc. I’ve realized the need for personal information management, which perhaps is part of information literacy?

I also used Hypothes.is for the first time as part of this course. It was a really great way to feel connected to other people reading the same article. It made the articles come alive in a way that I had never really imagined, as if I could see the people reading the same articles that I do. Plus I can now read comments that people leave on any site that I visit. Actually using this tool (just like Twitter) was eye-opening.I can definitely see how this could be used for collaborative annotation in courses that faculty teach, or perhaps in faculty development contexts.

Along those lines, one of the best things I’ve taken away from Open Learning 18 is seeing how the web and digital media tools can be a platform for shared learning. In the past, I’ve only ever experienced the platform of learning management systems (Blackboard, Moodle, Google Classroom) so it was exciting to participate in a more open and fluid space for learning that creatively made use of all these other digital tools like Twitter, Hypothes.is, a mother blog, etc. Those other learning management systems now seem so static and rigid compared to this open learning hub. Experientially learning as a participant in these spaces has really helped me envision ways to tap into these powerful tools to created shared learning platforms for all sorts of contexts.

Thanks for all the inspiration Open Learning 18!

 

Open Participants, Syndicated

Did I happen to mention I’m im#PRESSED18?

The PressEd Conference (still going as I’m putting this together) was today. It’s a conference on Twitter, about WordPress in education. No travel. No expenses. No fees. Maybe not even pants.

THERE WAS SO MUCH COOL STUFF. Take the rest of the year off and sort through #pressedconf18.

What better way to collect the stuff from my presentation than on WordPress (good suggestion, fellow #pressedconf18 presenter, Alan Levine!)

Here’s my collection of tweets about Ontario Extend.