#OpenEdMOOC – Final thoughts

(Source of Image – https://youtu.be/iHmHWVHmyfQ –  0.56)

Like Rebecca Heiser, I have been reflecting on the EdX Introduction to Open Education MOOC.

The title of the MOOC led me to expect a broad discussion about Open Education and in my first post about the MOOC, I wrote:

My hope is that it will offer a fresh perspective and rekindle the enthusiasm I had for open education in the early days of the first MOOC in 2008, but which I have found increasingly difficult to sustain in the last couple of years.

It turned out that my hope was not realised. The MOOC focused on Open Education Resources, which I think is just one aspect of open education, and I have to say the aspect that is of least interest to me since I work independently of an institution and no longer teach, so although I come up against some of the issues presented in the course materials, they do not have the impact on me that they might have on others. This was the syllabus for the course.

Week 1: Why Open Matters
Week 2: Copyright, The Public Domain, and The Commons
Week 3: The 5R Activities and the Creative Commons Licenses
Week 4: Creating, Finding, and Using OER
Week 5: Research on the Impact of OER Adoption
Week 6: The Next Battles for Openness: Data, Algorithms, and Competency Mapping

Disappointingly for me there was little discussion of open pedagogy or open teaching. But I did stick with the MOOC. I found the videos of discussions between George Siemens and David Wiley interesting, as were the videos by Norman Bier and other resources provided, and I was particularly grateful for the alternative thought-provoking perspective of Stephen Downes. Did I learn a lot? I don’t think so. I think this was because OER isn’t of huge interest to me, but also because there was minimal discussion between participants. But I don’t feel negative about the MOOC, just that it didn’t rekindle my early enthusiasm for open education.

Rebecca Heiser  has thrown down the gauntlet twice during the course and been largely ignored. First, at the end of the course she tweeted:

So will we get to see Open Analytics in #OpenEdMOOC? What were we clicking? What were our activity-levels? Hashtags generated? Most importantly what were our most discussed topics, was knowledge transferred? #OpenPL Did we form our own network? Will we continue the conversation?

I saw that Stephen Downes picked this up (I think in OLDaily), but otherwise no-one responded to these good and legitimate questions.

And then Rebecca tried again with a post reflecting on her experience of this MOOC.

I can’t help but be critical of the #OpenEdMOOC, Introduction to Open Education, hosted by edX. With as much excitement that was generated by the Open Community prior to the start of the MOOC, I feel that we were let down by Week 3 of the course. Here’s a recap of my critique by week…

This time she received a response (notably not from George or David) and a few comments.

Geoff Cain commented:

This was pretty ironic for me. MOOCs are the only educational space where instructors and institutions are comfortable with the “Set It and Forget It” model of teaching. Despite everything that we have learned about what makes for a successful online class, all the rules change when it comes to MOOCs. As an instructor who has worked in developmental education and education support my whole life, that model seems like a huge step backwards.

This, and Rebecca and Lena Patterson’s comments, seems to me what we should have been discussing, i.e. some of the more difficult consequences of open education and the questions that remain unanswered.

Having participated in and completed a number of MOOCs, I was not surprised by the “Set It and Forget It” model of teaching that Geoff mentions. From the very first MOOC (CCK08) the idea has been that participants teach each other and take responsibility for doing this, because in a massive networked environment it is impossible for one person (the tutor) to interact with everything that is going on. But the complexity of this as a model for teaching and learning, and whether it is an effective model, has yet to be adequately researched.

Thank you to Rebecca for bravely raising these questions in an environment which is known to reward consensus and punish dissent!

#OpenedMOOC Week 6: The Triumph of the Immaterial

This is the final week of the #openedMOOC and my final post. Like Matthias Melcher I have surprised myself by reaching the end of this MOOC. When I first considered signing up, I thought the MOOC would be more about open education more broadly and discussions around open pedagogy, than about open educational resources. Also like Matthias I have not wanted to complete the MOOC tasks or meet the course objectives; instead I have followed my own interests.

Like some others – see the Twitter stream #openedMOOC – I have enjoyed the weekly videos of discussions between George Siemens and David Wiley, which succeeded in being very informative, and also Stephen Downes’ videos, because he always brings an alternative perspective.

Again this week, Merle Hearns has done a really good job of pulling together this week’s content in her blog,  so there is no need for me to repeat it. Merle discusses Norman Bier’s video, which is well worth watching and from which I made these brief notes:

For Norman Bier the future of OER will depend on how technology is used to collect and apply data, and provide better feedback for students and teachers. He tells us that our practice is already data driven and this should raise concerns for open education research, particularly if that research focusses on static content. He warns that there is no visibility on how data is being used and that it’s important for the OER movement to understand and explore the algorithms in analytic systems. Algorithms are not neutral and if we can’t avoid the biases of the developers getting into the systems then we need transparency to mediate this.

So having written all this you may be wondering why this post bears the title – The Triumph of the Immaterial.

The reason is that this is the title of a clay sculpture by ceramic artist Phoebe Cummings, who today won the BBC Woman’s Hour Craft Prize 2017, with this clay fountain:

Screenshot from BBC Radio 4 Website

And this photo by Laura Snoad gives us a close up of the detail of the work

In this video Phoebe talks about how her work is temporary – making the raw clay sculpture as a fountain means that the water will erode the clay over time.

And in this short video clip we can see the effect the fountain of water is having on the clay sculture

For source of video see: http://alreadyshared.com/explore/medias/1632069198719374070_1663972413

In hearing that this sculpture (a piece of work that will no longer exist when the created fountain erodes the raw clay) has won the prize, it occurred to me that this may inform David Wiley’s 5 Rs of open content. Phoebe Cummings has created a piece of work that she expects to be reused, reworked, remixed and redistributed. She created it to be ephemeral, to enact its own performance and to no longer exist after a period of time, in this case the time it takes for the fountain water to erode the clay.

Phoebe Cummings has a unique approach and way of thinking about materiality and ownership and I’m wondering whether she has anything to teach us about open education resources and copyright. Maybe the success of open education will depend more on how we think about issues such as copyright and ownership, rather than what we do about them.

Thanks to David Wiley and George Siemens for the MOOC, and to Stephen Downes and Norman Bier for their videos.

 

#openedMOOC: CC licenses

In a recent post I mentioned that I have the attribution, share alike, non-commercial creative commons license on my Flickr site. I also mentioned that I sometimes get contacted with a request for use of a photo – usually by a tourism agency wanting to advertise their holidays. I know they are going to make money from their holidays, but I have never yet refused.

This week for the very first time I paused before agreeing to a request for a photo. This is the photo – an environmental sculpture in Cumbria, UK, where I live.

 Andy Goldsworthy – Tilberthwaite  Touchstone Fold

And this is a photo of the sculpture in situ.

Andy Goldsworthy is a well known English environmental artist and sculptor, who has worked on many sheepfolds. See this list http://www.sheepfoldscumbria.co.uk/html/info/list.htm  

This was the request I received by email:

Hello Jenny,

I am currently acquisitioning photos for a new Smithsonian Museum on Main Street (museumonmainstreet.org) exhibit titled “Crossroads” about the last 100 year change of rural America. It’s going to travel to 180 communities across 30 states and will be on view from 2018-2025. We came across one of your photos.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jennymackness/27171284715/in/photostream/#

We would love to use this photo for our exhibit. If you would like to proceed, would you mind letting me know how you would like this photo to be attributed/credit? I will also send a license agreement 

I was puzzled by this request. I didn’t know anything about the Smithsonian Museum, so I looked it up and found it was genuine, but I didn’t know why they wanted this photo, which didn’t seem to fit with their exhibition. So I replied:

Thank you for your email.

The license I have for all my photos is CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Could you let me know how you would be using this photo within the terms of this license.  I am a little puzzled as your exhibition is about rural America and this is the work of a well-known English Artist in rural England. How would it fit with your exhibition?

In principal I am happy for you to use the photo, but before agreeing would like a little more information.

I was concerned about how their use of a photo of Andy Goldsworthy’s work would affect him. Surely if they wanted to use a photo of his work, they should contact him.

In the event the museum decided not to use my photo, replying:

We have decided to not pursue this photograph anymore because of the outside range (as you pointed at, this art piece is in England).

Thank you for your time and I apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused.

For me this raises the interesting issue of whether the photo I took of Andy Goldsworthy’s work was indeed mine to put a license on.

#openedMOOC Week 5: Research on OER Impact and Effectiveness

Click on image for source

I have not done any research into OER Impact and Effectiveness and I don’t, in my career as a teacher, remember ever heavily relying on a textbook that students would have to buy. I do remember having to buy them myself during my own undergraduate studies, but that was back in the mid 60s. When I was teaching in Higher Education at the end of the 90s, early 2000, we would recommend textbooks which the students could buy if they wished, or could take out of the library (we tried to ensure multiple copies were in the library), but mostly we wrote our own materials and gave students hand-outs in the sessions. I must have written many text-books worth of hand-outs during my career. It never occurred to us at that time to share these online, but even if we had wanted to it would not have been possible, because all the materials we produced belonged to the institution. Of course, we also referred students to open online sites where they could explore further materials and dig deeper. So I haven’t had a lot of experience of this heavy reliance on expensive text books for teaching, although I have in my own research had difficulty accessing materials behind paywalls (see below).

It seems that at least in the US, there is this reliance on expensive textbooks and that explains the push for further research that David Wiley talks about in this week’s video. He tells us that whereas in the early days of this research the focus was on surveys and finding out what OERs were being used, and what happens when you use OERs, there is now a need for more nuanced research into what difference they make to student outcomes. According to David Wiley research into OER adoption is still at an early stage and there is need for further research into how OERs are produced and used, and how they are used in teaching.

Stephen Downes in his video for this week once more gets to the nub of the issue when he questions what we mean by impact and effectiveness. He tells us that research has shown that the medium makes no difference to student outcomes, i.e. it makes no difference whether the student learning environment is open or closed. The obvious difference that OERs will make to the student is cost.

As an aside here, from my own perspective, I doubt I would be a researcher if there weren’t OERs. I remember when we submitted our first paper on CCK08 learner experience in 2009, the reviewers criticised the number of blog posts we referenced. There were two reasons we referenced blog posts, 1. At that time there were no research papers on MOOCs to reference 2. Even if there had been, if they were in closed journals (and there were not many open access journals back then), as independent researchers we would not have been able to access them. I still have these issues, particularly in relation to books, which I often cannot afford; there are not enough open access e-books.

Returning to Stephen’s video and the point where I think he really nails it is in his discussion of what we mean by impact. He thinks, and I agree, that impact is more than grades, graduation and course completion. For him we should be looking at a person’s ability to:

• Play a role in society
• Live a happy and productive life
• Be healthy
• Engage in positive relationships with others
• Live meaningfully
• Have a valuable impact as seen through their own eyes and through the eyes of society

He asks how does using open content change any of these. If OERs are only used by the teacher then there won’t be much change. He says open is how you do things, open is when you share how you work with other people, open is when you take responsibility for ensuring that knowledge is carried forward into the next generation. This is the long-term impact of your value and worth in society. Stephen asks where is the research on this – we need research on how open resources help society.  This seems to me like the big picture and quite a challenge for research.

#openedmooc participants have responded to this week’s resources in different ways.

Matthias Melcher has questioned what we mean by research effectiveness in his blog post for this week.

Geoff Cain also reminds us to not forget the role of Connectivism and the role of history in open education (See also  Martin Weller’s recent post. Katy Jordan has done some amazing work in relation to this. I wish I had her technical skills!).

Merle Hearns  has done a great job of commenting on this video A review of the Effectiveness & Perceptions of Open Educational Resources as Compared to Textbooks  and further discusses Martin Weller’s paper The openness-creativity cycle in education as well as sharing her own work.

Benjamin Stewart keeps plugging away asking for a more critical perspective, both in his tweets, e.g. https://twitter.com/bnleez/status/924735752336039936 and in his blog.

For more blog posts see the course site

Finally there are some great resources provided this week, which I have copied here for future reference. These are links to publication lists. For anyone doing research into OER, they would be a great help.

• The Review Project
• IRRODL special issue (Vol 18, No 4, 2017) on OER impact
• Open Education Group publications
• OER Research Hub publications

#openedMOOC Week 4: Open Teaching

The topic for this week is ‘Creating, Finding and Using OERs and a lot of resources have been provided to follow up on this.  More interesting for me, was the initial discussion in the Week 4 videos about open pedagogy and how networks can enable learning. This left me with one or two questions to reflect on.

Those who advocate open education make a strong case for the advantages of learning in a distributed network rather than from one source, such as a teacher or a book. George Siemens tells us that his network is his brain and that learning is less about what we know and more about how we are connected. I found myself wondering whether it is as simple as this. Whilst of course it is possible that knowledge can be found in the connections in your network, it’s also quite possible that this knowledge doesn’t amount to much. As George says later on in the video:

“…. you get a lot of garbage in there, and you get a lot of stuff that’s not relevant. So then you need that feedback system that helps to push things to the surface.”

George explained that when he and Stephen Downes first began to discuss the meaning of ‘open’ in relation to education, they wondered whether it was possible to do for teaching what MIT had done for content. The story of how MIT opened its courseware to the world can be found on their website, but I remember MIT explaining at the time (in 2001) that what they weren’t offering for free to the world was their teaching, and it was their teaching that would make a difference.

In 2008, George and Stephen wanted to make not just content, but also pedagogical practices open and hence the first MOOC was born in the form of the open course ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge’, better known as CCK08. They wanted to demonstrate that their practice was different because it did not rely on the conventional method of the teacher being the exclusive or primary node in the online network. At the time, this was how many people understood education – small groups of students attending to one teacher/expert, i.e. the teacher was the hub of the learning experience, which was based on a hierarchical relationship between the students and their teacher. (Image A in the Figure below)

Image from – https://visualisingadvocacy.org/blog/if-everything-network-nothing-network

Instead, George and Stephen envisaged the learning environment as a network in which there is no primary node and everyone teaches each other. (Image C in the Figure above). The argument George makes is that given that everyone has a different knowledge profile then we can teach one another almost everything. Quoting from the video, George says:

“If I have an idea to express myself, if I have an infrastructure to share what I know, and if there are corrective mechanisms within that infrastructure that provide feedback to the users of that infrastructure, that’s all you need for global knowledge generation. It’s the ability to solve complex problems that are novel in our era and we simply cannot solve them with a hub and spoke model of the expert.”

George uses the example of finding a solution to the problem of the SARS virus to illustrate how networks can solve problems.

These ideas are often discussed in relation to open learning, but despite hearing this for the first time in 2008, and despite recognising the value of networks for open learning and collaborative problem solving, another question I have is: Does declaring what we know or sharing your ideas, equate to teaching?

For some time now I have been interested in Gert Biesta’s concerns about the shift from teaching to learning. Biesta (2013) describes the focus on learners and learning as ‘learnification’, writing:

“The quickest way to express what is at stake here is to say that the point of education is never that children or students learn, but that they learn something, that they learn this for particular purposes, and that they learn this from someone. The problem with the language of learning and with the wider ‘learnification’ of educational discourse is that it makes it far more difficult, if not impossible, to ask the crucial educational questions about content, purpose and relationships”. p.36

Biesta describes teaching as a gift, in which the teacher can bring something radically new to the situation. He says that being ‘taught by’ is radically different to ‘learning from’ and writes:

“… for teachers to be able to teach they need to be able to make judgements about what is educationally desirable, and the fact that what is at stake in such judgements is the question of desirability, highlights that such judgements are not merely technical judgements—not merely judgements about the ‘how’ of teaching—but ultimately always normative judgements, that is judgements about the ‘why’ of teaching”. p.45

For Biesta,

” …. teaching matters and [..] teachers should teach and should be allowed to teach.” p.36

Biesta’s work raises the question of whether large scale open teaching is possible and whether it is true that we can teach each other almost anything. If teaching is a gift, do we all have that gift in equal measure?

My final question relates to George’s comment, which he made more than once, that the network structure should incorporate corrective mechanisms. How does this happen?

In research that Roy Williams, Regina Karousou and I published in 2011, we argued that

“…. considerable effort is required to ensure an effective balance between openness and constraint’ and that in open learning environments ‘a system of negative constraints [is needed] which determine what is not allowed to happen, rather than specifying what does have to happen”.

George suggested that corrective actions might include the possibility of upvoting or downvoting posts and contributions to the network. The problem with this is that it could lead to homogeneous groups with only the people who agree with each other upvoted.

The issue with negative constraints or corrective mechanisms is that they leave us with the question ‘Who is responsible?’ and if we start thinking like this, then we are beginning to get back to hierarchies.

For me it’s not clear what we mean by open teaching. If it means do your teaching in the open, as in a MOOC, then that’s fine – but if it means that teaching is reduced to Biesta’s learnification, then I think there remain many unanswered questions as to how teaching works in open networks.

References

Biesta, G. (2013). Giving teaching back to education: Responding to the disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology & Practice, 6 (2), 35–49. Retrieved from https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/pandpr/article/download/19860/15386

Williams, R., Karousou, R. &  Mackness, J. (2011) Emergent Learning and Learning Ecologies in Web 2.0. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. Retrieved from  http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/883

#openedMOOC Week 3: The 5Rs, CC, and open Licensing

 This image is a screenshot taken from a YouTube video – https://youtu.be/x3CY6RR4uns

I have been working independently, i.e. not in an educational institution, for the past 12 years, so my take on this week’s content of Week 3 of the openedMOOC is probably not typical.

Much of the discussion is about the re-use capabilities of open educational resources (OER). Stephen Downes has pointed out that this discussion pre-supposes that you have access to the OER in the first place, and we know that quite often the resource is only accessible if you pay for it. On a personal note, I am currently trying to decide whether to pay for a  research paper a colleague and I are working on to be openly accessible in the journal we think is the best fit for the work! That could be a whole discussion in its own right.

But I have worked in a Higher Education institution and in schools in the past, so the issues being discussed this week feel familiar and, for those currently working in these environments, the course provides helpful resources to make sense of the difficulties associated with ownership of the materials produced when working for an institution. (See Week 3 in http://linkresearchlab.org/openedmooc/ ).

David Wiley has pointed out that the cost of textbooks in the US prohibits access for many students or causes them to drop out. Ideally students would not be required to invest in expensive textbooks, but instead use OER, which they can download, own and to which they can apply his 5R set of activities, which are:

1. Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
2. Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
3. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
4. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
5. Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

Source of information: David Wiley – http://opencontent.org/definition/

However, he points out that it is not possible to apply these 5Rs to resources you do not own, such as a textbook. So what is the incentive for University lecturers and teachers to create their own OER? What would be the incentive to write a textbook and then make it openly accessible, free and re-usable in terms of the 5Rs? At many institutions, this would require a cultural change and depend on the roles that lecturers play and the type of students that the institution attracts. If a lecturer’s role is to teach adequately, bring in funding and raise the prestige of the institution through high quality research publications, and if the institution serves upper middle class students, then there is little incentive to spend large amounts of your own time creating OER. There is much more incentive for lecturers in institutions where the students will struggle to pay for their education.

On top of this ownership of OER can be complicated and may not be worth the hassle for lecturers. Norman Bier acknowledges that it’s difficult to know who owns the work if a large team has worked on it (See https://youtu.be/o6FWfFPpPeY ). He advises that if you work in an institution and are keen to promote the use of OER, then you should look up your institution’s IP policies and ask yourself (and others) the following questions:

• Are traditional rights still being protected at your institution?
• How do online materials factor in?
• Is your institution making investments in building better course materials?
• How are faculty being ensured the right to continue to use the materials they have authored?
• How is your institution ensuring that educators and learners can make continued use of resources?
• What happens at your institution if multiple educators and development teams want to expand on and improve materials especially over and expanded time period, e.g. years?
• How can an open approach simplify these concerns while also making a larger contribution to the commons?

David Wiley suggests that we need to pull together pockets of individual practice and collaborate on the creation of OER which could then be further developed by future teams of collaborators. This would reduce the workload for individual lecturers and also mean that lecturers don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. Of course, collaboration in itself is a sophisticated skill that doesn’t come easily to everyone.

I did wonder, whilst going through all the materials for this week, how much time David and George spent on creating these resources and how they managed to persuade edX to allow them to host them on an independent site. What’s in it for edX? And indeed what’s in it for them?

#openedMOOC Week 2: Copyright, the Public Domain, and the Commons

An infographic created by Shihaam Donnelly from http://www.jlsu.se/ict-in-school/ict-in-school-part-12-create-infographics/ 

This week’s videos and readings are a lot more interesting than I anticipated.

David Wiley and George Siemens introduce the topic in an informative three part video in which they point out (as does Stephen Downes in his video) that whereas in the past a resource creator had to register for a copyright/patent, these days anything that can be fixed in tangible form is automatically copyrighted at the point of creation and anything created is owned. As Stephen Downes points out, this begs the question of what is not owned – Ideas? Software? Algorithms? How does something come to be in the public domain?

This question led to a discussion of the meaning of the Commons and the idea that a resource can be shared in common, i.e. a resource is managed collectively by the community. For example, a village green could be used by any member of the community for the grazing of stock and collectively cared for by the community. The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is that they tend to become abused, closed and controlled by people whose self-interest works against the common good. This is not only seen on village greens and the like, but also in education settings even in those environments which claim to be open. For example people in networks tend to gather in groups/cliques which, whether intending to or not, can exclude. Elinor Ostrom points out that exclusion of beneficiaries is costly and that ultimately the short-term interests of a few are not in anyone’s long-term interest. It seems then that it’s likely that if we hold a resource in common, someone will abuse it and the question of ownership will never be very far away.

So the question, why should you share, remains an important one.  Why shouldn’t the original creator of a resource retain ownership of his/her creation? These questions stir up a lot of emotion and controversy as seen in some of the readings suggested for this week.

Karl Fogel has suggested that we should now be living in a post-copyright world. He writes:

But now that the Internet has given us a world without distribution costs, it no longer makes any sense to restrict sharing in order to pay for centralized distribution. Abandoning copyright is now not only possible, but desirable. Both artists and audiences would benefit, financially and aesthetically. In place of corporate gatekeepers determining what can and can’t be distributed, a much finer-grained filtering process would allow works to spread based on their merit alone. We would see a return to an older and richer cosmology of creativity, one in which copying and borrowing openly from others’ works is simply a normal part of the creative process, a way of acknowledging one’s sources and of improving on what has come before. And the old canard that artists need copyright to earn a living would be revealed as the pretense it has always been.

This stirred up a hornet’s nest with some angry responses in the many comments that his article generated e.g.

Sorry, I am a creative professional. I would, and will copyright my work. Yes I want to get paid for it. It’s my job why shouldn’t I? I think it’s dumb to just give away everything you work hard for. That is what you are doing when you choose to not protect your work. You leave it open for everyone including pirates.

I have cherry-picked from the comment here, but I think it illustrates that ‘open, free, sharing’ is not desired by all.

Richard Coyne in a recent post which I came across via my colleague Mariana Funes, discusses the criticism that the sharing economy has come under lately  He writes:

The darkest side of this sharing narrative is that consumers and the short-term contracted labour force are fed the idea that they are participating in a new democratised economic order. The sharing economy is just part of a sales pitch, and a way of dressing up inequities and dodgy business practices.

The first line of a Guardian article written by Stephen Poole in April 2016 is:

 ‘Sharing’ is one of the most rhetorically abused virtues of the age.

But Coyne in his post continues:

At best, it [the sharing economy] entails a raft of technologies and business practices that disrupt some of the usual ways of thinking about work, service, and the economy. That can’t be all bad.

He thinks that maybe the idea of a sharing economy is not served by naming it as such. I have also often thought that the idea of sharing is not well served by the language that is sometimes used to discuss it, e.g. sharing = caring etc. There needs to be more balance between the rhetoric and the reality of what ‘sharing’ means.

A way of retaining ownership and control over how, and under what terms your ‘creation’ is shared is through the use of Creative Commons copyright Licenses.  In a video created by Henry Trotter from the University of Cape Town (see Week 2 content), he points out that copyright can be different and mean different things according to where you live. David Wiley and George Siemens see Creative Commons licenses as a means of overcoming these differences and making the whole process of sharing resources a lot easier, since you then don’t have to seek permission from the original creators. I have a copyright license on this blog and also on my Flickr site, but I don’t monitor this and I’m not convinced that people coming to these sites adhere to the copyright license. I am sometimes contacted about use of my photos and I always say yes, even if the required use doesn’t match my license. And I know from the blog stats that some posts are used in closed courses, i.e. I can’t actually see how they are being used as I don’t have a password for the course.

But there are things that I don’t share. I am very selective about what personal information I share and I am very careful about sharing information in the open about my family. I find the common habit of openly sharing information about young children, presumably without their knowledge, concerning.  I also don’t often share research in progress, unless I am doing a public presentation about it and then I will put a Creative Commons License on it, but I always try to publish in open journals. I agreed with pretty much everything David and George said in their video about the nonsense of publishing in closed journals with no payment, only to be charged to distribute your own work.

For academics and educators probably the most difficult area of all this is ownership of ideas. Thomas Jefferson’s writing captures the issue so well (from one of this week’s reading). James Boyle quotes him as saying:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possess the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

This makes perfect sense to me, but it also means that I need to be circumspect about the ideas I openly share. As my parents used to say to me – ‘If in doubt – don’t!’ Sharing is a choice – hopefully an informed choice.

#openedMOOC Week 1: The value of ‘open’

Link to source of image

Why Does Open Matter? This is the key question for Week 1 of the Introduction to Open Education MOOC, being offered on edX by David Wiley and George Siemens.

This question has been asked of participants, but since David Wiley and George Siemens have both fully answered the question in a two-part video, I suppose the question for participants should really be, Why does open matter to you?  And the assumption seems to be that we are talking about openness online as opposed to offline.

David Wiley believes open to be a value, like diversity and that openness is imperative for increasing access to, affordability and effectiveness of, engagement and vibrancy in education. He writes that “To be true to the deeper ethic of open we must be generous and open-hearted, feeling a sense of love, care, and responsibility for all humanity.”

George Siemens talks of the benefits of quick, frenzied, open knowledge generation.

Neither of these responses work particularly well for me. I have personally experienced the opposite of ‘love, care and responsibility for all humanity’ in the open environment. Openness online can encourage an ‘anything can be said’ attitude, presumably because the recipient of the comments cannot be seen. As Lisa Lane has written “…. we now have an appalling acceptance of unacceptable behavior and uncivil conduct, which in my country has now reached the highest levels of power.”

And quick, frenzied knowledge generation doesn’t work for me in terms of learning. I can understand the excitement generated which I acknowledge can be motivating, but for learning and knowledge production I personally need slow, quieter interaction, where everyone has an opportunity to be heard, not just the loudest voices.

But like Lisa, I am an advocate of open education and I am grateful to all those like David, George and Stephen Downes, who have done so much to promote it. As David said in one of the videos, open is beyond free. Even in countries, such as Germany, where education is free, open can unlock new pedagogies. David also said open matters because if we learn by ‘doing’ then anything that constrains that ‘doing’, e.g. copyright restrictions, prevents learning. For me that is a powerful argument in support of open education, but I would add, as mentioned above, that some online behaviours can be equally restrictive. This is the aspect of open education in which I am most interested, i.e. I am interested in both the rhetoric and the reality for individual learners, although I suspect, as Andy Lane (2016) has argued, that currently the reality does not measure up to the rhetoric.

However, in the meantime, I continue to benefit from open education; in fact my work as an independent researcher depends on it. In return, as I have written about before,  I try to be an open practitioner, within the constraints of my own capabilities and personality!

Reference

Lane, A. (2016). Emancipation through Open Education: Rhetoric or Reality? In T. eds. Blessinger, Patrick and Bliss (Ed.), Open Education: International perspectives in higher education (pp. 31–50). Open Book Publishers ,. http://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0103.02 Retrieved from: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/531/open-education–international-perspectives-in-higher-education

#openedMOOC begins October 1st

David Wiley and George Siemens are offering a new 6 week MOOC – Introduction to Open Education – on EdX at the beginning of October.

There is already a Twitter hashtag – #openedMOOC –  and you can enrol on the EdX website where you can also find the course syllabus:

Week 1: Why Open Matters
Week 2: Copyright, The Public Domain, and The Commons
Week 3: The 5R Activities and the Creative Commons Licenses
Week 4: Creating, Finding, and Using OER
Week 5: Research on the Impact of OER Adoption
Week 6: The Next Battles for Openness: Data, Algorithms, and Competency Mapping

I have signed up for the MOOC, mainly out of curiosity. My hope is that it will offer a fresh perspective and rekindle the enthusiasm I had for open education in the early days of the first MOOC in 2008, but which I have found increasingly difficult to sustain in the last couple of years.

Despite this, I remain an advocate of open education in the terms in which it was first offered. It would be difficult not to wish for a global democratic education system which offers free open access to all no matter what their circumstances – or is that an erroneous assumption? I am hoping this course will take a critical approach, encourage diverse perspectives and be willing to surface and challenge assumptions, such as the assumption that ‘open is good’, as implied by the header on the EdX course site.

Source of Image: EdX website 

In 2012 Stephen Brookfield wrote that “critical thinking involves three inter-related phases:

1. Discovering the assumptions that guide our decisions, actions and choices
2. Checking the accuracy of these assumptions by exploring as many different perspectives, viewpoints and sources as possible
3. Taking informed decisions that are based on these researched assumptions 

(Informed decisions are based on evidence we can trust, can be explained to others and have a good chance of achieving the effects we want).”

It is getting increasingly difficult to recognise evidence we can trust. We know that over time ‘open’ has led to as many problems as solutions, not least the pursuit of ‘fame and glory beyond your wildest dreams. Or, at least, a few thousand views’ that David Wiley writes about in his blog post. Is this what we really want from open education? I have recently wondered whether one of the problems of ‘open’ in relation to networks is that it is so often discussed out of context, i.e. out of the context of the principles of networks expounded by Stephen Downes, who believes these to be autonomy, diversity, openness and connectivity. He has written about this many, many times over the years, but here is one reference.

Downes, S. (2010, Oct 26^th). What is Democracy in Education?http://halfanhour.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/what-is-democracy-in-education.html 

I see these four principles as being interdependent, i.e. they should be thought about in relation to each other and the absence of one will have consequences for the others. For example, openness without diversity simply leads to echo chambers. In addition, autonomy is a key principle. An open network must respect personal autonomy. My perspective is that loss of diversity and lack of respect for autonomy is an increasing problem in open networks. Hopefully we will get to discuss some of these issues in the MOOC.

David and George  on their blogs, have asked that we create a 3-5 minute video sharing our perspectives and experiences regarding one or more of the weekly topics. I have exercised my autonomy by deciding not to do that but to begin my thinking here on this blog. But I will point you to the videos Stephen Downes has created in response to this request. He is always a hard act to follow!

Here is the first one:

And here are the links to the others, one for each week

Week 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPHYAFcUziA
Week 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVVULztlp1s
Week 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKaJNTgwHWc
Week 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3S3xOK6-GA
Week 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic1sRq46hys
Week 6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT_IaZG797

Reference

Brookfield, S. (2012). Developing Critical Thinkers. Teachers College, April 20^th & 21^st. p.14 http://www.stephenbrookfield.com/s/Developing_Critical_Thinkers.pdf