Tag Archives: #OpenLearning19

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Reflections on Open Learning ’19

Open Learning ’19 has ended and I’d like to ask everyone to consider writing a blog post as a way to reflect on their experience in the cMOOC over the past few weeks. (Rebecca Clark has already done this, and wonderfully so–check out her post!)

For me, this was my first time serving as Hub Director and that was a pretty daunting task. I’m a pretty good meeting manager and project organizer, but like it’s predecessors, Open Learning ’19 has had many pieces and parts to juggle and is run completely by volunteers. It’s been a challenge to find time to give the cMOOC and the Hub the attention they deserve. But we pulled it off! People came, they learned something, and their networks expanded! At least one person’s education and career may have taken a different path because we were here!

What was new for me this time was taking a lead role in designing the experience. We intentionally pulled in not only established leaders in the field, but the emerging leaders as well. We highlighted new projects and new roles in the realm of open learning. We pared down the experience to what we thought might allow some to make it to the finish line (and some did!). As is common with MOOC experiences, we had folks dropping in and out, but there were some who were there on the first day and are still engaging with the experience in this final week. Any level of participation is valuable and I thank all of you who participated for contributing to the learning experience.

We had fun looking back on the previous iterations of the cMOOC and invited some past participants to rejoin us for interviews, annotations and the reunion Zoom. That was my crazy idea and it turned out to be more fun than even I imagined. Reconnecting in a connected learning experience is a wonderful feeling and I loved hearing about how people took their learning experience from the cMOOC into their work. It lives on through you! I am humbled to know that the Open Learning cMOOC in all its iterations and the Hub have continued to inspire you in the in between times. My hope is that the Hub will continue to do that and I am committed to finding ways to keep it fresh and alive. What struck me about the reflections on past iterations of the cMOOC was the lasting impact that this particular learning experience has had.

One thing you can do to help keep the Hub alive is to continue to use the hashtag #OpenLearningHub when you blog or tweet something that’s relevant to the community we’ve built around all the iterations of the cMOOC. Also consider using #openlearning as well to gain a further reach, but the #OpenLearningHub hashtag will ensure that your voice comes into the Open Learning Hub site for our community to see. This will syndicate your post to the Hub and so it will serve as a way to refresh the content there for all of us. Follow the hashtag to keep up with posts from our community.

I truly look forward to connecting with everyone in the years to come and I’m proud to have played a role in facilitating the Open Learning cMOOC experiences. May the Hub live on through all of us!

And a very special to Gardner Campbell who had the initial idea for the cMOOC and the Hub, encouraged me to move from novice to node to hub director, and hung in there with me through all of this latest iteration. There’s no one I’d rather hang with in my liminal space of learning. Yoda to my Skywalker, you are!

Open Participants, Syndicated

The Medium is the Message and the Message is the Medium

I really enjoyed this week’s interview with Rob Blair and hearing about his course Democratic Erosion. It is a brilliant idea to use a networked course structure with this particular course topic!

Hearing about this course reminded me of Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message.” Open learning is all about developing, interacting and learning within a network. McLuhan believed that the medium is more important than the message, however, I would say you can no longer separate the message from the medium. In today’s world, messages come in all different digital formats such as websites, blogs, Twitter, email and digitally born books and journals. These things are so intertwined with our lives that we are constantly both consuming and creating. Dr. Blair’s Democratic Erosion course is both medium and message, intertwined and indivisible. Technology has literally become part of how we live and interact

From a librarian’s point of view Blair and his colleagues have created a course that exemplifies the ACRL Framework idea of Information Creation as a Process. I also was excited to hear Dr. Blair as he discussed the posts as living documents that can be edited and updated as students developed their points of view on complicated topics. This reflects another ACRL Framework idea of Research as Inquiry. We want students to be curious and to challenge ideas, including their own, and become lifelong learners who participate in the democratic process. Scholarship is a conversation (yes, another Framework idea!) and this course exemplifies this idea, as well as celebrates many of the ideas of open learning.

Open Participants, Syndicated

#OpenLearning19 Required Blogging?

In the resources for this past week, there were mentions of required blogging. I am very much in favor of blogging, but I am not sure if I would like to be forced to do it.

Traffic sign turn rightFirst, it’s not everyone’s taste. Since at least Mak, S. F. J., Williams, R. & Mackness, J. (2010), we know that Blogs and Forums are different. And exactly because I myself prefer the (more asynchronous) blogs over the (more synchronous) forums, I empathize with learners who have the opposite learning style, erm, preference.

Furthermore, my problem is to come up with an idea on demand. I like it when I encounter something remarkable and I can sit down and reflect on it. But I don’t want to search for something remarkable to write about. These are two very different modes of operation of the mind.

So I wonder if the requirement may put students off blogging, such that they won’t continue blogging after the course is over. In other contexts, ‘open’ connotates two ways of ‘free’: free of charge and without obligation or, as Suber said, free of most restrictions. Yes, I know that open does not equal free, but I am uncomfortable with the combination of openness and force. In connectivism, openness is combined with autonomy, diversity and interactivity, instead.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Comments on a "networked course"

After viewing the interview between Dr. Rob Blair and Gardner Campbell, I was struck by the appropriateness of using a networked course to teach a class on “democratic erosion.” Involvement of students and educators with different income sources, lifestyles, and political leanings (in terms of regional differences) can only diversify and enrich intellectual discourse.

I was interested to discover what concepts were discussed and in what ways students engaged with them, so I visited the course online. It was just as simple as I had imagined from the interview. While individual instructors design assignments specific to their classes, all students are expected to participate in (if only to attend/observe) political events locally and to blog about their experiences.

The overarching idea that we are all here together, learning and sharing with each other, no matter our differences is central to a democratic system and is key to making open learning work. I loved when Dr. Blair described how he introduced this idea to others. He sent out a few emails to some “friends,” and that turned into emailing larger groups, and those people talked to each other and spread the word, until the Washington Post got wind and published on the project.

If an idea is good, it isn’t likely to stay small. It can become something large and complex and help lots of people. I see open pedagogy as something that is taking shape and becoming a force strong enough to break down old barriers to access to information and education.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

SunLovingLibrarian 2019-03-20 18:58:00

Open Access & OER

The concept of publishing for impact rather than for pay was highlighted in this week’s chapter read on Open Access. Impact is seen as not only beneficial to the larger scholarly world, but to to the author as well, in that they “score career points” (p. 2) and have a better chance of receiving promotions, grants, and the like. So the impact (once measured) is as generous as it might be self-serving.

By chance, I happened to read another article this week, “Widening the Threshold: Using Scholarship as Conversation to Welcome Students to Science,” in which another side to career benefits and publishing was mentioned. In this article, undergraduate students observed that

“lab techs who do much of this kind of work but are rarely credited as authors or invited to participate in larger conversations. This was an opportunity for students to reflect on how people might choose research collaborators, and indeed who counts as a collaborator. It sparked their beginning to think about how authorship credit is impacted by social expectations and biases. This, in turn, can help students see that citation and collaboration are not markers solely of virtue but of social forces.”

This says to me that even articles published as open access are not always beneficial to all creators of the information, or even fair. Previous to this revelation, I had pictured open access material as something morally good. But maybe I should take a different perspective. Maybe morals have little to do with it.

This same article discusses barriers to access and to perceptions of authority based on social structures like gender and race, etc., which further tied in to the discussion on Tuesday among the conference participants in Toronto.

One more related idea that presented itself to me haphazardly to me was during my viewing of a webinar from ACRL titled “Beyond Citation Counting: Metrics and Altmetrics for Demonstrating Scholarly Impact.” The very simple idea was that “the absence of metrics [does not equal] the absence of impact.” I think of this more in terms of OER, where materials can be so remixed that they are almost unrecognizable. Their core purpose may still have a big impact on a large audience, but it can’t necessarily be accurately assessed.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the interconnectedness of scholarly communication in its many forms. I feel like this blog is all over the place, but that I could map these ideas onto a piece of paper and show myself the big picture. So many factors play into the dissemination of scholarly works, the measurement of impact of those works, and the driving force behind it all: just we humans, engaged in sharing information we find important.

Link to the article above: https://bit.ly/2WakE24

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

#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…