(Initial) Reflecting Allowed

Maha Bali's blog has now moved to http://blog.mahabali.me

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Origins of Courteous Review

“a system of anonymous peer review tends to work against scholarship that runs against the grain of currently accepted ideas” – great post on open peer review vs. anonymous peer reciew

IPRH Blog

Stephen Jaeger shares a letter from 2010 in which he asked the Medieval Academy of America (MAA) to reconsider the reviewing practices of its scholarly publication, Speculum . Addressed to the Executive Committee of the MAA, the letter describes some of Prof. Jaeger’s experiences with anonymous peer review in Speculum , and encourages the adoption of a more open process of evaluation, such as the ones modeled by the editors of Shakespeare Quarterly and postmedieval .  —bM

August 24th, 2010

Dear Colleagues,
I’m sending a copy of an article on the front page of today’s New York Times on new alternatives to peer review. I would urge the leadership of the academy and the editor and board of Speculum to take its message seriously and consider a change in its current policy of anonymous peer review.

My long and largely unhappy experience with peer review in Speculum has set my own…

View original post 742 more words


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Making Virtual Attendance Count – at #unet4online

I promise I will soon blog something about the content of the conference (though I’ve tweeted a LOT from what speakers were saying – hopefully I’ll aggregate that for folks who are not on twitter) and I’ll be watching some recorded sessions later and I can blog about those as well…

But for now…. I’ve been trying to join the online unconference – the #unet4online – I got onto the video but can’t seem to connect besides viewing the video. People are rather quiet on twitter and facebook… so I thought I’d just blog about the topic I wanted to write about!! People on twitter trying to help out… but some participants have decided to call it a day, so…

The key to enjoying virtual participation, imho, is not to think of it as something LESS than being there f2f but rather to think of it as something qualitatively different than being there f2f – and enjoy those differences!!! They bring opportunities!

So… how I made the virtual unconference experience count. Some quick tips:

  1. It helps if you’re on twitter. That way you can connect to all sorts of people from the conference in all sorts of ways (see almost all the points below).
  2. Use the chat box (seems obvious, but many ppl don’t – so they lose out on the networking potential of having side discussions  that would be rude to have in f2f but are really cool to have online). If I decide there’s someone I have “seen” often enough in sessions, and have enjoyed talking to, I’ll talk about a virtual coffee and exchange twitter handles and start interacting in that backchannel
  3. Tweet out useful tidbits from the conference – you might benefit folks from all over the place who could not pay to be there (and I’ve read somewhere that it’s questionable whether conference organizers will accept this, but it seems like the new culture is that people do that and it’s good PR for the conference, I think).
  4. Connect with speakers before the conference starts. I hit the jackpot when I got in touch with Jim Groom beforehand and look what happened! I was “there” before the conference started, and we engaged really well during the session as well
  5. Connect with the speakers during the conference – you can have side discussions with them on twitter after their session, just as other people who are present would talk to them
  6. Have side discussions without being rude. This happened quite a few times on twitter particularly but also in the chats during live video. Really valuable stuff.
  7. Make it last: make a lasting connection with people. I’ve followed so many new ppl on twitter and my own followers have increased 10% in 3 days! wow.
  8. Make it last #2: in a twitter exchange the idea came up to have a “book-club-like” weekly discussion of the recorded sessions – this could be on twitter or facebook… I’d like the chance to discuss recorded sessions with other participants or even with the speakers themselves.
  9. It helps if some of your PLN (Personal Learning Network) or friends are already at the conference virtually or physically – it helps you have someone to talk to about it at odd times or to ask questions, etc. I was lucky to have both people I know who were presenting, attending physically, and attending virtually (OK, I sort of encouraged some ppl to join hehe)
  10. It helps if you’ve got colleagues at work joining. I had one person joining but we were in different countries so did not have a chance to swap notes and discuss.
  11. IMPORTANT: it helps if you’re at the right conference for you at that stage of your career. For me this conference was great in the sense that I almost knew all about what everyone was talking about – e.g. today’s starting session mentioned #edcmooc and #rhizo14 – two free MOOCs/open courses that I’d participated in. They mentioned the collaborative autoethnography we’re doing in rhizo14 and quoted my friends in that talk. Sometimes, you want to be at a conference where everything is new and you’re learning something new every minute. But for this stage, I needed the networking aspect of this conference and the incremental learning from the sessions, helping me make connections with what I already know and do.

I’ve been to many physical conferences before and lost touch with almost every single person I met there. This time, with Twitter, I don’t think I will lose touch completely. Of course, you could exchange twitter handles at a f2f meeting as well :))

Now… what are some of the things Sloan-C (the organizers) did to help make the virtual conference a good experience?

  1. Really powerful streaming tool. Very few glitches, and I’m here in Egypt on not-so-strong infrastructure. I had about a 3-5 minute lag with the video, but otherwise it was really robust
  2. They were active on twitter and retweeted e.g. some of my blogposts about the conference
  3. Some but not all of the session moderators were really good at engaging participants and passing their questions on  (e.g. Jean, Ben, Lynne) – others did not even tell us their names, or ignored us completely. Some did a good job of having side discussions (e.g. Sandra) besides the main presentation
  4. Some but not all presenters did a good job of engaging the virtual participants – particularly Jim Groom and to a slightly lesser extent Jesse Stommel/Sean Michael Morris (e.g. Sean once read a tweet off his phone). That made a big difference, that some presenters cared. Also Mathew from Kent U had his poll online, for example, so participants from home could participate.

Not so good… not being able to join the unconference in any way… but as I tweeted to Sean today “life is an unconference”

Many things made my day today that are not directly (or at all) related to the conference, and I just wanted to post three tweets about them right here:

First one relates to this post:

Second one, the announcement of my third co-authored article posted on Hybrid Pedagogy today:

Third one (which actually came sometime before the 1st one above and after the 2nd one below) had me speechless and in tears, I was so touched:

https://twitter.com/slamteacher/status/454613507690860544

OK…I’m off

 

ADDED April 17:

I won “the top virtual participant” award 🙂 Yay!


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#rhizo14 Sustenance for a Compulsive Writer with Impostor Syndrome

I’ve been wanting to write about my compulsive writing (I know, compulsive, right?) and impostor syndrome (the latter mentioned on facebook recently) and then Sandra commented on Sarah’s MOOCaholic blog post saying she was “sustained by the people” she met here… and I was just… oh my God. That is such a good word to describe how I feel… how I’ve been feeling…

(Funny enough, I just gave a workshop today on authentic and sustainable assessment, but that’s a different issue)

Image

But back to the original blogpost that was going to be written before I read Sandra’s comment (her comment inspired it to GET written; beforehand it was written in my head, as David Wheeler has said)

Let me start by being totally honest. I don’t have “impostor syndrome” in the sense explained here

The author and impostor-syndrome expert Valerie Young says the condition “refers to people who have a persistent belief in their lack of intelligence, skills, or competence.” She continues: “They are convinced that other people’s praise and recognition of their accomplishments is undeserved, chalking up their achievements to chance, charm, connections, and other external factors.”

I mean, I am a pretty confident person. It’s not an act, or anything. But I think there are some factors that make me feel like… I appear to be more than I really am, or something? For example, doing a PhD remotely meant I did not “get” all the experience as other people did (though I tried to approximate it). I did not get the experience of interacting with other students, more academics beyond my supervisor. I was lucky to be working at a university but there was no school of Education for most of the time I was working on my thesis. Of course, doing a PhD just helps you realize how little you know – it is a case of the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know and I had complete writer’s block until I finally wrote my conclusion chapter where I critique everything in my thesis and say how I would have done it differently, what I would do in future, etc. THEN I could go back and edit my thesis. Whew.

And since I finished my thesis, I’ve lost my writer’s block. I just re-blogged a piece on writer’s block but really I have had writer’s diarrhea or whatever since I submitted my thesis. It started out innocently enough as I was trying to write some peer-reviewed pieces to keep my mind and writing muscle alive, waiting for my supervisor to give me feedback on my almost-final-dissertation… and while doing them I read a lot of blogs and chronicle articles (because one of the articles was about MOOCs and there was not much peer-reviewed stuff on that) – and I felt like I had opinions and things to say that were not scholarly but worth being said… first piece sent to the Chronicle got rejected… but after that, my writing got accepted in other places (the chronicle continue to reject my stuff for some reason, but it does well elsewhere). Anyway… at some point I felt that I’ve got sooooo much writing inside me that I don’t think any online magazine or journal have the time for (no matter how much they like me or how kind they are – it’s not a newspaper column). So I started the blog, and I did so for myself. It was OK if no one ever read it, but that’s not been the case. It’s not entirely coincidental that I started my blog in December and joined rhizo14 in January. I met Dave through my blog, actually! I was writing a post about rhizomatic learning after having just heard of the term, and I tweeted to tell him something, and then (because he’s such a nice guy) we had an extended twitter exchange where I asked if he’s teaching any MOOCs anytime soon and he said “well, since you ask…” and that’s how I joined rhizo14! And my blogging has helped me a lot in terms of learning and interacting in rhizo14 (I was not blogging while in edcmooc and I now regret that).

But anyway… I still feel like I write too much. I don’t always post my new blogs on rhizo14 facebook (not immediately anyway), and it’s amazing because there was one post I did not put on facebook that Clarissa did on my behalf and it got SO popular. I write some things and think they might not interest people so I don’t overly publicize them (as opposed to the latest Hybrid Pedagogy piece which I’ve been spamming ppl with hehe). I do still feel like I’m imposing, even though people could always ignore me and not read stuff, right?

For example, the recent article Shyam and I published on Hybrid Pedagogy. I think it’s a great article with great ideas, I think we’re onto something big here. I think it was written in the most collaborative way and worked out so beautifully… and then when it came out and the Hybird Pedagogy people used quotes from it as they promoted it on social media, I told Sean Michael Morris how great they were at finding good quotes and he replied:

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-partner=”tweetdeck”><p>Bonds of Difference: Illusions of Inclusion <a href=”https://twitter.com/Bali_Maha”>@bali_maha</a&gt; <a href=”https://twitter.com/sharmashyam”>@sharmashyam</a&gt; <a href=”http://t.co/ACcXZjiOby”>http://t.co/ACcXZjiOby</a&gt; <a href=”https://twitter.com/HybridPed”>@hybridped</a></p>&mdash; Sean Michael Morris (@slamteacher) <a href=”https://twitter.com/slamteacher/statuses/452093600508039169″>April 4, 2014</a></blockquote>

See, I read that, and I think, how can one of my favorite writers ever (Sean) who is a writing teacher say that about my writing? My next thought was, well, I’ll write all my new articles co-authored with Shyam since he’s a great writer so it must be helping raise my level 🙂

Uhhh, yeah. Me, who blogs like almost every day, and gets something published on Al-Fanar around every month, and somehow sees almost every interesting idea we discuss on #rhizo14 facebook as an opportunity to publish 😉

So I’m not really sure how to reconcile my “impostor syndrome” thing with my “compulsive writer” thing – and for some reason, I’m always now compelled to write for a public audience. Email? Why confine ideas to a few people I know? Why not open it up for the world, including people I do not know, and meet new people (love it when someone I don’t know tweets, comments, reads, likes my stuff) – but also love it when someone I do know (like Clarissa, Simon and Scott just did) comment on my peer-reviewed work or whatever is published outside my blog.

I’m always feeling like maybe I shouldn’t be sending so many articles to Al-Fanar or Hybrid Pedagogy or all those nice people who seem to like my writing. I was just talking to my boss today and she asked when I was going to get around to writing an article for our department’s newsletter and I laughed. I was like “you can use any of them” – because actually, sometimes I want to write something and it is not yet “time” for our bi-weekly newsletter, or someone else is writing it that week, so I can’t wait. I just blog it. One such post eventually caught the attention of Al-Fanar so has already been re-posted and I don’t think it can tolerate a third re-post… or can it? 🙂

Well, I’m a writeaholic and so I could just write a new one, can’t I?

P.S. while writing this blogpost I was chatting with Clarissa and I told her something I wanted to share with rhizo14: I love how we bring our parenting into the course. I hate how academics or professionals in general can be discouraged from doing that (though I have to say it is not the case in my workplace). But it’s such an important part of my identity and I am glad we all “bring it” with us openly.

[apologies for abrupt ending to post, but Clarissa has told me about interesting thread on fb that I must read before I sleep and it’s midnight already! Why publish it incoherent? Because I’m sure I’ll have a totally new thing to say tomorrow anyway… inshallah]

 

UPDATE: I read through the facebook thread and one of the articles posted by Ronald on that thread  brought on an interesting idea relevant to this post!!! That in Brookfield’s research, he found that people starting to become liberated and empowered through critical pedagogy (not the parts in bold I emphasized):

in the course of his phenomenographic study, it emerged that they also experienced powerful feelings of alienation both within their learning community and outside it. Brookfield identified five themes that exemplify what he terms the ‘dark side’ of critical reflection: impostorship (feeling unworthy to participate in critical
thinking), roadrunning (incremental struggles with new modes of thought), community (support for those
engaged in the critical process); and also ‘cultural suicide’ and a sense of ‘lost innocence’ resulting from
the multiplicity of new ideas that replaces old certainties, and the resulting sense of isolation and
exclusion within existing communities whose value systems remain untroubled by critical thought.

More on all that later, then!


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Authentic & Sustainable Assessment: openly brainstorming workshop ideas

I’ll be co-facilitating a workshop with a colleague on “alternative assessment” and I have chosen to make my part of it about authentic and sustainable assessment. I plan to ask participants to brainstorm ways to modify their current assessments to make them more authentic/sustainable. (My colleague will then discuss pedagogical strategies for implementing these abstract ideas that I will discuss).

Thought I’d write this post to share my thoughts so far and see if anyone out here has good examples they’ve done in their courses that I could share. Also any ideas you have for making the workshop activities more interesting. I could then, in sharing these ideas, show by example why a sustainable, authentic piece of writing (like this blog post) can help develop ideas (and share with a wider audience) beyond doing the research all on my own and not sharing it. Does that make sense? Would this be considered crowdsourcing my workshop? (I already have books and of course google full of ideas I could use, but I have discovered I can sometimes get much more valuable stuff from people directly, like here or on twitter).

I just saw this wonderful statement by Dave Cormier where he is encouraging “blind sharing” because

It is next to impossible for you to know before you’ve shared whether it’s going to be useful to someone else.

So true. Now, moving on so I can “blind share” and encourage you to share.

So how do i define my terms?

Authentic assessment is one where learners try “real-world” applications of what they are learning. Two definitions mentioned in the Authentic Assessment Toolbox are:

A form of assessment in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills — Jon Mueller

“…Engaging and worthy problems or questions of importance, in which students must use knowledge to fashion performances effectively and creatively. The tasks are either replicas of or analogous to the kinds of problems faced by adult citizens and consumers or professionals in the field.” — Grant Wiggins — (Wiggins, 1993, p. 229).

One way to look at it is to consider important skills/tasks/values a “professional” in the field does, and design an assessment close to that.
An example pf a very bad assessment was my First Aid training with the Red Cross many years ago – it was a multiple choice exam. This in no way tests anyone’s ability to perform CPR under stress. A more authentic assessment would be to simulate an emergency situation and have volunteers react. The simulation, of course, would not test the volunteer’s courage and confidence to act under real conditions (quite difficult to test in an artificial environment) but at least it tests their CPR skills directly! A truly authentic alternative to this would be difficult to do in practice (e.g. Leave them on lifeguard duty and watch them from afar! ) but I have to assume that real professional life-savers (e.g. Medical people, firefighters, etc.) get more rigorous and authentic assessments than volunteers at the Red Cross.

A good continuum used in the Authentic Assessment Toolbox is this below:

Traditional ——————————————— Authentic

Selecting a Response ———————————— Performing a Task

Contrived ————————————————————— Real-life

Recall/Recognition ——————————- Construction/Application

Teacher-structured ————————————- Student-structured

Indirect Evidence ——————————————– Direct Evidence

(Note: the word “performance” can be tricky to use because it sometimes has behaviorist connotations and neoliberal ones: i.e. The emphasis is on showing a measurable skill rather than learning it deeply; however, in this context, i think the emphasis means ability to do something rather than theoretically select an appropriate response on a test).

(And in case you’re asking why I didn’t just get examples from that same website – many of the links I followed are not working).

Sustainable Assessment is an idea I got from #flsustain, Nottingham’s Sustainability, Society and You MOOC. According to Speight the author of “Learning for Sustainability” (free, open book, downloadable from here)

assessment strategies should be carefully planned to ensure that what is assessed is the development of the individual rather than their performance. … to focus upon a journey rather than a moment. A sustainable method of assessment is one that can do ‘double or triple-duty’ – it is appropriate and valid for the learning involved, takes the long view (thus making a contribution to society), and also meets the academic requirements of the university.

As part of the MOOC, I wrote the following:

Sustainability has connotations of continuity and of doing things in a holistic manner. Because my interest is in education, I am particularly interested in sustainable learning: how to design our learning environment and community and activities in ways that use sustainable methods and materials, and also promote sustainable/ongoing learning that continues seamlessly beyond any course-constrained time and space. I am just now learning how ideas of open education fit within this framework.

My personal approach to sustainable assessment has been to have all or most of my students’ work on their blogs so others outside the course can benefit. Because the content is on blogs, I am more intentional about making it useful for others beyond the course, and have invited my international networks (aka my online friends) to interact with my students via their blogs and Twitter, to everyone’s delight 🙂

Community-based learning, when done well can be both an authentic and sustainable form of assessment: learners work with real communities in their real problems, and hopefully create something that will have benefit beyond just the course, hopefully something that could endure beyond that time and space.

And just one closing quote inspired by Sean Michael Morris’ latest post on Keep Learning:

as teachers we can never be certain that our students will choose the same walls we choose for them…the space of learning is more fluid and adaptable than we might have planned on

(Disclaimer: i am quoting him slightly out of context, but it still fits brilliantly here).

This blog post, and the workshop it prepares for, is an invitation to expand our teaching beyond the walls… And I am inviting you to post suggestions in the comments! Thanks in advance!

Update: some resources from Twitter (thanks to Andrew M and Sarah S):
I was reminded of Herrington’s work (strange I did not think of it even though I cite her often in my thesis!) and pointed to this website on authentic learning, which has an authentic assessment and also points to this other good resource from UW-Stout
Another resource was HE Academy, which apparently has good projects with sustainability at their core (have not checked them out yet; hoping they are sustainable approaches to assessing learning, rather than approaches to assessing sustainability)
section


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OERs, MOOCs, and dieting

This is just a quick post re-capping thoughts from today’s twitter discussions and especially the #nwoerchat

First, I want to point out that I remembered Rebecca Hogue’s great work on a framework for describing MOOCs and was compelled to share it with folks on #nwoer to help tamper the conversation on MOOCs beyond the typical xMOOC with all its flaws (was inspired after reading Peter’s blog post). It seemed to resonate well, and I am glad, because Rebecca did a great job.

One of the questions in today’s #nwoerchat (Storify here, great job Peter on getting it up so fast! And both Sue and Peter for facilitating) was what does the ideal MOOC look like. And well, first, most of us agreed there was no one-size-fits-all learners, contexts, etc. We also had a few rhizo14ers (Sarah, Simon, Carol, Len, who else?) and we of course waxed lyrical about rhizo14 (in this vague way that I am sure annoyed other people and made them feel excluded – I am so sorry, I remember feeling that way about other MOOCs ppl talked about and said it was an amazing experience and difficult to describe).

Speaking of no one-size-fits all, I was reminded again of the analogy of education is like dieting: fads come and go, but the reality is that each individual has different needs and different things work well for different contexts. And speaking of food analogies, Simon took my suggestion and created a padlet where we can all post our food-edu-oer analogies! Here it is if you’d like to add to it

One of the very important other conversations I have had today on fb and twitter relates to the openness/closedness of MOOCs. It is lovely to have MOOCs where you can get in any time (but I said, never leave, as in Hotel California). Several ppl on the twitter chat agreed that the best MOOCs are the ones where they never end, or at least the connections between people continue long after the official MOOC is over. This all reminded me of an earlier post about what makes a good professional development experience and it would be great if people can add to the list I initially wrote (via the comments – and then maybe I’ll do a new post integrating/attributing the comments).

Another really useful thing that came out of the twitter chat (though I did not see responses other than my own actually) was the question of how/whether MOOCs feed into our teaching. For me personally, MOOCs have fed into my teaching in many ways:

1. I can get resources to use (whether articles in xMOOCs, or peers’ blog posts in cMOOCs)

2. My students’ blogs this semester are getting loads of comments from my MOOC friends – and this fits perfectly with the course outcomes that include an element of intercultural interaction

3. Some of my students joined a Twitter chat by a MOOC friend that was done for his students originally

Flower: open and closed. Wikimedia commons

Flower: open and closed. Wikimedia commons

Among many other ways twitter has helped my teaching, e.g. when I posted my “riddle” for teaching this semester, Mark posted a “Goha” story that I used in my very first class to help me explain the dilemma to my students in a humorous way.

I’ll stop here before this all becomes too personal to make sense to anyone but me (and maybe rhizo14 coz they know me too well)

Oh… ok, one LAST personal thing: I received a (physical) gift from Clarissa (from Brazil) today – loved it Clarissa. Cannot believe I now have a rhizo14 magnet on my fridge… evidence (not that I need it) that our online relationships are much more than just that :o) And this reminds me of an annoying article I read today about online relationships not approximating f2f. Guess what? They can be richer and deeper and more engaged. Some people are just not lucky enough to be able to build them.

I’m off! One last last thing – I found a nice image for “open” and “closed” which also reminds me of Peter’s post “MOOCs: a rose by any other name”. I inserted it somewhere in the middle of this blog post. 🙂


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How many shades of open?

It occurs to me that those of us advocating for open access in academia (whether open educational resources OER or open access publishing) have a really hard time. We’re passionate about something, believe in it so much, it seems instinctual: how could others possibly not get it? But of course there are the institutional structures that for years have gone against openness in academia – on so many levels.

I don’t know that I can necessarily cover all the different shades of openness here, but here’s trying. (this blog post is inspired by a twitter chat using the #nwoerchat which was wonderful (Storify here) – but a group of advocates of openness supporting each other; I just cannot imagine a non-supporter of OER being able to contribute to such a discussion, or even wanting to).

“Open” as a word in different discourses is often a good thing – “open” as in honest, “open” as in welcoming, “open” as in open-minded, open to different perspectives. Sometimes, it’s a little radical and not mainstream, like “open relationship” and what is becoming more mainstream now, “open online course”. But “open access”, “open educational resources” – these sound like they should be good, right? That we should all embrace them. But we don’t.

So… the first obvious hurdle is Open Access publishing, and the issues it creates for tenure, promotion, etc., in academic as it is not always perceived to be as rigorous. That’s a myth, in my opinion, and I wrote about that and a few other myths of OA a few months ago. My writing of that article put me in touch with others at my institution interested in open access and we are holding an open access week, through which I got to know others locally and globally who are interested in open access (e.g. people coming to our event; e.g. the whole #nwoer online event). It’s great to know there are others interested in this kind of thing. It’s just that we’re faced by so many f2f colleagues who just don’t get it and I’m not sure if we’re going to get through to them. I’m not sure who plans to attend our OA event, will we be preaching to choir? Will we in a couple of days be able to convert anyone? Hopefully, there are people on the fence who believe in openness but fear it would limit their career prospects (this point also came up in the twitter chat). One of the best things I heard on the twitter chat is that openness is our social responsibility. This is even more so for research in the sciences where things like patents in the pharmaceutical industry can result in very expensive drugs and people’s health/lives at risk because of that.

Several of us in the Twitter chat mentioned trying to publish all our work in OA journals. I go one step further and try to also peer review mostly OA journal material; and to join editorial boards of OA journals. Luckily, there are many examples of good quality OA journals in the field of education (these are ones I have either published with, reviewed for, or am on the editorial board of):

Journal of Pedagogic Development
IRRODL
Journal of Online Learning and Teaching – via MERLOT (which also links to some OER and peer reviews them)
And a bit more radical and exciting: Hybrid Pedagogy

The latter also has an open peer review process, which I absolutely loved, as I wrote here. Unfortunately, although I find it a pedagogically better approach to peer review, there are people who are pro-open access but against open peer review. I have heard some people say it wastes time (this makes absolutely no sense to me: at least you’re not second-guessing your interpretation of what a reviewer says – you can just ask them!!!); I have heard concerns about antagonism and retaliation by more senior colleagues – but as I’ve discussed with a friend, this all assumes peer review has a policing effect that may result in rejection: but what if the journals are “open” as in, we want to try to accept everything, now let’s work together to make it of the required quality? That’s kind of the approach Hybrid Pedagogy takes, and I respect that so much. I can see why it might not work for the sciences where some experimental work might not really be of the standard acceptable, and where hierarchies might get in the way. It’s sad, though.

One thing that was brought up in the chat was the benefit of sharing openly. Many of us felt it helped us develop our ideas, network with others, and for me personally, it is gratifying to know I’ve done something valuable to others anywhere else in the world… and it’s important to my own professional development to benefit from what others share – including incomplete thoughts on blogs that develop via interaction with others.

Then there are of course Open Educational Resources (OER) – some teachers traditionally hoard and protect what is theirs and won’t share it with anyone. The first time I taught formally was at Rice University, teaching English (in what is their continuing education school/dept) and we were asked to share all our material in a shared online drive. This was wonderful in that I felt I could both benefit from the work of more experienced others before me, and also share with others my innovative practices as a younger teacher. No need to reinvent the wheel. However, you do make yourself vulnerable: what if what you’ve done is not up to par? Some people might also feel like they’ve given up something, rather than given something. While I care about attribution, I would much rather the hard work I put into creating a resource by used by many students for years to come (leave a legacy and such dramatization) than have it thrown in the bin. Many great proverbs we use today are of unknown origin. I say this, but I assume the “reuse” is being done in good faith, not in ways that “steal” ownership and pretend it is the idea of someone other than the original author. Otherwise, I’m happy to “share”. It is actually strange how many things are available online but copyrighted – gets confusing for people unfamiliar with the concept. All those images you technically can’t use but you can see them, right there!!!

Anyway – I asked around about a repository of different open edu/access repositories, and Lenandlar graciously linked me to this: Directory of Open Access Repositories (note how the web title with acronym OpenDoar sounds like… Open Door!). I guess this is even wider than DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)

In OER there are still more levels of openness: open to link to, open to embed, open to copy, open to modify? The latter is maybe one of the highest forms of openness (as in open source software; as in collaboratively edited google docs) – but I always ask myself if “share alike” is a good thing, or would we be enforcing openness on someone else? Do we have that right? Is it our responsibility? I am not sure!

 

graded squares

graded/shaded squares – wikimedia commons

 

There is so much else to say about openness, but I’d like to discuss one other topic that came up – MOOCs. The MOOC acronym stands for “massive, open, online courses” – but they vary on all these fronts (well, maybe they’re mostly online but they definitely vary a lot on the other three). Particularly, I have tried a variety of MOOCs on various platforms led by people with diverse philosophies. The most most most open has to be Open Learn because you just click the link and find the course and you can do whatever you want with it. A couple of other relatively open platofrms are P2PU and Canvas. But I did take a course on Canvas that was later removed, so I was disappointed. The other MOOCs on Coursera, etc., require a login so this makes them slightly less open. The more connectivist MOOCs (cMOOCs) are obviously more open because much of the content lies on social media outside any platform like people’s blogs and twitter – though I think stuff that’s on facebook groups is less open as others are less likely to be able to listen in, even if the group itself is open. Also, some stuff on MOOCs disappears eventually. Not really open. Much content cannot legally be used beyond the course. Not so open. A good blog post shared during the twitter chat on this here

The last thing I wanted to say about openness (for now, anyway) is that just because you make it open (e.g. via using a Creative Commons license) does not necessarily make it accessible. People with certain disabilities may not be able to access it. People without internet connections, without knowledge, without judgment might not be able to access or benefit from it. And people whose language is not the language of the object cannot benefit. And that’s why the license to create “derivatives” is important – at least to allow translation, customization to local needs. I am sure I am missing other ways in which open is not really open 😉 I just can’t think of them all right now.

And I leave you with a beautiful analogy of openness and food (a point brought up and reused during twitter chat):