… and my first post for Open Learning 2019 because I have to post to have a feed to complete sign-up. This procedure guarantees that I will have written at least one blog post for Open Learning 2019, which puts me ahead of Open Learning 2017, although at least I came away from it with a Hypothesis account and another MOOC feed in my reader.
I’ve participated in MOOCs since 2010, including the occasional x-version. The past few years, participation has not matched intentions, and I’ve been on an extended blogging hiatus as well. When I missed most of Open Learning 2017, I told myself next year but missed that too.
So here I am following #openlearning19 tweets, reading blog posts and collecting links. And if it helps kick starts a return to blogging? Lagniappe.
Great! Another real Open Learning MOOC. I’m a frequent learner at FutureLearn. I teach online college courses in Canvas. These are pretty good learning experiences. They are fairly structured although they encourage learner choice and contributions. This is process toward …
The third iteration of Open Learning begins next week (March 17) with a focus on Open Access and Open Educational Resources. Week Two (March 24-30) emphasizes Open Pedagogy. Week Three launches Open Learning ’19 into the future with a discussion of Open Professional Development, including the idea of openly networked faculty development that was the initial emphasis for Virginia’s participation in the AAC&U’s Faculty Collaborative project, phase II, led and inspired by Dr. Susan Albertine.
This week, then, is the warm-up week, the orientation week, the week in which new folks have a chance to get themselves sorted and situated: sorted as in “what sorts of things should I be ready to do?” and situated as in situated cognition.
First, getting sorted. Here are the primary ways in which you can co-create (i.e., learn from) this experience.
Blogging. Yes, it can be the hardest, for all sorts of reasons. But I put it first because it’s the sort of participation that can yield the greatest benefits. When you blog, you’re present to your fellow learners (and yourself!) with a depth and breadth that can’t really be achieved with shorter and less essayistic forms of participation. Remember that the word “essay” originally means “an attempt.” An essay is not a term paper. Again, with feeling: an essay is not a term paper. It’s an attempt. And yes, I forget that too, all the time.
Tweeting. Yes, Twitter is fraught in all sorts of ways. But for now, at least, it’s also a place where you can share, link, and connect quickly and effectively. Gather ’round our hashtag the way you’d gather around a warm and welcoming campfire: #openlearning19. Be hospitable. Expect hospitality in return. If you’re new to Twitter, you’ll likely be surprised by how quickly your network grows and becomes an indispensable part of your personal and professional development. I’ve been on Twitter since 2007, and while I’m repulsed and overwhelmed and bewildered by much of what lives in the fetid parts of our global lightspeed telecommunications network, in the last few weeks I’ve also been very strongly reminded that extraordinary things are not only possible in that network but more likely than they would be otherwise.
Hypothesis. Here’s where we gather around a text and read it together, making our annotations and weaving them into conversations. So, set up an hypothes.is account, look at the quick-start guide, and maybe practice a little. Shared online annotation, in an atmosphere of hospitality and a commitment to good faith, can reveal more glorious layers of both commonality and diversity within community.
Open Learning ’19, like the two iterations preceding it, generates resources worth consulting long after the event is over. There are interviews and panel discussions archived on YouTube. There are Twitter chats, annotated documents, blog posts, lush forests of learning full of associative trails. But the resources exist because of the networks from which they emerged, and for Open Learning, the network is the deliverable. That’s the situated part, as in situated cognition. For Open Learning to be meaningful, you must situate yourself within the network. That’s the easiest part and the hardest part, too.
Welcome! We look forward to learning with you, and from you.
I was going to spend five or six minutes talking about improving the style of a very clunky section of the Openstax OER text as I remix it for my spring class. Then I had to add another six minutes to address some problems I had with the substance.
This is a 12-ish minute long episode of History in 5-or-so Minutes, in vlog format this time, in which I talk about beginning to rewrite the Openstax US History textbook. I’m going to use this as the basis of a US History I class this spring, but not before I revise it sunstantially. I’ll discuss those revisions chapter by chapter as I rewrite or as I create PowerPoint lectures and videos using the content.
The Creative Commons license itself comes in several flavors, depending on how many of the rights normally included in “all rights reserved” you want to retain, and which ones you want to be more flexible on. Each of these licenses exist in three forms or layers: a full-on legal description, a user-friendly commons deed, and a machine readable version that talks to things like search engines. Most of the time CC is seen as a wide-open license to do anything, but it doesn’t have to be. Maybe rather than going from least restrictive to most, instead I’ll go from most restrictive (most like full-on copyright) to least. There are four basic elements: BY, SA, ND, NC, and they mix and match into six levels of licensing.
The most restrictive CC designation is CC SA NC ND. This specifies that people can use your work as long as they give you credit (attribution is part of all CC licenses), but it says they CANNOT sell the version they make for a profit and they CANNOT change your content in any way (that is, make no derivatives, no adaptations). This still means they can share your work freely, as long as they don’t sell it or change it. But this isn’t considered optimal for OER, because in addition to compiling anthologies, educators often expect to be able to adapt your content to contextualize it for their students. This license can also have a final added stipulation of share alike, meaning that any work that incorporated your content ought to be licensed under the exact same CC license. This isn’t on the CC organization’s matrix, but it prevents people from switching to a less restrictive license which might let the people who remix down the line to do something like sell the work for profit or adapt it.
NC SA is a little less restrictive, in that it does allow for adaptation. But it still prohibits sale for profit and requires the adaptations carry the same license.
NC, Non-commercial without Share Alike allows for adaptations and doesn’t protect against those adaptations being part of a commercial work.
No derivatives (ND) doesn’t allow for adaptation, but it does allow people to sell the work for a profit and it doesn’t require that the work they sell has a similar license on it.
Share alike alone DOES let someone sell an adaptation for a profit, but it has to retain a share alike license on it, so that might limit the market for such a work. I’m not sure I see the point of SA all by itself, other than to limit the market by undercutting anyone thinking they can somehow corner the market and monopolize distribution of a work.
The most open CC license is actually just CC BY. This allows a user to do anything with your content as long as they give you credit for creating it. All the other more restrictive licenses also include attribution – it’s just assumed in the rest. There’s an even more open condition if the work is in the public domain. Creative Commons calls that CC0, but it’s not technically a CC license.
All these CC licenses are ways of modifying copyright, so they apply where copyright law applies. That means NOT to things like patents, privacy restrictions, or moral claims. Exceptions and limitations to copyright like fair use also aren’t affected by CC licenses. But this can create complications if some work that begins as fair use finds its way into OER texts or coursework and now all of a sudden things like photos that may have been useable under fair use maybe aren’t any longer. So it’s important to understand the chain of custody, but I’ll say more about that another time.
Image from https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ CC BY-SA 4.0
As part of preparing content for this Spring’s “People In the Environment” section I’m teaching on American Environmental History, I’m “porting” my textbook over to a full-on OER (open educational resource). This should allow me to make the content available to students in a less expensive and more flexible version, in both print and ebook formats, as well as making the chapters available to other educators as stand-alone modules they can mix and match, remix, rewrite, etc. As I do that, I’ll be able to add CC content from elsewhere and link to outside text, graphics, and video, as well as including narration and possibly even links to my lectures in the electronic version of the text. I believe Pressbooks allows for linking and embedding, and Camtasia allows adding interactive elements like quizzes along the way in the text. I’m going to try to incorporate both.
So the new elements I’ll be adding to my text will include color (!), fonts, revised format, quizzes and discussion prompts (possibly links), audio narration, videos from the web (YouTube, Archive), and links to my Camtasia lectures. I’ll also be updating the content. I think I’ll continue with the 15 chapters = 15 weeks format. But I might throw in some additional chapters that people could swap in or use as extra credit opportunities if they chose. The goals of many of these chapters is not to cover the topics exhaustively, but to make students aware of the issues and introduce basic ideas. The outline will look something like this:
Module/Chapter 1: Prehistory
Goals: Push back the “beginning” of the story, introduce Beringia, climate change, staple crops
Module/Chapter 2: Recontact
Goals: Introduce the Columbian Exchange (Crosby), native population disaster, early commerce (silver, sugar).
Module/Chapter 3: Colonial America
Goals: Compare Euro and native land use traditions (Cronon), Examine role of religion justifying colonialism, impact of slavery on land use.
Module/Chapter 4: Frontier & Grid
Goals: Understand role of western expansion in Revolution and early republic, consider barriers to expansion (Proclamation Line, Free Soil debate, Trail of Tears), describe pioneer life, immigration.
Module/Chapter 5: Industrial Revolution
Goals: Examine changes caused by industrialization on use of commons, incorporation, labor, economic and environmental externalities. (Steinberg)
Module/Chapter 6: Transportation Revolution
Goal: Understand changing technology and public policy around development of canals, steamboats, railroads. Consider tension between public and private sectors in issues like land grants, monopoly. Continue to automobiles and highways (with extra material on ethanol vs. leaded gasoline), air travel and containerized freight.
Module/Chapter 7: Commodities
Goal: Examine shift to a commodity market: population changes, new industries in packing (pork & beef) and their discontents (The Jungle), ice, lumber (and fires), flour (and populism).
Module/Chapter 8: Green Revolution
Goal: Cover beginning of commercial agriculture, ag. Improvement (manure, rotation), green manure (alfalfa), guano (Incas, Liebig, Humboldt, Chinese labor, Chincha Islands War, Guano Islands Act), Nitrate (Caliche, War of the Pacific, Haber-Bosch process), Phosphorus and Potassium, Hazards and pollution (Gulf Dead Zone), the Dust Bowl, Ogallala Aquifer, Export of Green Revolution to Developing World (Borlaug, Indian debt and suicide).
Module/Chapter 9: City Life
Goal: Examine what cities are for. Consider American colonial cities built on native cities (Cuzco, Mexico City, Plymouth), Land Reclamation and filling wetlands (Mexico City, New York, San Francisco), Sanitation and water supply (New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles), symbiosis with hinterlands, Horses and mechanized transport, Urban reformers, parks and suburbs, contemporary exurbs and CSA.
Module/Chapter 10: Wilderness and Country Life
Goal: Distinguish between Conservation and Preservation movements (Muir v. Pinchot), examine ideas of wilderness (Cronon) and exclusion (Jacoby).
Module/Chapter 11: Farmers and Agribusiness
Goal: Examine America’s change from a country of farmers to an urban nation, implications for farmers, rural life, consumerism, politics.
Module/Chapter 12: Treasure Underground
Goal: Examine the mining and drilling of underground resources: Cerro Rico silver, ideas of subsoil ownership, copper, iron and steel, gold rushes, petroleum (in the world, the US, and the relationships between corporations, government, foreign policy).
Module/Chapter 13: Population and Limits
Goal: Examine Malthusian ideas, challenges to them such as #stopthemyth and Rosling’s demographics, consider controversies over Population Bomb, Limits to Growth, peak oil.
Module/Chapter 14: Externalities
Goal: Review the ways economics deals with the idea of externalities, with examples. Politics, Globalization, Dependency.
Module/Chapter 15: Environmentalism
Goal: Review American people’s concern over environmental issues. Consider alternatives to contemporary lifestyle. (incorporates “Food and Choice” chapter from book with survey of environmentalists.
As I’m beginning to prepare for my American Environmental History course next semester, I’ve started a Zotero Group containing a bibliography of some of the books that contain chapter readings and some journal articles I’m going to assign, or that are available for students working on term papers. So far, these are just books that are in BSU’s Library (I’ve given them a list of a few more I’d like them to get). This is a public list, so if other people start joining the Group and contributing titles, I’ll probably add tags that will indicate for my students which books are available locally and which they have to order via ILL, or in the case of articles where they can get hold of them. I normally attach pdfs to my own Zotero entries, but I can replace them with stable link URLs in the public lists.
Does anybody else use Zotero Groups? I believe if you click on this link (https://www.zotero.org/groups/2242171/envhist_oer ) you should be able to see the bibliography, but please correct me if I’m wrong?
I’m thinking about the additional readings I may assign in this class. Many of them are chapters in monographs, which I believe I can assign and students can go to the Library and read or scan the chapter. We have a really cool, fast scanner, so I may put the texts on course reserve. I’m curious about how other people doing OER deal with content from copyrighted (all rights reserved) sources. I’ll be talking with a Librarian later today about the Minnesota State University system’s fair use guidelines, but if anybody has experience they’re willing to share, I’d love to hear about it. My thought was there ought to be a way to replace the printed course-pack with some type of digital one, but I realize there may be objections to that because it’s easy to limit the printed course-pack to a finite set of students in a particular class during a particular semester…but even so, there’s got to be a way to update this idea for the 21st century. I guess making these types of pointers available in Zotero is a first step, for people who have access to an academic library. It’s not ideal for folks who don’t, however; but maybe that’s a battle for another day.
