Navigating the Marvellous: Openness in Education - #altc 2014

Navigating the Marvellous: Openness in Education Catherine Cronin  @catherinecronin  #altc  2nd Sept 2014 Image: CC BY-NC 2.0 owaief89

open divide spaces identity

Education is inherently an ethical and political act. Michael Apple

Public domain: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Collection ppmsca.04295 CC BY Burns Library, Boston College (Flickr)

Image: CC BY 2.0 dlofink

At its best openness is an ethos not a license. It's an approach to teaching and learning that builds a community of learners online and off. Jim Groom @jimgroom “

Image: CC BY-SA 2.0 cogdog Openness: hubris or humility?

“I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process [of] establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.” – Joi Ito @joi Slide: CC-BY-SA catherinecronin Image: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 yobink

Networked Individualism Social Networks Internet Mobile

2005 2013 Source: Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 2005-2013

There is a divide between formal and informal learning. Students navigate the dissonance between these – with or without our support.

…furtive thinking and behaviour around open-web resources such as Wikipedia masks the level of use of non-traditional resources and also masks the methods learners use to increase their understanding of subjects, creating what we have called The Learning Black Market. The point at which learning takes place is often not being discussed because either explicitly or implicitly learners are being told by their educational intuitions or perceive that the educational institutions view that their information-seeking practices are not legitimate. David White, Lynn S. Connaway, Donna Lanclos, Erin M. Hood & Carrie Vass Evaluating digital services: a Visitors and Residents approach, JISC InfoNet “

Seamus Heaney Lightenings viii - video by Eoghan Kidney vimeo.com/4831035

Networked Teacher Image: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Alec Couros

Networked Educators Networked Students Physical Spaces Bounded Online Spaces Open Online Spaces

CC images: cdessums, infidelic, sholeh!

Khan Academy... #studentvoice Strange putting a face to the voice of my first year maths lecturer! Khan Academy is possibly one of the most useful sources for students studying maths. The idea is simple, If you don't understand the first time you watch it... watch it again. “

@CT231 #ct231

#icollab We’re now looking at the ‘tag-team model’ of education: the projects never end, as there is always a cohort to carry on, and lead into the next group, and when they overlap that’s great – that’s where the genuine collaboration happens. Traditionally, we deliver modules/courses, neatly chunked into 12 weeks, with units of assessment, leading to grades etc. and that’s the way things are (generally) done. I’m not saying scrap all of that, but I do think that modules are best served as springboards to other things. Increasingly, students are connecting across levels and cohorts through Twitter and now we have ex-students getting together with current students, undergrads coming to postgrad classes (and vice versa) as they’ve connected online and have a genuine interest in getting involved in other groups/further curricula outside of their taught modules.” Helen Keegan (2012) @heloukee “

#icollab TAGSExplorer thanks to @mhawksey

Individuals, students and educators, can be nodes in a network. Groups and learning communities also can be nodes, e.g. via #hashtags.

HE – primary school collaboration @msokeeffesclass https://storify.com/catherinecronin/msoke effesclass-visit-to-nuig

Youth Media Team @YMTfm

Coder Dojo @coderdojo

storify.com/catherinecronin/icollab-student-staff-twitter-chat

#studentvoice

#studentvoice Openness... “ I learned a lot more about writing to the public. Before this I would have been less likely to express my views to a group of people online whereas now I would not have a problem in doing so. By posting publicly it opened up our world to other academics or people who are just interested in the topic... I don’t think anyone would have thought that the author of one of the works we were researching would get involved. “

#studentvoice Social networks... “ “ Before studying it, I used Facebook and Twitter mainly just for keeping in contact with people, but since have discovered they both have much more to offer. They are places to discover new information and boost your knowledge. That both education and socialising can be rolled into one.

Open practices give us and our students opportunities to cross boundaries of geography, culture, institution, term, education sector, community, and/or power level…

Image: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Frederic Poirot digital identity

Image: CC BY 2.0 davitydave

DigiLit Leicester Working to improve learner outcomes and raise standards in secondary level schools across Leicester through design & implementation of a digital literacy framework for secondary school staff. Josie Fraser, Richard Hall & Lucy Atkins http://www.digilitleic.com

As studies become more contextualised it seems that the real lesson of online identity is not that it transforms identity but that it makes us more aware that offline identity was already more multiple, culturally contingent and contextual than we had appreciated. Danny Miller (2013) @dannyanth Photo by George Miller (used with permission) “

Alearning space not THEspace

We proposed the idea of a Third Space where teacher and student scripts – the formal and informal, the official and unofficial spaces of the learning environment – intersect, creating the potential for authentic interaction and a shift in the social organization of learning and what counts as knowledge. Kris Gutiérrez (2008) University of Colorado, Boulder “

People live their lives and learn across multiple settings, and this holds true not only across the span of our lives but also across and within the institutions and communities they inhabit... I take an approach that urges me to consider the significant overlap across these boundaries as people, tools, and practices travel through different and even contradictory contexts and activities . Gutiérrez (2008) “

If institutions of learning are going to help learners with the real challenges they face... [they] will have to shift their focus from imparting curriculum to supporting the negotiation of productive identities through landscapes of practices. Etienne Wenger (2010) CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 choconancy1 “

Manifesto for teaching online MSc in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh By redefining connection, we find we can make eye contact online. Place is differently, not less, important online. Community and contact drive good online learning. … onlineteachingmanifesto.wordpress.com

There’s a risk that online education systems get tooled to “the norm” – a roaming autodidact a self-motivated, able learner that is simultan-eously embedded in technocratic futures and disembedded from place, culture, history, and markets. Tressie McMillan Cottom (2014) “ tressiemc.com/2014/07/30/round-up-of-berkman-center-notes-and-reflections

Learners need to practice and experiment with different ways of enacting their identities, and adopt subject positions through different social technologies and media. These opportunities can only be supported by academic staff who are themselves engaged in digital practices and questioning their own relationship with knowledge. - Keri Facer & Neil Selwyn (2010)

navigating the marvellous…

#YesAllWomen

http://www.theguardian.com/education/shortcuts/2014/mar/12/oxford-university-students- of-colour-being-othered

Gardner Campbell – Ecologies of Yearning youtube.com/watch?v=kIzA4ItynYw Openness [is] process, not product after all. It’s not so much the what we learn but the how and the who with and the why we do so… it’s not so much about “open” as an adjective to describe education; rather it’s “opening” as a verb to describe what we must do. What we want students, learners, all of us, to do. Audrey Watters (2012) “

“We have to build our half of the bridge…” Colum McCann Image: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Tim Haynes

Thank you! Catherine Cronin @catherinecronin about.me/catherinecronin slideshare.net/cicronin Image: CC BY 2.0 visualpanic

References Apple, Michael (1990). Foreword. In S.G. O’Malley, R.C. Rosen & L. Vogt (Eds.) Politics of Education: Essays from Radical Teacher. State University of New York Press. Atkins, L., Fraser, J. and Hall, R. (2014) DigiLit Leicester: Project Activities Report, Leicester: Leicester City Council (CC BY-NC 3.0). Cottom, Tressie McMillan (2014). Roundup of Berkman Center Notes & Reflections. tressiemc.com Cronin, Catherine (2014). Networked learning and identity development in open online spaces. 9th international Networked Learning Conference, Edinburgh. Facer, Keri & Selwyn, Neil (2010). Social networking: Key messages from the research. In R. Sharpe, H. Beetham & S. de Freitas (Eds.) Rethinking Learning For A Digital Age. Routledge. Gutiérrez, Kris D. (2008). Developing a sociocritical literacy in the Third Space. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(2), 148-164. Heaney, Seamus (1991) Lightenings viii, Seeing Things. Faber and Faber. Ito, Joi (2011, December 5). In an open-source society, innovating by the seat of our pants. The New York Times. Keegan, Helen (2012). A new academic year: global, connected, creative – and not (quite) a MOOC. Miller, Danny (2013). Future Identities report. Foresight Project, DR2. Pew Research Internet Project (2013). Social Media Update 2013. Rainie, Lee & Wellman, Barry (2012). Networked: The new social operating system. MIT Press. Watters, Audrey (2012). Gardner Campbell, J. Alfred Prufock, and the Ecologies of Yearning. hackeducation Wenger, Etienne (2010). Knowledgeability in Landscapes of Practice SRHE Conference 2010. In deFreitas & Jameson, Eds. (2012) The e-Learning Reader.

Additional Resources

connectedcourses.net #connectedcourses

http://umwdomains.com/

Reclaim Open Learning “Showcases innovation that brings together the best of truly open, online and networked learning in the wilds of the Internet, with the expertise represented by institutions of higher education.” http://open.media.mit.edu/

Reclaim Open Learning Challenge 2013 http://open.media.mit.edu/

Open Mercia @OpenMercia Collaboration by developers, data analysts and policy advisors – from the public sector, voluntary sector, academia and technology SMEs; Interested in encouraging openness by default and with specific reference to data, encouraging the release and use of open data for social, economic and environmental benefit.