The Self
as an
Open Educational Resource
Suzan Koseoglu @suzankoseoglu
&
Maha Bali @bali_maha

Who are we?
We are human.
We are educators.
We are open
educators.
We are curious about
education and everything it is
connected to.

And today we are going to talk about
human OERs (Funes, 2014).

How is OER commonly defined?
Definition #1: “digitised materials offered
freely and openly for educators, students,
and self-learners to use and reuse for
teaching, learning and research.” (OECD,
2007)

How is OER commonly defined?
Definition #2: “OER are teaching, learning and research
resources that reside in the public domain or have been
released under an intellectual property license that permits
their free use or re-purposing by others. Open Educational
Resources include full courses, course materials, modules,
textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software and any other
tools, materials or techniques used to support access to
knowledge.” (The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation)

A common theme across these definitions is that
they all refer to the 5Rs of open education (Wiley,
2009, Wiley 2014).
• Retain
• Reuse
• Revise
• Remix
• Redistribute

How do YOU define OER?
Share your thoughts at #SelfOER

What is Open Education?

What is Open Education?
A focus on things not actions…
A focus on content not people...
A focus on materials not relationships…

What are Open Educational
Resources?
Content.

Our Focus

Because:
Education ≠ Access to content
Educational resource ≠ Educational material
“The true benefit of the academy is the interaction,
the access to the debate, to the negotiation of
knowledge” (Cormier & Siemens, 2010)

We propose that:
The processes and products of open scholarship can
be valuable open educational resources.
We OURSELVES can be open educational resources.
Anyone can be an open educational resource.

What Is It Like to “Be” Open?
Not just to create openly but for
openness to be a state of being in the
world

“Editable person” -
need not be
online/public
Kevin Hodgson
(@dogtrax)
http://www.digitalwritingmonth.com/roster/
flickr photo by somaya https://flickr.com/photos/somayalangley/2118009228 shared under a
Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Open, Not Just Broadcast Publicly, But:
• Make your processes open (e.g. as you think
through your teaching or thesis research, defend
thesis publicly)

Open, Not Just Broadcast Publicly, But:
• Be willing to change, have your ideas and your
values challenged and shifted
• Be open to reevaluating your worldview when
dealing with people very different from yourself

Virtually Connecting as Open
Practice
Do you know Virtually Connecting?
In what ways is it an open practice? Or not?

Virtually Connecting
• Conference participants taking time out of the
onsite experience to include virtual participants
who could not attend;
• (keynote) speakers taking 30 or more mins time to
have a casual conversation with a small group of
people - can be more valuable than what’s on the
stage in front of 100s.

Critical Look into “Open”
• Whose voices dominate the open? Can vulnerable
populations afford to be open?
• The “open” minority voice becomes dominant?
• For example, how many Arab women do you know in edtech? I know about 6 and 4 of them are called Maha :)
• Responsibility? Burden? Inevitable?
… MOST OER (material/people) are Western/Anglo
and so at least you help spark the possibility of
“other” and get heard because “exotic”

Consequences of Open: Risk Vulnerability
• Posting incomplete thoughts or raw processes -
open self to critique and possibly worse esp in
academia
• Exposing own weaknesses (e.g. illness)
• But all of this supports others who would not
otherwise have a window into these
processes/experiences from that viewpoint

Openness is a process… A process that is:
• multidimensional
• shifting and evolving
• contextual
• influenced by our digital literacies
• not always beneficial because every opening calls
for “selectiveness and exclusions” (Edwards, 2015)

A process that is...
• Personal
The unique characteristics that make us an
individual (Campbell, 2013).

This is the beginning of this dialogue,
not the end…
Join the conversation at
#SelfOER

Thank you!
Maha: bali@aucegypt.edu
Suzan: kose0031@umn.edu

Image Credits
• Sky photos by Maha Bali, Cairo Sky album:
• https://www.flickr.com/photos/25902165@N
03/albums/72157645654870584