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Open Participants, Syndicated

Ok, I’m in. Open Learning ’18

Ok I’m in. Open Learning ’18 a cMooc that will have me “explore all the opens:” Open Access, Open Educational Resources, Open Pedagogical Practices, and Open & Participatory Cultures.  I’m excited but I also admit I hesitate a bit.  It’s the whole cMooc thing.  A cMooc is about communicating and learning by being a part of an online community.  (Very different from the more traditional xMooc with an instructor, set of readings, video lectures and assignments.)  Open Learning ’18 will like other cMooc’s use blogs and twitter and other social media to communicate and I am often more guarded in how I participate online.  But what is learning but expanding boundaries, finding limits and going beyond them.

What are boxes for except for us to open them.

Open and climb out of.

So, Ok I’m in

 

 

I got my information about Moocs from this excellent article by Stephen Downes

Downes, S. (2015). Becoming MOOC. Retrieved February 6, 2018, from https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2015/02/becoming-mooc.html

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Open Learning ’18

I created this blog in order to participate in the Open Learning ’18 connectivist MOOC for Faculty Collaboratives. If you do not know what Open Learning ’18 is, you can find more detail at: Open Learning Hub. In a nutshell, the purpose of Open Learning ’18, is to explore and discuss all of the possibilities when it comes to openness. Well, what does THAT mean? Think about the drive for Open Access materials, Open Educational Resources, Open and Participatory Cultures; all of the ways in which ‘open’ has become a driving force in education, librarianship, and culture. Participants in this MOOC will engage in a variety of synchronous activities, as well as reflective activities, like this blog. Participants can also follow the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag, #openlearning18. The Open Learning course will begin on 4 February and last through 29 March. In preparation for the start of the course, I plan on reading, and perhaps writing more about what I learn in regards to openness. I’m looking forward to the conversation in 2018!

Syndicated, Virginia Group

My trip to Digital Pedagogy Lab’s 2017 Institute

Welcome to the new home for my blog–my own domain! I set up this domain while I was attending the Digital Pedagogy Lab 2017 Institute at the University of Mary Washington. I will continue to use this space to think and tinker with ideas about connected learning, and more broadly higher education and libraries.

At DPL, I attended the Networked Learning and Intercultural Collaboration track and was excited to meet Maha Bali, one of the track’s facilitators, with whom I had collaborated in the spring. Maha and I co-directed the Open Access week of learning in the OpenLearning17 cMOOC. Since Maha lives in Egypt and I in the United States, all our collaboration was virtual, using Google Docs and Google Hangouts. I also enjoyed getting to know Kate Bowles, Maha’s co-facilitator for the Networks track, and all of the colleagues who were in this track throughout the week. The week revolved around philosophical discussions about building connections across identities and cultures, authority versus agency and intersectionality. We had many discussions attempting to define and redefine constructs. My notes are cryptic, so it’s impossible to try to capture the thread of the conversation.

I also attended two workshops during the week. The first was a workshop about Respecting Students in Digital Pedagogies by Chris Guillard. He introduced his work on digital redlining and challenged us to consider what we ask our students to give up when we use commercial technologies in the classroom. To paraphrase Chris, don’t enter students into any relationship with technology where they don’t have control over the relationship. Chris had us pick apart a syllabus to locate the places where students’ were being asked to put their privacy at risk. Related to this were discussions about surveillance capitalism and extractive data. Chris also alluded to these ideas in the final keynote he gave with Maha Bali.

The second workshop I attended was on Decolonizing Rigor in the Classroom. Ashleigh Wade presented some ways of providing students with assignments that give options beyond writing and she discussed how writing is often privileged over other forms. Thanks to some hands-on time with a partner, I decided that I would offer an infographic as an option for an assignment in our Roadmap to Research course the next time I teach it, and I will encourage my librarian colleagues to do the same. Students could be given the option of creating a traditional presentation, or an infographic as their assignment. I would also have them evaluate infographics in class as it relates to thinking about how information is presented and citing information accurately.

As is typical of other conferences I’ve attended, the in-between conversations were incredibly valuable–the lunches, the hallway conversations, the chats during the reception. My network is larger and richer for having made these connections during the Institute. I even met some individuals I had connected with online in OpenLearning17, including fellow Faculty Collaborative Steering Committee member Laura Gogia. That was definitely a highlight! There is something really special about having face to face time with someone after having collaborated for months in virtual space. In fact, I noticed lots of hugging and gentle touching at DPL (the hand on the shoulder or arm, the fist bump, etc.). It’s as if we had to touch each other to be sure that the physical connection was real. I have the impression that many of the attendees had connected via Twitter or other online spaces and I think many of us were grateful to finally have that face-to-face connection.

I’d love to tell you that I came away with clear ideas that will shape how I move forward, but I don’t think it’s that kind of learning experience. I hope that the philosophical discussions I participated in will re-emerge as I run into ideas in my day to day work with students and faculty. I hope that I will come to conversations of connected learning and digital pedagogy with a better understanding of the complex issues involved. What do we need to think about when we ask students to connect, particularly through a specific platform? Platforms are political, extractive, and limited. What choice are we really making when we select a platform and for whom are we making that choice? Are we sure we have the right to make such choices for our students? What about the choices they have already made for themselves? Are they aware of what’s involved in those choices? What’s the best way to help them understand what it means to live and work in the open? These are the ideas that resonated most with me.

So in the end, I left with more questions than answers, but I think that’s what was supposed to happen. What happens next, well, time will tell. Watch this space for more tinkering with these ideas.

Open Participants, Syndicated

It seems like “Open” ought to be easy

[808 words]

…Yet, it’s neither easy, nor free-flowing nor natural. At least it does not seem so to me as I try to “open” my course development and scholarly work. I know that others have discussed the challenges, but I intend to walk through this on my own two feet (figuratively speaking) and lay things out as I see them from my naïve perspective.

There are two fundamental problems from which a plethora of smaller practical obstacles derive. The first is what I’ll just call history. Or more like… the inertial impact of a long history. The private, for-profit (or, to a lesser extent, not-for-profit) publisher has been the norm for a long time. There is an entire academic culture that has sprung up around the industry of textbook adoption, the purchasing and distribution of software packages keyed to textbooks, the authoring and review of textbook manuscripts, etc. I know because I’ve taken part in it over my career. Entire courses are constructed on the intellectual platform of a particular textbook. And in some domains, certain textbooks have become the “gold standard” for the teaching of X, Y or Z. The is a culture of the textbook, of the publishing package, of the premade curriculum where books for a certain subject and level can be plugged into courses crafted to correspond not to learners’ interests or breaking news in the discipline, but to a tried-and-true preformatted cours in a particular subject area, at a particular level. Intro to Bio., Geometry I, French II, Spanish Conversation I, Advanced Grammer, Basics of Writing, etc., etc., etc.

Now to say that all course planning across all of Academe fits this pattern would be an exaggeration. However, it tends to dominate. And it’s made all the more necessary by the “adjunctification” of higher education, where a majority of teachers at certain levels in certain disciplines are part-time teachers who also teach elsewhere and need to be able to show up, open “the book” to page X and begin teaching. Textbooks and preformatting, with software and ancillary materials keyed to the course text make it easy and predictable for teachers — and for students.

The question might be asked, though, whether or not there is something better, a way to proceed that is more aligned with critical inquiry, with learner curiosity, with faculty interests, with what’s happening in the real world. The problem is that there is a long tradition and an entrenched culture of “the textbook.”

The other problem, of course, is the entrenched power of money, of profit margin, of payment for services rendered, of contracting. By adopting the textbook, departments and faculty are buying a certain kind of quality. And publishers and service providers are maintaining their livelihood. There is a certain logic to the system, which includes a certain level of quality assurance in textbooks, software, online resources keyed to the textbook, etc. It is perfectly understandable that institutions and the people running them would prefer to maintain a system that had kept a certain staid ordered quality to the process of producing curricular materials of a certain quality.

To jettison those guarantees, those assurances, in favor of the unknown might seem like a risky proposition. What if more, for individual faculty members, it would mean giving up the efficiency and ease of using predefined, pre-verified, familiar materials and to devote a lot more time investigating and assessing other materials in formats that may vary considerably, with a plethora of delivery options, divergent qualities, etc.  In a word, moving from order and familiarity to a chaotic and time-consuming option that may or may not offer high-quality materials that are well-adapted to the instructional needs of the teacher and the learning needs of students. Heck, students themselves often react badly to unfamiliar material that requires greater attention.

So the two major issues are, on the one hand, culture (or history or tradition or inertia) and, on the other, institutional pressures, profit motives, vested interests, including faculty and student interest in safeguarding the familiar. From those two issues emerge a variety of difficulties. Uncertainty about quality. Increased time investment. Inefficiency because of unfamiliar forms or modalities. Discontent among adjuncts and tenure-track faculty because someone has upset the apple cart. In a word, there are lots of down sides.

What are the up sides? Well… one might be that liberating oneself from a “textbook” gives one greater freedom to use authentic materials directly. one can gain in the timeliness of materials and information. Student self-directed learning has more space to grow when students are made responsible for pursing investigation and finding materials. In a word, intellectual freedom and critical inquiry can soar in this new space. Students can invest themselves more in the process of curriculum development and knowledge creation. It can contribute to active learning.

So… I ask. What’s not to like about “Open”?