Social media, the democratisation of knowledge and physiotherapy. Can they play nice together?

Last Friday I was fortunate enough to attend 2 panel discussions on the use of OER in higher education. It was a bit of an occasion as one of the panels included a few board members of the Opencourseware Consortium (on a side note, UWC is a member of the OCW Consortium). This post is really just a few of the comments made during the panels.

The session began with a welcome message by the university’s Chancellor, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a wonderful man who is always a pleasure to listen to. Something he said struck a chord with me, as I’ve been reflecting on this issue with my students in the ethics module I teach. He said to remember that we are not second rate, and that we don’t have to apologise for who we are. This is important because so often I find that my students lack self-confidence and seem almost apologetic for even being here. The history of this particular institution seems to haunt them, and they can’t seem to shake the belief that their degree isn’t worth the same as one from another university. This is obviously a deep issue that I’m not going to go into here, but I just wanted to mention that comment.

The Vice-Chancellor also made an interesting point in his short welcome address. That is, a redistribution of wealth from the rich 10% won’t significantly improve the lot of the poor 90%. Only by empowering the majority of the people to make their own change, can the country move forward.

The other comments I made a note of included the following:

Andy Lane (Open University, UK): OER is not just good to do. It’s about some form of social justice.

Neil Butcher (OER Africa, South Africa): Curricular frameworks must drive the development of OER i.e. content is not the focus, content comes after pedagogy

Derek Keats (Wits University, South Africa): 1) When content is free, students can use scarce financial resources to acquire technology, which opens up access to an even greater body of content. 2) When institutional strategy is developed around OER, faculty pushback can be reduced

N.B: 1) Institutional pushback is reduced when the OER conversation happens around better ways of addressing faculty and student needs. 2) The content is infrastructure.

Philip Schmidt (Peer 2 Peer University): When lecturers become "internet superstars", they can teach a greater body of students than any traditional lecturer could teach in a lifetime. This reduces the emphasis on formal recognition of professional development.

Ultimately, OER is about content, but I’m more interested to know if it has a role to play in changing teaching and learning practice?

I know that this is all out of sync but the audio for sessions 4 and 5 aren’t up yet and I haven’t had a chance to go through the slideshows yet.  Today’s session was about the actual practice of teaching, using “open” as a framework.  Here are my notes:

Session 6 – Open pedagogy

Focus on educators and the impact of “open” on them.

Jason Jones

Initially started using wikis for groupwork.

Noticed a few problems when teaching – no one takes notes in class, “no real content”, inattention.  Also, when taking notes, educators aren’t always sure what notes are being taken.  Notes can “go wrong” when other thoughts intrude or when students mis-hear.

Paper notes are hard to improve and are private and difficult to organise.

Wikis are public and solve some of the problems just mentioned.  Everyone collaborates and there is negotiation of content.

An unexpected result was noticing that under the old system of teaching the only way you would know if the students have the wrong information is when they fail a test.  With a public wiki, you realise more quickly that students may be on the wrong track.

Lessons learned along with way.  Merely pointing students towards the wiki doesn’t work.  Students don’t always understand technology.  They’re also not sure what to record when taking notes, so templates are useful.  Students can sometimes find it difficult to use other resources (one benefit of using wikis / being online).

Problem of using old assessment techniques with new approaches to teaching and learning.

Garin Fons

Using wikis to get faculty to put teaching materials online, as well as collaborating with dedicated classmates to build community (reflect on communities of practice).

With wikis, faculty get a chance to have materials edited and reviewed in a way they can’t do alone.

Participatory pedagogy – John Seely Brown and the social view of learning.  We can no longer look at the classroom in a cartesian system.  We participate, therefore we learn.

Melanie McBride

Students create blogs as emerging professionals, rather than personal blogs (about what’s happening in their industry).

Found that some students weren’t very keen on blogging.  Reasons included: “I don’t know who I am yet, or who I want to be (powerful statement)…and that some don’t like the idea of being told what to do.  Anonymity was also an issue.

Students did take ownership of their own emerging industry knowledge.

“Banking” model of education = passive recipients of education.

Concerned with progressive asessment models.  Using wiki as means of checking in on student learning.

Issues of social justice and equity.  Not every student has access to tech (in America…try Africa).  Educators must be aware of that.

Pre-defined roles fall away with open pedagogy – students take ownership of courses and rewrite / restructure them.  Allow this to happen.  This can make teachers nervous.  Dichotomy of losing control but giving freedom.  Be careful about too much freedom.

Teachers and control…depends on the teacher, if they’re willing to dive into the participatory learning environment.  Getting teachers involved in the process.  What does their classroom look like normally and what is their teaching style?  Are they willing to break out of that?  if not, it’s difficult to move forward with this approach.

Open educational resources

I missed the second session of the Mozilla Open Education course that was held about two weeks ago because of Internet issues, and only just had the opportunity to listen to the audio. Here are my notes from the session, which featured a panel of experienced users and creators of Open Education Resources (OER).

Began with an overview of the open ed movement / background to set the context against which the case studies are set…what is the big picture? OER features many people involved at many levels, using many technologies and business models are being built around this idea…shows it’s an idea who’s time has come.

Create a movement of diversity, seeing how different ideas play off one another.

Fundamental adherence to openness means that ideas and content designed for one task need not be delimited to that task but can be “re-packaged” for others i.e you needn’t design materials for everybody, just for your own needs, but then to endow it with the characteristics (legal and technical) that make it available for everybody to redesign.

OER should be:

• designed to give learners access to a broad array of tools
• available for anyone to use/share/adapt to their needs
• relevant for formal/informal and lifelong learning needs

Open licensing is crucial – current systems undermine the premise that creative content can be shared and changed, therefore OER is important for catalysing new ways of learning, critical thinking, collaboration, engagement, reflection

Education is the key to an informed population, therefore it needs broad, optimistic ideas that do away with the notion that “you don’t get to have an education because of your circumstances”.

4 topics that came from previous interviews:

1. Open means not being afraid to solve problems publically (and to fail publically)
2. Open means creating space for people to do things that you don’t anticipate
3. Open means giving up control
4. Open means sharing models that others build on for quick diffusion of good ideas

What is an edupunk and how does it relate to online learning? Edupunk came from a notion that you could do a lot in education by yourself, and not being afraid to fail. Moving against the corporate base who designs courses based around management, rather than learning (isn’t this a bigger problem within Learning Management Systems. Take this further with the idea of “managed learning”). Also, proprietary, no control, they shape our learning experience.

Traditional methods of learning and teaching are clean, easy and simple for lecturers to follow, textbooks are available, curriculum can be moved through in a predetermined way, boundaries are evident. Open source communities allow involvement with real things, which can be scary…you don’t always know where it’s going. The opportunities to talk about things that wont’ come up in other contexts adds to a richer expereince. Better place to learn because it scales.

Discussed issues with institutions catching on to and embracing change, eg. hosting content on external servers.

Difficult to get students to contribute to blogs:

• Thought no-one would read it
• Thought that if they did read it, they’d think it was stupid

Realised that by aggregating content, they could draw a much larger audience. Students were blown away by comments on blogs (profound moment when the person you’re blogging about comments on your blog). Aggregation helps build critical mass. Powerful idea that people from all over the world are reading your work and following it.

A key competency is understanding how to manage online identities. Posts can’t be thrown out there, reflection before posting is important because these conversations are available forever. People beocme more conscious about how ideas and conversations can travel.

Surprised at how few students read and understand how blogs work. Need to teach them how the internet works. Communciation needs to change, tone, strategy. “Learning to write in a way that honours the web”. We need to spend time teaching students how to communicate online, in a living and open way. It’s wrong to think that this is the Facebook generation and that they know how to do this.

Students taking control of their work and presenting or “re-presenting” themselves online. Where they live online and how they work online. Online identity and data portability. Moving beyond the limited view of institutional services…not about email addresses or university webspaces…framing their own online identity outside of the institution.

Regarding Weave for an “educational passport”. Students taking their own digital identity and learning experiences with them when they leave univerity…portfolios of learning that they own. Storing personal information through the browser that the student owns and can always access. Aggregating online identity through your own domain.

Not about building resources, it’s about building community. Forget about building the one hoop that you can re-use every year to make new students jump through. How can I make sure that my community of students is healthy and finding their own hoops?

We had our first session of the Mozilla Open Education Course earlier this evening and it was pretty interesting.  There were a few technical issues with sound but generally it was very well done.  Thanks to everyone who made it possible.

Here’s a few notes that I took during the session.  I know the video will be available later but I took notes anyway and listed the comments from the presenter as it was happening, so there may be errors.  If I’ve made any mistakes, please let me know.

Mark Surman (from the Mozilla foundation)
Spoke about why Mozilla is involved and what the foundation’s motivations are.

Why do the course?

Students are living and learning on the web.  Education is not working and the web is making this even clearer.

Educators need to teach like the web, using these building blocks:

• (open) content
• (open) tech
• (open) pedagogy

This course is about using these building blocks…all 3 need to come together in order for open education to work.

Why do Mozilla and CC care?
To promote openness, participation and distributed decision-making as a core part of internet life.  Education is critical to this.

Also, an experiment to:

• share skills
• new ideas
• more allies
• …have fun

Frank Hecker (Mozilla Foundation)
Elaborated on previous presentation

• Teach people about Mozilla
• Create learning opportunities around Mozilla technology and practices
• Bring new people into the Mozilla camp
• Create a global community of Mozilla educators
• Mozilla curriculum at Seneca college
• Incorporate Mozilla-related topics into coursework
• http://education.mozilla.org – repo for course materials created
• People learn things best when participating directly in the communities around that project
• education@lists.mozilla.org

Question: will we be able to make our own ff addon?  Yes

Ahrash Bissell (ccLearn)

Why is Creative Commons involved in learning?

It’s mission is to minimise the legal, technological and social barriers to sharing and reusing educational materials.

Focusses on ways to improve opportunities for and education:

• Teach about OER
• Solve problems (built the “discover” tool for OER)
• Build and diversify community (education is traditionally subdivided into camps e.g. university, high school).  Open education transcends these boundaries. Boundaries useful but should be permeable.
• Explore better pedagogical models (learning is not something that happens in a delimited way, ideally it should be enjoyed and embraced all the time.  Models haven’t penetrated, everything the same way for the last 50 years (deeply entrenched)
• Empower teachers and learners (certain expectations of students / teachers, “this is what it means to teach/learn”.  Little power to engage as “scientists” in teaching / learning and make adjustments.  Open source development models – emphasisise feedback, creating a system that allows experimentation in an open, transparent, participatory way.

Embrace overarching principle for engaged padagogies, not new but has become inevitable.

Crucial considerations:

• Constant, formative feedback (must want to be assessed)
• Education for skills and capacities, not rote knowledge (the internet makes it obvious why this is the way to go, “knowledge” is already everywhere, thinking is more important.  “Skilled learners”.
• Leverage human and material capital effectively (reaching into peer groups)
• Consider the bulding blocks of a participatory learning system
• Enjoy learning

Philip Schmidt (Peer 2 Peer University)
Provided an overview of the project / sessions

Background readings available on course wiki / 20 min. interviews

Draw up a blueprint for individual / group projects:

• (open) technology platform
• (open) licensing
• (open) pedagogical approach

Idea – blueprint – prototype – project!
Good idea to feed into ongoing things, like:

• Mozilla education portal
• Firefox plugins
• P2PU

Next steps:

• Decide on groups
• Start sketching
• Ideas more important than detail
• A picture
• Enough detail to start building

I’ve been thinking about the concept of open research since listening to Jon Udell’s interview with Jean-Claude Bradley on his open notebook science project.  The idea is similar to the open approach to writing software in that the process is transparent and open to scrutiny by anyone.  This could have important implications for the soundness of the methodology behind the research, the distribution of results and the potential for massive collaboration on research projects.

Open research makes use of social tools like wikis (wikiresearch), blogs, Google Docs and social networks of like-minded individuals, that allow for collaboration, rapid publication and increased access to information for anyone with an internet connection.  There is also the suggestion that openness in research could lead to more innovation by stimulating ideas that allow others to make contributions to the body of knowledge that may not have been the original intent of the researcher.

However, not everyone is comfortable with the idea of conducting research in an open environment, that is subject to scrutiny by everyone and largely against the culture of secrecy in scientific research.  There are definitely issues with the process and one example of how conflict could arise is by publishing primary data openly.  This has the obvious benefit in that anyone could take that information and use it in ways not intended by the researcher, taking data that may have never seen the light of day and creating new knowledge.  The downside is that someone else could beat you to the finish line by publishing your results and negating your work.

There are other approaches that aren’t as “open” as publishing everything concerned with the project.  For example, you could choose to publish only your methodology or ideas around where the project is headed and request input around that, or raw data could be summarised before publishing online.  Other, similar fields are also becoming more mainstream, like open peer review, in which the peer review process of publication is made public, and open notebook science.

What will the world be like when all knowledge is freely available?