Open Educational Literacies
I’ll start this by saying I’m going to sound like a broken record, but for some reason reading the Times Online’s post on “‘Self-learners’ creating university of online” (hat tip to @lisaharris) has got me feeling really irate.
The article discusses the notion of open educational resources (OERs), and the increasing trend for many universities to open up their content to the public, share their lectures, curricula, syllabi, reading lists and other course related materials. It continues to discuss how people are beginning to reference these resources, and use them either as leaping off points for degrees or certifications, or general interest.
So, what’s the problem?
What’s so wrong with sharing educational material and content, you might ask? Nothing, that is, if the sharing is part of a larger vision, process or continuum. The problem is it’s commonly not. What is making me increasingly irate about the topic of OERs is that, by themselves, open educational resources are simply not enough, and yet are being touted as a momentous achievement in the annals of education.
Whether they’re just token gestures or altruistic attempts at freeing up teaching materials, the outcome is pretty much the same. The materials are released devoid of any context, peer interaction, learning networks, filtering systems, ways of interpreting, discussing or synthesizing the knowledge. It is an classroom model without the classroom – worse than the instructivist model, because there is no teacher or expert to consult with in times of confusion or uncertainty.
Now hang on a second…
Now I’m not for a moment saying that open educational content should require a gatekeeper in the way classrooms have historically operated – with teacher at the top, students at the bottom in nice, neat rows, all learning by rote. What I am saying is classrooms offers a critical component that OERs do not: a network with which to explore information and synthesise knowledge in a socially constructed way. Networks, incidentally, which are both formal and informal.
When you release OERs to the ether – regardless of your motives – there is no network.
In some ways OERs are just another facet of the traditional view of education, where there are sharp delineations and clear distinctions between subjects and especially between classroom and the outside world. This is particularly true with respect to the sharing of entire courses and curricula.
When you release OERs to the public, you release them into the outside world – where perspectives and reality are far more complex, dynamic, and above all NOT scripted in the way they are in the classroom.
What’s missing…
So what really needs to be factored into the discussion on OERs – and indeed what is inherently absent in the current model – is the dynamic process of learning, and the context the learner. Intended or not, OERs inadvertently maintain echoes of the context of the content creator – and yet omit the peripheral social aspects in which the content initially appeared.
In order to be truly useful, and yield an optimal impact, learners need to be able to – and know how to – develop their own learning networks within which to socially construct and interpret what the OERs mean to them. Yet for most people, the notion of learning networks is inherently foreign and unknown.
Open Educational Literacies
What this might ultimately entail is an offshoot of Digital Literacies – “open educational literacies” – that relate very closely to education. Having access to content is not the same as understanding how it can be used effectively, or having access to peers and mentors to engage with in the learning processes.
Mind you I’m not trying to be prescriptive about what open educational literacies are in any definitive sense. They could range anywhere from a complete replication of a classroom environment (physical or virtual) to a loosly linked network of global enthusiasts using distributed technologies.
The point is that releasing OERs to the masses and thinking it’s good enough, just isn’t. If education and educators are really intent on making a difference world wide, and helping facilitate the learning experiences of a vast range of people, then we must start considering global diversity, and individual contexts.
Hello
This is something I have been thinking about. Recently we started think about trying to develop some OERs with students, around current student knowledge on using new technologies for learning. I thought a key part of the process would be sharing the development of the OERs with a community through a blog and twitter. That way when the OERs would arrive there would already be a wider community who had contributed to the thinking behind them and who would be keen to start using them and giving feedback. That way hopefully the OERs would have contect embedded within them (if that makes any sense!).
What do you think of that as a possible solution? I’ve searched to see if people have blogged during the development of OERs before but couldn’t really find very much. If you are aware then please let me know. Grainne Conole suggested that Cloudworks would also be a way of supporting something like this.
Anne Marie
@anne marie cunningham: I think that sounds like a pretty good idea. Seems to me that one of the important things about developing OERs is to ensure the entire project is as open as possible – in process as well as output.
Now with your field being Medicine there are some obvious caveats there with regards to client confidentiality and privacy, but as a general rule the more transparent the process and the greater the community input the better.
I think including ongoing communication, as you’ve indicated, is a really good idea because it starts to build a culture of open discussion above and beyond the actual creation and production. If ongoing multi-way discussion takes place throughout the process, you will hopefully find that at the formal end people will have built up ties with one another that will continue afterwards. In a sense a key outcome will be the development of self-sustaining networks.
One of the other ideas that just occurred to me here is to somehow track usage of the OERs after they have been released. If it were suggested that anyone who uses the resource were to also assign their work (reflections, reuse, papers, presentations, etcetera) a specific tag you would be able to monitor and aggregate examples of how it was evolving and/or being used in practice.
This data might in turn be used to establish a second phase of the project where new students could locate existing examples and individuals they could see or engage with. So you’d be mapping and sharing the emerging networks and thus establishing opportunities where people could explore the concepts and ideas together.
As far as examples of people blogging/openly documenting the OER production process – I’ll have a think about that and will let you know.
If anyone else has examples for Anne Marie please post a comment
Good luck!
Thought-provoking post, Mike.
My concern, I guess, is that (by my reading anyway) you seem to be suggesting that OER’s, absent this “dynamic network,” aren’t worth it. I guess that’s where I’d differ; yes, they need to have more supporting materials and expertise… but, until you get it out there and let people see for themselves, can we really predict WHAT that supportive environment should look like?
Thus, Anne Marie’s post, where we take the tools at hand (twitter, etc.) and share what we’re doing, and see what happens..
As for the hype out-stripping the reality of a very new tech/educational resource… well, that’s hardly a new development, is it? ;^)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ed Webb, drakelibguy and drakelibguy. drakelibguy said: Open Ed op ed; read and comment! PRT @edwebb Great post from @mbogle on open educational literacies: – context matters! http://bit.ly/4qReEe [...]
@Bruce Gilbert: Thanks for the thoughts Bruce.
I’m not trying to suggest there isn’t any value in OERs, because I definitely think knowledge and information is more valuable the more it is shared and accessed. Rather that OERs are really just one aspected of a much larger conversation about open education – and indeed learning more broadly. Information and knowledge are not just being created and then shared, they’re being accessed, used, adapted, discussed, synthesized, etcetera.
However the latter phase – where much of the learning occurs – tends to be considered somehow separate to the vision and creation of OERs (not to mention the mandate of organisations that produce them), and then omitted from the conversation. It’s that omission that I think needs to be re-examined.
To use an analogy, the current model for OERs is much like the traditional library model, where books are available to those who wish to read them and then contemplate their meaning. They’re fantastic public resources for people to browse and use – providing access to information that might have previously been unavailable – however they do not actively facilitate the learning process.
What I’m suggesting is that we start thinking about ways to establish “book clubs” for OERs (or nurture their development) to give people opportunities to come together and discuss works they are all reading. We’d then be starting to move from a mere repository of useful objects, to a dynamic environment that includes multi-way flow of conversation and social construction of knowledge.
This would let people take the general context laid out by the resource itself and more easily examine it within their own context.
Having said that, you’re quite right, we really have NO idea what is going to happen once OER are released to the public. It’s like a library that is instantaneously anywhere and everywhere on the planet, in all contexts, cultures, religions, languages, geographies, levels of development and understanding, etcetera.
Knowing how best to facilitate learning when you don’t know the learner is a very complicated situation. Then again, perhaps that’s one reason why it’s not broached as frequently.
[...] 13, 2009 · Leave a Comment Mike Bogle has a new post on “open education literacies.” Bogle suggests that limitation of OER is the lack of [...]
Hey, Mike. Appreciate the follow-up comments.
I want to make it clear that I have no fundamental differences with your points; it has more to do with “tactics,” I guess.
The VAST majority of academics have NO idea what OER is, much less what it might mean; so, saying that OER needs to move away from a “mere repository” to a “useful dynamic environment” is (bear with me here) a little like a 1995 email complaining that the first version of Netscape didn’t have enough social media features (and yes, i was around and writing Web pages back then!)
My own thoughts (and isn’t it amazing how another person’s worthwhile musings contribute to one’s own) are that the whole set of “open” (software, ed resources, open access initiative) movements are in such a state of infancy, no one (and I certainly don’t exclude myself) has a clue as to the true implications.
So, stepping one small step further back, getting to the educational implications of all this: The TRUE transformative implication is that it sparks conversations such as this! And it sparks the bigger questions: What is education, anyway? There has been some resistance (on my campus, but I’m guessing not exclusively!) to things like iTunesU because (paraphrase) we’d be “giving away” our educational expertise.
Which leads us right where I feel a lot more conversations need
to be (and perhaps back to your main point), namely: Very little of education is “content” per se. “That” we master content is, generally, not anywhere as near as important as “why and how” we master it.
Again, thanks, and would be interested to hear more comments from you and others, Mike!
Open Ed op ed; read and comment! PRT @edwebb Great post from @mbogle on open educational literacies: – context matters! http://bit.ly/4qReEe
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Here’s the article (which I agree, is a bit over-hyped) on Open Ed: http://bit.ly/RLrXt then read thoughtful rejoinder: http://bit.ly/4qReEe
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Open Educational Literacies has this writer irate!! http://bit.ly/10QWXm
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