Tag Archives: openlearning

Open Participants, Syndicated

OER EnvHist!

 

In addition to the Creative Commons course I’m taking this semester, I’m also involved in a project to turn my American Environmental History textbook into an OER (Open Educational Resource) prior to using it to teach a course called “People In the Environment: Environmental History” in the Spring semester. “People In the Environment” is a required course for all Bemidji State University undergrads, and it is usually taught in interdisciplinary teams. It has been ages (literally between 5 and 10 years!) since a historian has been on one of these teams, so I’m going to rectify that in the Spring. I’m going to trach a survey of American Environmental History this Spring, and then I’m putting in a request to teach a more in-depth version of it, with readings from some of the major works in the field, this summer.

As part of that process, I’m going to turn my American Environmental History textbook, which is already a very cheap alternative to the other textbooks available from academic presses, into a fully OER production. I may continue to sell copies of it on Amazon, since that seems like one of the lowest-cost ways to get a decently-printed paperback into peoples’ hands. Currently the book is $25 and the Kindle is either ten bucks or free (if you have Kindle Unlimited or if you buy the paperback you get a free Kindle copy). It will probably come down a bit from there. I’ll also probably be making audio and my course videos available online in a more permanent form. Maybe discussion prompts and quizzes and exam questions, as I put together the course material.

Hopefully turning this authoring project into an OER authoring project may give other Environmental History teachers an incentive to not only use the material but contribute to it and add their own content and perspectives. I don’t claim to have any type of unique insight into Environmental History — except maybe my feeling that it should be much more available to students and that opening this project up a bit might help make that happen!

Open Participants, Syndicated

What is Copyright?

Another installment of History in 5-or-so Minutes, this one also for my Creative Commons class, about copyrights. what they are, when they were first used, how theyre used today:

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

And here’s the text, in case you want to follow along:

Copyright was first enacted in 1710 by the British Parliament in an act called the Statute of Anne, which begins:

Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; May it please Your Majesty, that it may be Enacted …

Queen Anne was the sister of Queen Mary, the daughter of James II who was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Mary and her husband William of Orange took the throne, and after they were both dead in 1702 she took the throne. She ruled for twelve years, and then the throne passed to her second cousin George I, the 54-year old German ruler of the duchy of Hanover. Anne had 50 closer relatives, but they were all Catholics.

The Statute of Anne specified a copyright period of 14 years and allowed copyrights to be renewed for a similar term. The statute also for the first time vested the copyright in authors rather than publishers, which was an important change.

Any creative works or performances can be covered by copyright, as soon as they are performed or recorded. The ideas in a work are not protected; there are other forms such as trademarks for commercial expression and patents for inventions that cover ideas their creators wish to protect as intellectual property. In the US and under the Berne Convention, copyright begins as soon as a person creates the work and does not need to be applied for. However, registered copyrights can be easier to protect, since the registration established a paper trail or what might be called a chain of custody.

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works is an international agreement established in 1886 and originally signed by 10 nations. Currently, 176 states are parties to the convention. Some of its minimum standards are that the term of copyright must be at least the author’s life plus 50 years, and that copyright must be automatic and formal registration is not required. The US did not sign on until 1989, partly because the convention nullified America’s requirements of copyright registration and mandatory copyright notice.

Under the Berne Convention, a person receives copyright as soon as she creates a work in a recorded form or a performance. This is unlike other forms of intellectual property like inventions, which must be protected by filing for a patent. At the end of the copyright period, the work enters the public domain and becomes available for free use, copying, and modification. Works that are made using the public domain material are then covered by copyright, but the copyright does not extend to the public domain elements incorporated in the work.

Copyright exceptions and limitations are designed to safeguard the public by allowing people to use excerpts of works for the purposes of scholarship, review, and commentary. Works that couldn’t be quoted couldn’t be reviewed or discussed in public fora. Similarly, educators are allowed to use works in classroom settings under “fair use” provisions, without permission or payment. Also, once a single copy of a work (say, a book) has been sold, it can be resold, donated, loaned, or otherwise passed on to anyone without additional permission or payment to the copyright holder. This is what allows libraries to loan out books. The advent of ebooks has muddied these waters somewhat, since technology has to be developed to prevent the loaned copies from being kept, which would be copying rather than lending and would violate copyright. Many of the digital rights management systems people have implemented to deal with these issues are controversial and have been criticized by advocates of information sharing.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

The Professional Ethos

Australian_Capital_Territory_Legislative_Assembly_and_the_statue_Ethos

By Bidgee – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5 au, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12857136

Although Open Learning ’18 has come and gone, the questions and issues linger in my mind. I continue to think about faculty development, and more widely, professional development. I wonder about the routine and damaging separation of skills and content, teaching and research, computers and pedagogy. During the thirteen years I worked in faculty development, as I worked with colleagues to foster deeper and more intellectually stimulating varieties of professional development, I saw organizational and cultural barriers of all kinds; and while I did my best to identify, address, and overcome those barriers, I feel that I failed more often than I succeeded.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how to frame professional development as an ethical project–which of course leads me to think about the ethos of the contemporary university, which is not a happy thinking spot. Still, it’s interesting to think not about programs or outcomes or assessment or any of those useful but secondary things, but about ethos, and ethics. I understand that trying to identify one ethos in the contemporary multiversity is probably a fool’s errand. I wonder, though, if we can talk about ethical higher education without asking about the ethos of the university.

In this regard, I find Jerry Z. Muller’s definition of “the professional ethos” very interesting.

The professional ethos is based on mastery of a body of specialized knowledge acquired through an extended process of education and training; autonomy and control over work; an identification with one’s professional group and a sense of responsibility toward colleagues; a high valuation of intrinsic rewards; and a commitment to the interests of clients above considerations of costs….  (The Tyranny of Metrics)

Mastery. Processes that take time. Self-regulation. Responsibility. Intrinsic rewards. Commitment to the interests of clients (not mere “customers”). It’s hard to think of what professionalism might mean without these commitments. It’s hard to watch such commitments being eroded, or forgotten, or forsaken.

When I hear vapid and damaging talk about how the university is a “business” (as if there’s only one kind of business in the world, the kind focused on making as much money as possible) or about how we need to “give the students what they want, not what we think they need,” I hear a refusal of this idea of the professional ethos.

When smart and perceptive experts feel they must problematize the idea of expertise as what I can only assume is a sincere but misguided egalitarian gesture, I hear a refusal of the idea of the professional ethos. As should be clear by now, putting the word expert in scare quotes can result in a truly frightening and harmful rejection of knowledge itself. To see any part of this rejection in higher education is to see a process of self-consumption that cannot end well.

I wonder if the assumptions underlying much (not all) professional development in contemporary higher education reflect a similar erosion of the professional ethos. Expertise is not simply a quantity or something to be certified. Expertise is a practice emerging from, and reflecting, an ethos. A professional ethos.

Food for thought.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

“The Moral Crisis of the University”

Michael B. Katz is a new discovery for me (h/t Roving Librarian). His scholarship on the history of public education in the U.S.is fascinating, troubling, and revelatory. I’m sure his conclusions are contested–whose aren’t?–but at times the clarity and forcefulness of his insights take my breath away.

“The Moral Crisis of the University,” reprinted in Katz’s last book, Reconstructing American Education (1987), is full of such insights. The essay doesn’t make for happy reading, but every time I read it I come away with a renewed understanding of what will be lost if  higher education centered on the life of the mind and nurtured by a strong sense of civic obligation disappears. In many cases, this has already happened. The change Katz describes in 1987 has accelerated in ways that may go beyond his worst nightmare. Along with that acceleration, of course, is a great deal of business as usual, as there always is. We look here when the real erosion is happening there. It’s hard to know where to look, even when there are no distractions–and there are always distractions.

There’s an old joke about going broke, credited to Hemingway: Q: “How did you go bankrupt?” A: “Little by little, then all at once.” During the little by little stage, people who sound various alarms risk being called cranks, or worse. And it’s true: a premature or mischievous cultivation of outrage may damage or destroy what little semblance of community may be left.

And yet, the little by little becomes greater every year. Michael Katz gives me a way to see that. With that clarity also comes hope, the hope that recognizing problems really is the first step toward addressing them, managing them, perhaps even solving them.

Here, then, for Week 7 of Open Learning ’18, my last week as hub director, is some Michael Katz for us to consider together.

[W]hat is it exactly that makes a university distinct from other social institutions? [Robert Paul] Wolff offered a compelling definition based on a conception of the ideal university as a “community of learning.” The ideal university, he argued, should be “a community of persons united by collective understandings, by common and communal goals, by bonds of reciprocal obligation, and by a flow of sentiment which makes the preservation of the community an object of desire, not merely a matter of prudence or a command of duty.” Community implies a form of social obligation governed by principles different from those operative in the marketplace and state. Laws of of supply and demand lose priority; wage-labor is not the template for all human relations; the translation of individuals into commodities is resisted. The difficult task of defining common goals or acceptable activity is neither avoided nor deflected onto bureaucracy….

For all their problems, universities and their faculties remain immensely privileged. They retain a freedom of activity and expression not permitted in any other major social institution. There are two justifications for this privilege. One is that it is an essential condition of teaching and learning. The other is that universities have become the major source of moral and social criticism in modern life. They are the major site of whatever social conscience we have left…. If the legitimacy of universities rested only on their service to the marketplace and state, internal freedom would not be an issue. But their legitimacy rests, in fact, on something else: their integrity. Like all privileges, the freedom enjoyed by universities carries correlative responsibilities. In their case it is intellectual honesty and moral courage. Modern universities are the greatest centers of intellectual power in history. Without integrity, they can become little more than supermarkets with raw power for sale. This is the tendency in the modern history of the higher learning. It is what I call the moral crisis of the university.

I firmly believe that these large questions are essential foundations for any effective change or conservation in higher education. For always some new things must be invented, some things will benefit from change, and some things must be conserved. Some core principles must remain non-negotiable. I agree with Katz: tenured faculty in higher education are the last, best hope for addressing these large questions of common goals and acceptable activities.

It may not yet be too late.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

What Makes a Compelling Faculty Development Opportunity?

This post is going to be short and I hope sweet. The best faculty development opportunities I’ve experienced in my career haven’t been designed primarily (or explicitly?) for faculty development:  Examples include UMW’s Faculty Academy, ELI Annual Conferences, at least in the early years, the SERC project, and OpenEd Conferences, to name just a few.   What have they had in common? They were rich scholarly experiences, rather than training per se. That workshop on Excel may have taught me a few tricks with the software, but they didn’t fundamentally change the way I teach or think about teaching. The best faculty development opportunities were framed in a way that drew me in, that made me think the question they were exploring was interesting, even if I came in thinking the opposite. (I could name some of these, but I don’t wish to upset any of my friends.  What you should remember is that I ended up in the right place.) These opportunities became intellectually compelling so that for a while (an hour, a day, a few days—whatever the length of the event) I forgot about real life and immersed myself in the problem at hand. And then, much to my surprise, I found myself thinking of ways this exploration could be applied to my teaching.  In short, these activities were about scholarly learning rather than training.

That’s what I’ve found rewarding about #OpenLearning17-18.  There were several topics in #OpenLearning17 that I didn’t think would interest me, but somehow I was carried along by the interest of my co-learners, and then found that I was interested as well.  Part of it was the journey–the fact that I was studying a topic with a group of colleagues who, in the process, became friends.  I wanted to contribute to our collective learning, so I had to take the process seriously.  This is especially true in an open learning environment.  Part of it was the conference effect–that what was happening was occurring outside of my normal work.  That’s why going away, either literally or virtually, matters.  With open learning, the colleagues I worked with included people I might never have had a chance to meet in real life.  Yes, non-economists! 😉  That diversity (of place, of discipline) made the experience much richer for me.  And it continues to do so.

 

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Tolstoy, Economics and OER

OpenStax - $ Contribution page

David Wiley wrote a recent blog post that had me scratching my head. In the post, David argued that OER is in a feature of the resource, not who is providing it and whether the provider is offering it for free. This whole thing got me thinking about OER, commercial publishers and non-profit providers.

I know there are people who are opposed in principle to publishers who charge for their products in order to make a profit. I don’t have a problem with profit. If a chef opens a restaurant in my community and offers good food at a reasonable price, I am happy if they make a profit with the business, because that means they are likely to stay around. What I do have a problem with is excess profit. My favorite example, which some of you will remember, is Blockbuster Video. Blockbuster offered lousy service and charged too much. But they were the only game in town, so if you wanted to watch a video that night, you pretty much had to go to Blockbuster.

The first rule of economics is that nothing is produced for free; if it’s free to use, someone else is paying. This is not a moral judgment. Rather, it’s a fact of life. Everything (or almost everything) has a cost to produce. Image of Leo Tolstoy dressed in peasant clothing

Leo Tolstoy gave up the copyright to his early novels, and adopted a peasant lifestyle.   I can’t imagine what his family thought of that. Most of us are not like Tolstoy. We all need to provide for ourselves, and our families. When I helped write OpenStax’ Principles of Economics, I was paid a reasonable stipend to compensate me for the time. It didn’t make me rich, but it was enough. If I was one of those heroic authors, like my colleague Caitie Findlayson, who writes an open textbook without the support of any publisher, I would be able to do it only because I had the luxury of time as part of my professional responsibilities as a tenured faculty member. In other words, I would be implicitly compensated by my institution, but the cost would be the other scholarly work I wasn’t able to do in that time. There is always an opportunity cost. If I was working 9 to 5 somewhere, I wouldn’t be able to do the project at all.

OpenStax is a nonprofit organization. Where did they get the money to pay me, and to pay the other expenses of producing the book? The answer is grant funding. Grants are great, but they run out. Then what? How does OpenStax pay for the servers on which the book resides? How do they pay for updates and corrections? How do they pay for new editions? This is a perpetual challenge for non-profits. As far as I can tell, OpenStax has a four-pronged approach:

  1. They ask for donations. I don’t know how successful this us, but I suspect it’s not much.
  2. Ten percent of their adoptions are in print form. They sell these at slightly over cost, which means those copies generate some revenue.
  3. They look for more grants, but granting agencies prefer to fund new books to maintaining existing ones.
  4. They find commercial partners to work with, like Sapling Learning. Sapling offers the OpenStax text with online end-of-chapter problem sets and quizzes. In return, Sapling gives OpenStax a modest kickback, and then OpenStax markets the Sapling option. (I mention Sapling because I used their product after I adopted OpenStax. OpenStax has many more partners than Sapling.)

Do people criticize OpenStax because of their affiliation with Sapling who charges a fee for the book plus ancillaries? I may be wrong, but I don’t think so. Do they criticize OpenStax for openly allowing Sapling to use their open texts? I’ve not heard that criticism. Have people criticized Sapling for exploiting the open license of OpenStax? I haven’t heard that either.

The elephant in the room is commercial publishers who are beginning to offer OER wrapped in a package for a price. Traditional proponents of OER are rightly suspicious of commercial publishers who are new to the OER field. Commercial publishers have a long history of charging very high prices for textbooks, higher than can be justified by costs.

Take “Inclusive Access” for example. If you’re not familiar, Inclusive Access is a marketing venture by commercial publishers to rent digital texts to an entire class for a discounted price. Students are on the hook to their university for the bill, unless they opt out, so the “nudge” is in the wrong place. Inclusive Access strikes me as akin to OpenWashing. While the digital text is cheaper than a new print edition, at my school at least it’s not very cheap, coming in a bit under $100. It’s a pretty good deal for the commercial publishers, since the marginal cost of a digital copy is about zero. And Inclusive Access is certainly not OER since the access goes away at the end of the term.

When is it legitimate to charge for OER? Like any product, charging is appropriate if the product adds value, in this case to the OER. Sapling added value to OpenStax Principles of Economics because it offered a feature that OpenStax didn’t have. The problems & quizzes helped students learn better than just with the text alone. Similarly, Lumen Learning adds value in its Waymaker platform for the same reason.

Of course, one can argue that the value added isn’t worth the price. In the older model of commercial publishers, they charged for the book and then offered the ancillary products, including online quizzes and problems for free. But the package was pricey. Cengage is currently charging over $200 for their market leading Principles of Economics book.  That price has come down from its original $385.  Sapling charged about $40 for its product, which included OpenStax Principles of Economics. Lumen Learning charges $25 for its Waymaker Principles of Economics. Sapling struck me as a bargain for what it offered my students. Waymaker, which I’ve used for the last three years, is even better, especially since my own statistical analysis has shown that the average student does at least as well with Waymaker as with the previous commercial text I used. Perhaps more importantly, Waymaker seems to help weaker students more than stronger ones.

Commercial publishers have traditionally charged too high a price for their books two reasons: First, because they have a higher cost structure (due to their large sales force). Second, they have exploited their market power to charge more than a reasonable price for their products. Netflix mailing envelope w/DVD insideMonopolies often fall when a technological improvement creates better alternatives. Thus, Netflix supplanted Blockbuster.  Only when OER came on the scene did cracks appear in the commercial textbook oligopoly. (For non-economists, an oligopoly is an industry dominated by a small number of firms that exploit their joint monopoly power.) Newcomers like Sapling brought textbook prices down to under $50. And Lumen Learning brought them down to $25. Is $200 too much to ask a student to pay for a textbook? In my opinion it is, especially given the alternatives. Is $25 too much to ask? I’ve asked my students that question every semester that I’ve used Waymaker, and no student has ever said yes.

Lumen Learning deserves some kudos: For every course for which they offer their Waymaker value-added OER, they also offer a free version of the Waymaker content without the added features. This free version is openly licensed to include the 5Rs. It’s hard to ask more than that.

Disclosure: I’m the lead subject matter expert for Waymaker Principles of Economics and I’ve taught with Waymaker for the last three years.

 

Image credits:

OpenStax website

Image By Ilya Repin – ugFXC9F7-NWM9Q at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21854099

Image Netflix courtesy of Abhijit Bhaduri via flickr.com

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Beautiful Study

Elaine Scarry,

Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just has long been food for the journey for me. Yesterday Scarry’s insights emerged yet again at an important moment, both for me and for my students in ENGL 325, Early Modern Literature, as we met for a second time to consider Aemilia Lanyer’s brave, complex, and intense poem Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). Lanyer’s poem is vitally concerned with beauty, truth, and justice. They’re central topics in her retelling of Christ’s Passion, but they’re also linked on multiple levels to Lanyer’s own biography and proto-feminist arguments. I wanted my students to get a feel for how deep, complex, and important Lanyer’s thoughts on beauty are–why beauty mattered for her, and in what ways, and how those ways might be relevant to us as learners, too.

I knew Scarry would be a vital part of the context for our discussion, so I read a longish excerpt aloud to set the tone for the class. What I read was so resonant at that moment for me, too (this always happens on good teaching days), that I wanted to share it with you all. For me, Scarry’s words go deeper, and are more vital, than much or even most of what I read about “higher education” these days. I think her words are especially interesting in light of Open Pedagogy week in Open Learning ’18.  For me, open learning seeks to reveal, and by revealing stimulate, insight and love. Or, as Scarry writes, “to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education.” At its best, open learning shares and encourages the placement Scarry describes. Open pedagogy, then, leads by example.

I also think that “studying,” a neglected term in many contemporary conversations about learning, involves a version of the “staring” that Scarry celebrates below. One older sense of “study” used to mean something like that. When I was a child, my father would perceive me lost in a reverie and ask, “what are you studying?”   I hope such staring does not become lost in all the laudable “experiential real-world problem-based” approaches to learning celebrated so widely today, valuable as they certainly are. Contemplation, musing, mulling: these too are modes of active learning, no less important for the rapt stillness they inhabit.

So here’s Elaine Scarry, who begins by thinking about the way “beauty prompts copies of itself”:

This phenomenon of unceasing begetting sponsors in people like Plato, Aquinas, Dante the idea of eternity, the perpetual duplicating of a moment that never stops. But it also sponsors the idea of terrestrial plenitude and distribution, the will to make “more and more” so that there will eventually be “enough.” Although very great cultural outcomes such as the Iliad or the Mona Lisa or the idea of distribution arise out of the requirement beauty places on us to replicate, the simplest manifestation of the phenomenon is the everyday fact of staring. The first flash of the bird incites the desire to duplicate not by translating the glimpsed image into a drawing or a poem or a photograph but simply by continuing to see her five seconds, twenty-five seconds, forty-five seconds later–as long as the bird is there to be beheld. People follow the paths of migrating birds, moving strangers, and lost manuscripts, trying to keep the thing sensorily present to them. Pater tells us that Leonardo, as though half-crazed, used to follow people around the streets of Florence once he got “glimpses ot it [beauty] in the strange eyes or hair of chance people.” Sometimes he persisted until sundown. This replication in the realm of sensation can be carried out by a single perceiver across time (one person starting at a face or listening to the unceasing song of a mockingbird) or can instead entail a brief act of perception distributed across many people. When Leonardo drew a cartoon of St. Anne, for “two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung.” This impulse toward a distribution across perceivers is, as both museums and postcards verify, the most common response to beauty: “Addis is full of blossoms. Wish you were here.” “The nightingale sang again last night. Come here as soon as you can.”

Beauty is sometimes disparaged on the ground that it causes a contagion of imitation, as when a legion of people begin to style themselves after a particular movie starlet, but this is just an imperfect version of a deeply beneficent momentum toward replication. Again beauty is sometimes disparaged because it gives rise to material cupidity and possessiveness; but here, too, we may come to feel we are simply encountering an imperfect instance of an otherwise positive outcome….

This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. The arts and sciences, like Plato’s dialogues, have at their center the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear discernibility, as well as to confer initial clarity on what originally has none. They are a key mechanism in what Diotima called begetting and what Tocqueville called distribution. By perpetuating beauty, institutions of education help incite the will toward continual creation. Sometimes their institutional gravity and awkwardness can seem tonally out of register with beauty, which, like a small bird, has an aura of fragility, as when Simone Weil in Waiting for God writes:

The love of the beauty of the world … involves … the love of all the truly precious things that bad fortune can destroy. The truly precious things are those forming ladders reaching toward the beauty of the world, openings onto it.

But Weil’s list of precious things, openings into the world, begins not with a flight of a bird but with education: “Numbered among them are the pure and authentic achievements of arts and sciences” To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed.

 

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 Options

pexels-photo-210441.jpeg

This week I learned how little I actually know about Open Access.  However, with all its pros and cons, I firmly believe that Open Access is the way of the future for research.

Last week we talked about the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.  One of the frames is Scholarship as Conversation.  This frame outlines the idea that scholars recognize that their work will be discussed, analyzed and debated among peers who may in turn, build upon or disprove their work.  In order for this to happen, scholars need access to the work of other scholars.

Traditional methods of publication have limited authors in their ability to retain rights and limited users in their ability to access due to paywalls.  Open Access allows authors to choose how they share their work with the scholarly community.  Although Open Access is not universal access, it does promote the ideal of universal access and we should champion efforts that support this ideal.  Andy Nobes’ article pointed out other problems that limit access in Africa.  I believe that periphery publications would gain more attention through an Open Access platform, especially with the help of the DOAJ.  Catch up is inevitable in places where internet access itself is still limited and leaders do not value digital progress as Nobes mentions throughout his article.  Building infrastructure may be a goal that continues with  the next generation and will most likely be slow in some places.  Reaching out and including periphery scholarship is something we intentionally must do in order to promote accessibility and progress.

This leads me to ask myself, “What can I do?” As a librarian, I can help spread the word and educate others about Open Access and Creative Commons licensing. I can encourage professors to publish in and teach with Open Access journals and I can intentionally select OER books and teaching tools for the classes I teach. This movement can continue to have momentum only with the support from within the scholarly community.  My experience so far in OpenLearning#18 is a great way to keep the idea of Scholarship as Conversation moving forward.

Open Participants, Syndicated

The internet and information literacy

Sigh… So work got away from me so I didn’t get to participate as much as I would have liked so this is my attempt to catch up.

Week 2 we examined the Internet and how it relates to education and open access.  I did the reading early and then didn’t have time to fully participate to get my questions answered.  When I read and annotated the Tim Berners-Lee article I didn’t get the chance to respond to some of the questions I was asked about my comments, which deserve to be answered.  As I read the article I was struck by the income bias.  The article while very informative and enlightening, has a bias toward those who can afford access. Gardner Campbell noted my concerns and is I believe on the right track with inclusive access for all.  Gardner also provided a link to Pew research showing the increase in usage of the internet.  But as I looked through this data I was struck by how we are still biasing access with income and education.  While general use has increased, lower income and education have just now reached the use point of higher income and education individuals were at 18 years ago.  And home use of the internet via home broadband for low income is at 53% and low education at 34% verses high income and high education’s 93% and 91%.  This is not taking into consideration location (data is provided).  Also of note in that same research is that lower income and education individuals are more dependent on their smartphones for all their internet access.  The internet has an inherent bias to those who can afford access, and I think it’s important to recognize that.

Week 3 we examined information literacy and open access.  As a librarian who teaches a credit bearing research course, Facing the Frames just confined what I do.  Although there are differences since my class is 16 weeks and we go into more then just information literacy (we also cover some aspects of writing), the concepts of teaching the student to analyze every aspect of what they are doing is important for librarians to understand and use in every aspect of what they do.  Critical thinking and evaluation is the most important thing we teach.  Which lead into Beyond Buttonology… I have to say I was surprised at this article, because I had thought that librarians had moved beyond teaching the mechanics already.  Critical thinking and metacognition has always been emphasized where I have worked.

That’s my $0.02.