Category: open education

Reflecting on my not so active #openeducationweek week #hedigid

This week is open education week.  Every year I try to do something to mark the week. I usually try to organise something at work, or try to ensure we release some open resources. However this year, up to last night (Friday) I had failed to promote or engage the week.

This isn’t because I have had a change of heart about open education,  or that I don’t see the value of this global week celebrating the movement. It’s much more basic than that. I just haven’t made the time. Partly this is because I have been busy with other things at work and also in my non work life (buying and selling houses takes up a lot of time).

Hwever last night I did manage to take part in a slow (running throughout the day)  tweet chat organised by Laura Pasquini,  which is part of a series of open, collaborative opportunities for discussion Laura has instigated under the #HEdigID hashtag.

#hedigid chat logo

You can see a full list of the questions, and contribute to the discussion on twitter or here

In terms of question 1, the energy, affirmation and joy I got from connecting with a group of like minded, international colleagues pretty sums up a huge part of the benefits I have got from being an  open practitioner.

  • What are some of the benefits for being an open educator, scholar, and/or practitioner in higher education?

I do try to encourage my colleagues to be as open as possible, however my opening paragraph to this post I think starts to answer a bit of question 2.

  • What issues do academics and practitioners face, when being “open” in higher education? What challenges emerge when your teaching, research, or practice is open?

Sometimes I just don’t have anything to share or say. Like most people I have peaks and troughs of activity.  I am also very fortunate in that I have been doing lots of “stuff’ openly online for a while now so have an established network I can tap into (and out of) pretty easily.  That is still a challenge for many.

But as Sue said

But that does take time.  Again I  have been incredibly fortunate to have been sort of forced to  blog and  engage with online networking from over a decade now.  Through that I have found a voice, probably been able to punch way above my weight and been able to be a small part of a very large global conversation around open educational practice.

So in terms of Q7

  • How does being “open” influence graduate preparation (masters, doctoral, etc.) or early career professionals in your field or discipline? This might be related to digital scholarship and open practices on the social web (e.g. blogs, Twitter, etc.

Open-ness has given my voice, my opinions a space, given me freedom to be heard outwith  the confines of traditional academic publishing. Open has also allowed me to engage with “proper’ scholars/researchers (Catherine, Chrissi and many, many others) and allowed me and other to gain access to their research almost instantly and without additional costs. (NB there is a shoutout to another inspirational open educator, Lorna in this para too. )

Like any form of practice, open educational practice is an evolving state of being. It is my personal commitment that keeps me pushing on, and conversely it is that personal commitment that makes me worry at times that I don’t do enough, that I’m not visible enough.

Last night was like a getting a little recharge of my open batteries, getting a shot of the open juice. People connecting and sharing is at the heart of education (and life for that matter), open education allows me to do that in a much broader, collaborative, supportive way. So thank you Laura for organising and everyone I connected with last night for once again reassuring, challenging, inspiring and motivating me once more.

Crossing boundaries with #byod4l – some thoughts on sustaining and extending open: design, resources and practice

( Nerantzi, 2017)

This post is an attempt to try and sort our a stream of thoughts currently running around my brain after last week’s #BYOD4L event; after hearing Chrissi talking about open practice at this event also last week;  and some quick chats with my fellow #BYOD4L facilitators.  I’m also following Laura Pasquani’s current work in networked, digital academic life in HE.

I’m trying to make sense of what it is about #BYOD4l that motivates me, my fellow facilitators and the wider community to continue to participate.  There are many unique things about #BYOD4L, but at its heart is an open and flexible design based on open educational practice – the 5 C framework.

This year we extend the model slightly to add 5 more Cs to the mix to reflect some changes in practice and to extend the conversations particularly in the nightly tweet chats.  Every year we have a quick review meeting to see what we should update, but we haven’t (so far) felt the need to update the original content and resources. That might be down to lack of time, perhaps a bit of laziness? But also the fact that it all seems OK. That might change next year. However I think we are probably less concerned with the content as we know it is the community interaction that is at the heart of the week. So we tend to focus our attention on making sure that the synchronous bits are fully supported.

As #BYOD4L has evolved, it seems to me that the nightly tweet chats have become increasingly important. In fact, based on no real evidence whatsoever apart from my observed interaction, I think that for many this is their main contact with the event.

The community engagement is (perhaps) more important than the content/design of the day. Also the chats aren’t really so much about BYOD anymore, they seem to me (again without any empirical evidence) to be about practice and how we are all dealing with the many boundaries we have to deal with in (higher) education between personal/professional everyday practice, personal/institutional technology provision,  formal and informal academic development.  Hence the link with Laura’s work.

  • How does being part of a digital learning network support learning and development for higher ed professionals?
  • How are faculty and staff shaping their online identity and presence to share professional values, work, etc.?
  • How can does a networked community expand knowledge to enhance our roles on campus and the work we do?
  • Why might others higher ed professionals want to network with peers to scaffold their own career goals?

I really hope that I can participate in at least one of the slow tweetchats she has planned over the coming months. Not least to compare that experience with the somewhat frenetic hour long #BYOD4L ones.

We have 5 years worth of archived tweets now and  it would be fascinating and probably quite illuminating to do some proper SNA, textual analysis of the tweet chats – another one day job . . .

However back to motivation.  There is definitely something about the open, collaborative element of the event that provides my motivation to continue to be involved in the facilitation team. It also provides really accessible  routes in and out of my daily professional development and the support I provide from others within and outwith my institution. This is first year I haven’t actually organised some kind of CPD event in my institution around  #BYOD4L. That was largely  down to other work  commitments  during the week, and tbh lack of headspace for me to do that.

That said, despite it being a really busy week for me, participating and facilitating the week has really provided me with a much needed networked, community boost – another key motivation factor for continuing to be involved. The community interaction makes me think about “stuff” – particularly my own CPD and in turn the wider CPD provision I am involved in my institution,  in a different way. It’s also giving my blog a bit of an injection which is always good. (Well for me anyway, hopefully it is for you too, dear reader). #BYOD4l  allows me to cross many boundaries,  which links to Chrissi’s PhD research which specially investigated the:

benefits of crossing boundaries (i.e. open learning) in an academic development contextand proposes an alternative model to traditional academic Continuing Professional Development (CPD). It engages academic staff in experiencing novel approaches to learning and teaching and developing as practitioners through engagement in academic CPD that stretches beyond institutionalboundaries, characterised by diversity and based on collaboration and openness.”
 I’m really hoping that with the rest of my facilitation team we can explore this more and write up our experiences of not just open learning but the motivations, benefits and challenges of open facilitation using Chriss’s PhD (which I am really enjoying reading just now) as our theoretical underpinning.

Coming together with all the C’s: a short reflection on #BYOD4L

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So another week of connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating and creating with #BYOD4L has just come to an end.  As ever I find the week just flies by in a whirl of persicopes, tweet chats, googl+-ing and general community sharing and fun.

This year we add a few more C’s into the mix to  extend the conversations a bit and also to reflect evolving practice and use of mobile devices, web services and apps.   So we had connecting and confidence, communication and (digital) capabilities, curation and and copyright, collaboration and community,  creating and celebrating.   I think that these additions really did help.   And once again our community came together in a whirl of sharing based on shared values. It’s really hard so soon after the event to pull anything coherent however a couple of the C’s stood out for me. The first of them being community.

One of the reason I continue to be involved with #BYOD4L is the community spirit it engenders. Over the past three years Neil Withnell, Alex Spiers  and I have evolved into our own wee team/community organising things behind the scenes. We very rarely get the chance to meet in person but we just seem to naturally be able to divide up what needs to be done and support each other in a really collegiate way. There’s no rivalry, no one-man-upship, we just get on with things.

This year we were joined by Debbie Baff – an stalwart of the #BYOD4L community and Suzanne Faulkner a complete newbie to the whole thing. What a joy it was to work with them both.  Debbie is just one of those lovely really open educational practitioners people who always shares and cares.  Suzanne, well what can I say. Talk about embracing all the C’s! She was periscoping every day, often with her students, tweeting and she even wrote that blog post she had been thinking about for such a long time.  We managed to meet up briefly on Friday afternoon and what a joy that was. Although we had never met, it was like meeting a long lost friend.

I think for those of us who have been working and networking online for the last decade and are part of established networks, it’s all  to easy to forget that others aren’t.  Events like #BYOD4l are a great way to jump start that on line networking within a safe. supportive environment and community.

So whilst I know many of us are finding Twitter not quite the same place as it used to be, it still can be a great space to connect. It saddens me that others may not have the same experiences that I have had in terms of connecting, collaborating and community building that I have been so lucky to experience.

During the week I was speaking at an event in London where I met many of my extended online community, including Chrissi Nerantzi (one of the inventors of BYOD4L).  I took the opportunity to do a very unplanned, slightly chaotic persicope from the event with Chrissi and a few others.  It still quite amazes me that just with my phone I can broadcast from anywhere with a decent 3/4G or wifi connection.

The other C that I really need to think about more is curation. On Wednesday night we joined with with #LTHEchat community  to discuss curation and copyright. So many threads to that discussion! The recent-ish news about Storify now moving to a paid for service has certainly help to focus minds in some aspects of curation. I think it’s fair to say many people used storify primarily as a twitter curation tool. I know that’s how it was/is used by #BYOD4L. We do also back up using Tags Explorer too. But the storify interface is/was simple to set up and use. A salutary tale in terms of becoming reliant on free at point of use, and apparently open services.

Personally I am in a slight quandary about my own curation. I have “stuff” all over the place, mainly in the cloud. Maybe I have an over simple faith that I will be able to find said “stuff” whenever I need it. In reality, when I am looking for that link/paper/ref and can’t find it in 5 minutes, I usually just resort to an internet search . . .  Part of me feels that I should try to have a less  chaotic approach to curation, but that doesn’t seem to last very long. My laziness and faith in asking the “lazy web” just keeps getting in the way.

Anyway lots more to think about after the week and hopefully a few more blog posts once my thoughts are a bit more in order.

 

 

Some thoughts on being open and the ongoing struggle with open praxis

#hello #flickr

(random picture from my open photo collection)

I am writing this post in response to this, really thoughtful critique on open practice from  my former colleague and good friend David Sherlock (aka Paddy the Rabbit).

In the post David articulates his personal struggles with being told to “be more open” and about writing openly.   At the crux of the post is this question

how does an open person use technology in an open way? .  . . I think there is a struggle in the current technological landscape to be open and that large corporations purposely turn open in to self-promotion. In technology and education I don’t think that something ‘being there’ is the same as “being open”. How can people interact with my stuff, how can they expand, remix. It isn’t solely about the right license.

Now this really made me stop and think. As one of the people who encourage not only David, but everyone, to “be more open”,  I see technology as a crucial part of my own personal open network/ecosystem/infrastructure. That’s not to say I don’t share David’s concerns about intentions of big corporations, fake news, data manipulation, bots.  I really do.

However I believe that those of us working in education do have a bit of an obligation to use/subvert technologies and be open or at least keep an informed and evolving discourse alive and active across many channels.  Blogging and  social media are a way of doing that.

Perhaps I am deluding myself, but I have to believe that the medium is not the message. There are really significant messages with the medium. But of course finding them is a challenge. The needs of “the market” are mostly at odds with the recognised right  for all to universal, fair and open education, as highlighted in UNESCOs 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development . But we have to try.  As commercial pressures force changes into the terms and conditions of many services, we are all potentially held hostage to the dominant “fat digital controllers”.

Not long after reading David’s post, I came across this post from a wonderful open educator, Maha Bali. If it wasn’t for technology, I probably would not have found her work so immediately. But more importantly I wouldn’t have been able to connect directly with her and be able to call her a colleague and friend.

Maha’s work constantly takes me out of my comfortable, global North enclave and reminds me of the wider meanings of inclusiveness, hospitality,  open-ness and equity. and the “unbearable whiteness of the digital.”  In this open document she quotes Lugones and Spellman:

We [the minorities] and you [the dominant] do not talk the same language. When we talk to you we use your language: the language of your experience and of your theories. We try to use it to communicate our world of experience. But since your language and your theories are inadequate in expressing our experiences, we only succeed in communicating our experience of exclusion. We cannot talk to you in our language because you do not understand it

Now this made me think of David’s post. Ironic, on so many levels as David is a white male – but he really is one of the good guys.  It got me thinking is what David expressing actually his feelings of exclusion around open practice?  Is he actually seeing a dominance of open voices that he equates to established personalities and personas that he can’t engage with/that won’t engage with him beyond superficial self promotion?

I don’t know, but it does make me think about the difficulty of working at the praxis of open education. It is a habit, you can’t do it all the time, as Catherine Cronin says it is continually negotiated.

So how do we ensure that open practice doesn’t seem out of reach, too hard, for researchers like David to engage with?  I would point people to the work of the non dominant voices like Maha, and so many others.  Use them as inspiration and example of how to circumvent the tech giants, the formal means of academic publishing.

Personally I have always found working in an open way equally scary and rewarding. I keep doing it at my own pace, in my own way but with the support and encouragement of a wider (mainly open) community.  Sometimes it is superficial but more often than not, open practice (in all its variations) leads me to many things that enhance ‘the day job’. The externality that my open praxis provides me with often gives me the support, inspiration and criticality I need to continue my work in more closed areas.

David is probably more open than he realises but it is really important that these struggles are discussed further.  I would love to hear what you think?

Opening and closing OEPS but what/where now for open education in Scotland? #beopen

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image: If you look you can find wind swept Open Educational Practices all over Scotland by Ronald Macintyre and is licensed CC BY 4.0

An email this morning reminded me that the OEPS project has now come to the end of its three year funding period. I did virtually attend part of the final project meeting held  a couple of weeks ago in Edinburgh and just haven’t got round to writing a post about it.

I feel I need to write something. Not least because of this post I wrote 3 years ago when the project started.  In that  post was I fairly critical of the funding decisions around the project. If felt that in the midst of 1,000 cuts money was being given to the “haves” without any consideration for the “have nots”.

3 years on have I changed my opinion? Well, yes and no.

Whilst the project and the team – all of whom I like and have the lot of professional respect for – have done well particularly in engaging with third sector organisations with the concept open education and developing open courses. They have also:

worked with 68 organisations across Scotland, including universities,colleges, schools, third sector organisations, unions and businesses. It held 79 workshops, gave 44 presentations, organised four one-day open forums and one seminar and co-organised a two day symposium

I am slightly confused as to why all the project outputs including project reports  are now “courses” as part of a collection in Open Learn which I have to register for to access. I do hope the project website will remain so I can access the open resources created by the project there.  UPDATE 27.7.17 – you can “browse” the courses without the need for registering, but I still find the concept of project reports as a course a bit odd.

I like and support the list of recommendations in the final report, I do worry that there is now an ever bigger vacuum in relation to Government policy, funding and action around open education.

The first recommendation is one I whole heartedly support

Colleges and universities and the Scottish Government should consider formal adoption of the Scottish Open Educational Declaration.

Wouldn’t it have (and could still be) great if all the institutions on the project steering group could have done that as a commitment to supporting open education practices?  That might make the SFC sit up and take notice and also provide some national as well as institutional support, commitment and sustainability to help with the other recommendations.

However I fear that this project is going to be more of a footnote around OEP in Scotland than a rallying call to action which it had the potential to be. I fear a chance has been missed to help recognise and  give additional support and sustenance to the grassroots Scottish open education community.

The Open Scotland Declaration has been the inspiration for many other countries around the world as a basis for national policy. Indeed,  Joe Wilson reported early this year from the UNESCO European Regional Consultation on OER:

In terms of Scottish approaches,  the formation of Open Scotland and the creation of the Open Scotland Declaration has positioned Scottish Education as thought leaders in building both grass roots support for open educational practice and for encouraging policy shifts at national and institutional level and this is still garnering Scotland and Scottish education with global recognition.

So what now? The project has done some good work, there are more OERs, courses and awareness of open education but to (mis) quote Maha Bali (keynote speaker at the final project event), 3 years on maybe we need to be thinking more about notions of open tables.

Is the legacy of OEPS and its SFC funding one big open table that we can all contribute to and share  (an idea I took away from the  Porous University event co-hosted by the project)? Or is it a actually just a contribution to a bigger OU open table aka Open Learn?  Either way,  I think we all need to consider who and how these tables are supported and maintained  in order to move forward open educational practices in Scotland and beyond.

 

I say open, you say ? #EUNIS2017

Last week during my keynote at the #eunis2017 conference I tried to get a bit of audience participation and idea of what open meant to the delegates by asking the question:

“I say open – you say?”

I gave delegates the opportunity to share up to 3 words.  This image below shows the resulting word cloud.  Quite a range of responses, and maybe unsurprisingly for an information services conference, data featured pretty highly, but some of the other words are quite interesting too – education, available, seamless, access, collaboration.

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As a quick way to get some swhooshy interactivity into a presentation mentimeter worked really well, it was quite entertaining to see the cloud develop in real time as delegates responded.   If you would like a go – then you can add your 3 words here  and see the results here.

You can see the conference cloud unfold in real time in the video recording of the presentation that Martin Hamilton made using a couple of tricks from his Futurists toolkit (well actually a mobile phone and a niffy little tripod).

Today's post is brought to you by the letter P – more leaking from the #porous uni

I guess when you have a title like “The Porous University” you are probably inviting a bit a alliteration at some point.  A number of big words infused through the conversations and twitter back channel from the #porousuni event earlier this week.

In addition to permeability (shout out to Alan Levine again bringing this to the table), praxis (which makes me think of Catherine Cronin’s research) and pedagogy, I was introduced to new P word –  paragogy (thanks to Neil Mulholland, Edinburgh College of Art).

From a quick google search I got this definition:

“Paragogy is a theory of peer learning which endeavors to both describe the phenomenon of effective peer learning, and to prescribe key aspects of its best practice.”

and an open book on Paragogy by Corneli and Danoff  which I’m exploring just now, and have discovered that paralogy means production in Greek.

Maybe we really are moving across the alphabet in open, with less Cs and more Ps.

What can you bring to the open table? Some initial thoughts from the #porusuni

I’ve spent the last two days in Inverness at the Porous University Symposium. This was a relatively and deliberately small event, with about 35 people in the room. The event wasn’t exactly an un-conference but it was very much structured around discussion and debate.  Provocations were invited to stimulate discussions and then in smaller breakout groups we discussed and shared our reactions to provocations and attempted to create responses to them.

I am still processing the many discussions that I participated in, but there were a couple of overriding themes that I want to highlight, which follow on from many of the discussions I have been having pre and post the OER17 conference around open practice and open hospitality.

Unsurprisingly many of the provocations at the event highlighted the uncertainty, fear, demoralisation that many of us who work in education (and indeed in other parts of society) are experiencing just now.  Increasing managerialism, neoliberalism, the rise and acceptance of alternative facts.  . . . what Richard Hall neatly described as the challenge between “the pessimism of the intellect versus the optimism of the will”.

We spent quite a lot of time discussing the nature of our Higher Education Institutions, what is their role, their wider place within society? What does a University do? How does/can “open” impact on that role, that potential of exchange of ideas within and beyond our spaces?  Lots of chin stroking, deep thoughts, and critical concepts were flying around the room.

This was great, but, and yes there has to be a but. It was all at a very high level. There were lots of very clever people in the room. To misquote from Forrest Gump ‘“clever is as clever does”.

Whilst on the one hand  I appreciate and support the need for criticality, there is also the need (more pressing than ever just now) to be able to distill our critique into something that is clear and understandable to those not in ’the academy’.  Our choice and use of language can actually close off our conversations around openness to those we ultimately presume can benefit from open education.

This event was specifically targeted at University level so there was an inherent bias and exclusivity about it. However, we were really fortunate to Alex Dunedin from the Ragged University attending.

Alex is one of those extraordinary people who just “does it” and is a truly open by default human. He doesn’t do anything for the money, because it’s in his job description, because it’s the “cool” thing, he does it because he really cares. He is an embodiment of the self as OER.   He finds places, spaces, people with ideas, people with problems and brings them together.  You can hear more from Alex in this recording of the Virtually Connecting session from the event.

‘The Ragged University project is about learning from all the traditions of free education and making them live through practice . . .The Ragged project operates in informal spaces. The spaces we are interested in are known as ‘third places’ which belong to everyone and are those which foster relaxed atmospheres. These non-institutional spaces are needed to generate certain types of dynamic between people which allow us to comfortably share what we know on our own terms.”

I *think* that I am a pretty hospital person, but its only recently that I have discovered the work of Kate Bowles around the concept in education. Being a bit Winnie the Pooh like at time ( a bear of little brain), I hadn’t quite put the two things together.  It is something that I am committed to continue to work on.

I loved Alex’s simple messages of bring education back to hospitality, find a space and just asking people to “bring something to the table”.  You might start with just one dish, but by the end you have a full table and a feast.

Although there was a lot of talking over the two days, there was a consensus that we wanted have “something” at the end of the event to share. (All the provocations, videos, and other ‘stuff’ from the event will be available over the next few days). At the end of the first day there was talk about a manifesto. However as day two unfolded the conversations turned from the high level institutional issues to the personal, pragmatic, practice ones. I may have had a small hand in that, and have to thank Alan Levine again for his explanation of porous and permeable.

I always feel that although I can’t make a huge difference in my institution I can do small things that can start to help model changes in practice of others. One of the reasons I am drawn to open communities and other open practitioners is that it is a way for me to explore, share, have fun outwith my institutional context. Being part of the open education community, fills me with inspiration, joy, hope and hospitality.

I have been trying to think of a simple way to express and share some of the ideas from the  two days. I’m still working on it but for now, based on some of the feedback from one of the group discussions about the elements of open practice, I am thinking about the open table and what we need to add to it.  What would you bring?

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Open pedagogy and open resources, curiouser and curiouser . . . #YearOfOpen

Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English) (Alice in Wonderland)

I have to confess to feeling a bit like that during last nights #YearofOpen hangout on Open Pedagogy.  There was such a great line up of people in the hangout space, and an even greater line up joining via YouTube and Twitter, that every time I spoke I think I ended up forgetting what I really wanted to say.

Since the end of the chat and most of today I have been having the reflective, “I wish I’d said that” thoughts.

One thing that we touched on which really resonated with me is the importance of open (support) networks, open collaboration, and open communities which was raised by Mike Caulfield

David Wiley proposed that the open pedagogy was somehow seen as more exciting than OER and he felt quite sad about that.  Open pedagogy and practice was in some way the new “shiny” thing was sparking peoples interest. OERs are just boring now.

I don’t think it’s that binary. But people do get bored with things. If you have been at the cutting edge of innovation once whatever the shiny thing is becomes mainstream it can lose some of its sparkle.  There are lost of people who like to be at the cutting edge all the time. For me the loss of that initial sparkle is actually the most exciting part of any innovation. Helping people see the potential of new “stuff”, and watching them go off in directions I couldn’t have thought of is one of the best parts of my job.

What I think is happening is now that OERs are becoming mainstream we need to explore how they are actually being used and created. That naturally leads to open practice. The reflection and articulation of that practice through  pedagogical frameworks in HE is a natural evolution imho.  However pedagogy brings with it a set of assumptions and privileges, particularly in relation to higher education.  Exploring practice then is perhaps a more equitable and meaningful starting point.

During the hang out, Robin de Rosa  made some really excellent points about the need to leverage open in terms of infrastructure to ensure access to public education in the US context. I think we have the same concerns here in the UK. Open infrastructure isn’t just about technology though undoubtedly that is a very important part. It’s also about people and practice, the sharing of the where, what, why, when and how we use that infrastructure in our practice.

The conversations and bonds that open (as in open in the web) networks forge are hugely important and for me. They form a significant part of my open practice and my open infrastructure.  As we all struggle with increasingly closed political environments we need to fight for open conversations and sharing of ideas and practice.  These are things that don’t need to be openly licensed but form an increasingly important layer around, above, below, alongside licensed OERs.

This morning I did an interview with another open education researcher Helen Crump. It was very timely  happening just after the hangout.  Helen’s areas of research is around the notion of self OER and we discussed how I felt that manifested in my interactions with open scholarship, education, practice and networks. I truly believe that people are educational resources, and the some of the best resources that we have. We can’t forget that.

I have really struggled with open this year as I shared in this post. Being able to tap into my network (which is full of some fantastic open researchers and practitioners) has helped keep me sane;  allowed me to be able to be part of a workshop session at #oer17; kept me informed about new work, and examples of practice – all of which I can store until I can find a way to (re)use.

Open pedagogy, practice, OERs are equally boring.  It’s the connections, confidence, increased access to, and extension of knowledge that open education and open networks create that are exciting.

Many thanks again to Maha Bali and the #YearofOpen for organising the hangout which you can view below. Maha has also started curating a really useful collection of recent blogs posts and conversations around this issue of open pedagogy – well worth exploring and bookmarking if you are at all interested in this evolving discussion.

Thinking about open pedagogy

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(image via unsplash)

The question “what is open pedagogy?” is this months  Year of Open  perspective.  A really rich variety of voices have shared their views on the site. They are all worth a read.

As the waves of #oer17 are still washing over my brain, I’m not sure I really know, the answer to the question, but I have been thinking a lot more about over the past week or so. Partly because of the really excellent presentations, discussions and reflections at and after the conference and partly because of some other discussions and definitions that have been causing some healthy (maybe slightly heated) discussions in certain quarters. (See this post for a summary of the whole “he said, he said” thang).

Maha Bali has also organised  a google hang out on Monday 24th April which I’m taking part in, to try and unpack the question and maybe get a bit more “she said” into the discussions too!

I have equal feelings of  excitement and fear about the session. I am excited as I think it’s really timely,  and I admire and respect all the participants. Coupled with that I have a bit of the old imposter syndrome creeping in in terms of thinking “wtf can I bring to this party?”

However, as someone who self declares as an open practitioner, and as I pointed out way back in my #oer15 keynote, someone who is from the middle of the mainstream in the UK HE sector, then I think that actually my take on this is actually quite important in terms of the widespread adoption and understanding of open education, open resources, open pedagogy and for me the most important, open practice.

Whilst I fully recognise the need for definition and rigour, I also am very aware of the pragmatic needs of practice.  So I was a bit concerned with my relationship and practice in terms of the 5 R definition of open pedagogy from David Wiley.   Partly I think that is because most of my practice isn’t content (book) based. A lot of it is actually about giving people confidence to try new things, to share their practice and resources.  There are, as Maha and I have been chatting about in our prep for the session, some things you can’t put a license on.

So whilst I  strive to meet the 5 Rs  I can’t always meet all of them. So if I am not practicing open pedagogy does that mean I am not an open practitioner is the questions circling through my brain? If I am having doubts then how the heck can I extent, support, be part of an open education community in my institution and beyond?

After a small cry for help on twitter I was pointed to this article on  Attributes of Open Pedagogy by Browyn Hegarty which probably resonated more, and articulated some of my challenges particularly around the overlapping nature of the 8 attributes discussed in it.

My #Iwill message from #oer17 was to be “be generous, inclusive and extend notion of open hospitality in everything I do”.   But in our definitions of open pedagogy are we inadvertently being exclusive? Josie Fraser highlighted some very pertinent questions in her reflections on #oer17 post,  I can’t put it any better than this (thanks Josie)

I’m suspicious of the current distinction between open pedagogy and open practice, and in particular, how little explanation is being given to the privileging or even just use of the term pedagogy over the term practice. Is the use of pedegogy being used as shorthand for educational practice? Is it being used to underline the importance of formal education, or the primacy of teaching? Why not open heutagogy? Is it being used as a form of interpellation, a signal to include and exclude specific groups within open education? What is wrong with ‘practice’? How do we benefit from continuing to insist on a break between theory and practice, or theory and politics? Is this distinction as harmful as the disavowal of the relationship between the personal and the political?

It should be a very interesting discussion on Monday – more information about how to join in is available here.

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