Sharing is very powerful. In Leigh’s circle, people have sought to develop stuff, posted it as a work in progress to find other people working on similar things just down the road. Bingo: collaboration, synergy, time saving and dare I say it, saving time and feeling better about things. Oh and doing a better job.

What is an OER (Open Educational Resource)?

Open educational resources are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute. Open educational resources include:

* Learning content: full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
* Tools: Software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities.
* Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources

The term comes from a UNESCO conference in 2002.

There is a LOT of work in developing countries at the moment, building synergy between institutions. Resoures currently being used are worked up and improved. or new resources created. Often funded by some group.

Some think this is a new form of colonialism. http://leighblackall.blogspot.com/2009/08/looking-into-sky-open-ed-oh-nine.html

A quick history of Open Education (from one perspective)

Norman Freisen: wikieducator.org/Open_Education:_Precursors

I presented on day one: http://openedconference.org/program/program-schedule-at-a-glance
I’ve summarised some of the material in some posts here and here.

OK, of what value was this conference?

1. Conversations. I learned a lot about processes for dialogue and moving on thinking. I’m convinced of the unconference model. We just don’t get it in New Zealand. We have a great opportunity at the next e-fest conference, with an unconference day, based on open space approaches. But what are we doing? Starting it with a keynote.
2. Personal. This has been quite remarkable. There was the inner core of mainly guys, but they were generally very approachable. (I’m not sure I’d go so far as the post here: …  to come when I find it)
3. University back home: there is a lot I have learned. I think this whole open ed idea is a thing of the heart. You need to have some sense of connections. Once you do this, things become quite different.
   OK then: how to engage in this at an institutional level? or a department level? or a team level?
4. Global. Still thinking.
   I’d like to go to China or Bangladesh.  I have a proposal.
5. Local. New Zealand wide? Christchurch wide? Too much competition.  But it may be possible on a micro level.

That’s it for now.  If you want to meet: Friday 28th, 12.00pm at Okover house.  But check in with me in case the venue changes.

Twitter emerged at the OPenEd conference complete with conference tag: #opened09.  Not as a trickle, but a steady stream.  I wondered a little at how people kept up until I saw they used some other applications.  Moving into using TweetDeck instantly quadrupled my productivity and ease of use of Twiter. In other words, if you dabble just using the regular Tweeter interface it takes too much time and there are too many overheads.

But when and how do we learn about these new things?

1. There is a discipline in following up on a piece of new technology
2. You need to make some decisions on how beneficial it is, or is not going to be, and we often don’t get this right
3. It took this conference as a catalyst to properly lure me into this.

Aside: The buzz word is microblogging.  I stumbled on this little romantic piece about twittering from Richard Smith who we met last Saturday: Is twitter the latest thing? Or is it an ancient thing, writ new? I argue the latter.

It seemed to me there was not much blogging about the conference during the conference, and that many people were putting their energy into tweets and personal conversations. Probably a good thing. Here is Tony Hirsts’s post on visualizing Twitter and the connections at the conference:

http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/preliminary-thoughts-on-visualising-the-opened09-twitter-network/

Long term I’m not sure how I will cope with Twitter.  There is such a flow of information, the responses and the follow up often are so fragmentary.  But we shall see.  I’ll get a plug in on this blog.  Which one? To be decided.

But, during the conference it was stimulating, sparking off many side conversations.  It favours the quick typists, then the people who can think two things at once, or quickly change from a moment, send their tweet and then return.  Several observations:

Lost gems: Some passing comments seemed to just disappear into the flow of posts. Others got picked up and retweeted. I notice in the help documentation the abbreviation RT for retweet is not regarded as a standard Twitter phrase but is extremely popular.

Democracy (or not): In some respects, some voices are louder than others. On the other hand, there is a democratization process at work and a comment from somebody, even a non-attender of a conference via Twitter, can help bring a new thought into the conversations.

Unfinished conversations: Just like some things can get lost, some things can be just unfinished. An example of this, in particular, is the final session on Thursday with David Wiley looking at the quality of OERs. The question of voting, metadata, personal recommendations, tags and so on was completely unresolved at the time, and there were a lot of half-finished conversations.  There were a large number of diverse threads to this particular discussion. Personally I was finding it difficult to decide what to give my attention to. Often it came down to a case of what was personally interesting to me at the time, versus what might have had specific long-term value for my work situation back home; after all they have helped to fund this trip.

The serious blogging came after the conference.

Yesterday, the last of the conference, a trip to Whistler.

Last night tea with Randy, Patricia Schmitt and Christine Geith, all with a Wikieducator connection.

Today is Saturday, we took the Ferry to Bowen Island for a meetup with Peter Rawsthorne http://www.rawsthorne.org/ after some canoeing (6 hours, I didn’t think I was up to it so I’m hanging around the organic market waiting for the bluegrass music festival to start). This is 20 minutes free internet in the library.

Close to being like paradise here.

Wandered along another part of Commercial Drive.  Supposed to be a carless day, but no, commercialism and realism  has won.

The cars were back on Commercial Drive yesterday, after four weekends of street closings, and Ed Wilkerson of Magnet Hardware is thrilled and relieved.

So is the owner of Café Abruzzo two blocks away and the staff at Caffé Roma across the street. And they’re all hoping that the remainder of the experimental city Summer Spaces program on their street gets cancelled so their business can get back to normal on what is usually one of the city’s liveliest streets.

“It’s just not working,” said Mr. Wilkerson, who lost a quarter of his normal 300 customers the last four Sundays, during the program that banned cars for the day. “Basically it’s a waste of time.”

The problems: walking three blocks from car parks, diverting the buses, not advertising (the romantic view, this was supposed to be a local event) . . .

This part of town is fascinating.  I spent some time trying to buy a copy of the Cook the ‘Hood recipe book.  One store that features in it did not even know the book existed and that it said on the door the book was for sale.  Cookbooks are a bit out of fashion, but this is a little different.

Morning: Vancouver Eastside Vineyard.  Really cool little church.  How many places have the Sallys, Baptists & Vineyard in the same building, sharing facilities and advertising.

Afternoon: Found the Chinese restaurants I noticed were missing on Commercial Drive in Upper E Hastings.

Bought 8 CD’s for $16, all local artists, no-one at the Co-op radio stall had heard of most of them, got them on gut instinct.  Bought a cheap camera from London Drugs.  (“Any colour you like as long as it’s pink”). Pizza.  Walked & sat in cafes for four hours.

Evening: thinking about my contribution ot the OpenEd conference on Wednesday.  The conference list is here.  The sessions here.  I’m going to learn a lot I can see.  How do you REALLY explain Open Education?  I’ve tried several times when people ask “Why are you here?”  I’m really a beginner, a good basis to come to a conference.

I’m sharing a session with Arash from ccLearn.  While we have not talked in detail yet, things will I think be OK.  I think what I am saying is probably pretty basic for others coming.  I wonder what part of my life and thinking OER will assume?

These are some of the roadblocks put forward as real or perceived issues by teachers who expressed a keeness to share and to collaborate or work together on resources – or at least being open to the idea.

The main issue was finding the stuff that they really wanted when they wanted it.  Several repositories were mentioned.

There were at least two issues in this respect.

Personalisation.

With some resources there is a perception that style issues, idiosyncrasies and personal preferences of the writer mean they can’t easily be used by other teachers.  “The effort to fix this is often too great”

“Style can get embedded and is hard to alter”

Context

Similarly with context: there was a perception that many resources were just too context dependent.

One example: grammar exercises became quite differently expressed if they were part of an ESOL course, journalism course or an essay writing support package. You’d expect that.  But there was a feeling that some resources were developed in such a way that meant they were still too context dependent.  Worksheets with several questions unusable (maybe with a curriculum difference, or a grammar point not yet taught) in PDF format could not be edited.

“Tagging has helped – (But we are not there yet)”

Even so, there were some teachers quite positive towards the idea.  It just had not quite worked itself into a solution for them yet.

Others however felt that there was some good progress in their area.  It is here that I am particularly interested: what factors tend towards success?  What can be done to promote this?  I think there are three aspects to this that I can point to in the data.

(perceived ) Barriers to Sharing resources

After some of the conversations, here are some jottings of perceived barriers to sharing resources. I realize there are more types of resources than just written items [such as video, audio and images].

Some of the stated barriers to sharing

1. The sense of possession from the original creators of a resource.
2. The perceived loss of control if the resources were used further.   Work may be “misused”
3. The potential commercialisation of resources. Two specific feelings were expressed:
   1. A suspicion of others benefiting financially from reuse of the resources.
   2. The worry that the owner may in future want to commercialise, and a past free release may muddy the waters for a potential publisher.  The right type of license can help this, but not the attitude of a publisher.
4. “I’ve put in all the work, why should I share it to benefit someone else?”
5. Others may use the work to my detriment.
6. Worry about putting work “out there”  Others may not like my work.

Related factors seem to include

• the leadership of the institution
• the leadership and management of the smaller teams. ‘Management’ includes aspects of work flow, scheduling, short and long term planning etc.

In many respects I am an amateur and a dabbler in this area of open education. The wikipedia definition: “Open educational resources are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute.”  I put a lot of my work in the early 1990s into the giveaway category and other items I put up for sale and copyrighted. I sold literally none, but I swapped a lot and gave away a lot. The benefits I found were huge in terms of relationships and a general improvement in quality of my work.

When I arrived at the College of Education in Christchurch in 2001 to find my copyrighted material had been passed out to all students for a number of years. It was shortly after this that I encountered the open education movement and the idea of creative commons and shared educational resources.

The Riccarton Project

In 1999-2000 I worked at Riccarton High School in an 18-month long professional development programme funded by private money (the Riccarton Project, supported by Denis Chapman). There was huge curriculum development going on at this stage nationally and in the school. There was the drivers of pressure of work, new approaches to assessment and a revising of the curriculum. One department in particular made huge progress, which seems to have remained.

Leadership in the department concerned was positive, optimistic and modeled an open approach to work, sharing ideas and resources and collaboration.

These teachers seemed to appreciated right from the start the benefits of collaboration and sharing, and in many respects were more interested in how simple and easy it could be made. The decision to share and collaborate had already been made.  The discussions were around version tracking, the quality of resources, new ideas and who was working on what rather than anything else to do with the value or otherwise of sharing.

New functionality, which arrived six months into this time gave us network drives that were accessible from home, providing a further impetus and benefit. Ten years later I do wonder what benefit cheap Internet access could also have had to offer had it been available at the time.

Another project

In another time and place, there was another project aiming to facilitate teacher resource sharing.  It had a reasonably costly central infrastructure, special interest groups, forums and local co-ordinators.

It never seemed to really get off the ground.  Among other things, there were problems with the taxonomy and categorisation of resources.  It was probably ahead of itself in some ways, with nearly working functionality to serve up tests, provide feedback as well as mere repository and communication functions.

What I found interesting is this: some of the small parallel informal networks seemed to work much better in achieving the aims. In one particular subject area there were a small number of teachers who collaborated to share ideas, resources and more importantly, recommendations.  The “mother ship” repository was still there, but served merely as a place to go to get things you heard may have been good.

The reports after the project indicated many teachers avoided using the search and find functionality in the central system but relied much more on recommendations from their informal network.

This was well ahead of the tagging, social networking, profile based sites.  In many respects this shows the power of the small network.  Success in repository models may need this social network flavour as well.  I think we have the technology now.

Scenario: A teacher in Canterbury develops two or three local contacts, who between them attract a small critical mass of material and ideas.  A small informal connection at a conference creates a link to another teacher in the far north, who in turn has links with a few locals. A tenuous connection between these two teachers can create a powerful linkage between the two networks, all happening outside the formal system.

Now: my day job as an educational designer

With 2007 came a merger between the Christchurch College of Education and the University of Canterbury.  Immediately there was pressure on the teaching at the College.  In the future the trajectory was towards

1. Less contact hours
2. Increased class sizes
3. Standardisation of course sizes.

Huge change.  I was wondering what to do and how best to proceed.

Informal conversations

I started  a few informal visits to lecturers to see what was happening and where best to proceed.  Conversations often turned to the workload required to adapt and develop resources for new and revamped courses.  I chatted to a few people and jotted down some scribbled notes.

These brief conversations revealed some quite interesting dynamics. Simultaneously to having reduced class contact hours and larger classes mean some new approaches to teaching, or in some cases, taking seriously what we were already doing.  I changed a little in my thinking: Open Educational Resources were a viable way ahead, nearly a moral imperative.  There seemed to be every possible permutation and combination of attitudes.  In amongst the change there were some quite productive and functional groups.

Formalised questions

At some stage I formalized my questions a little to see what could emerge as trends.  Having found some interest in sharing resources, but also some barriers, the questions became (for better or worse)

1. A brief description of OER.  Heard of it?
2. Yes: used them? (yes/no, why/why not)
   Yes: contributed ever? (yes/no, why/why not)
3. No: would you? What do you think?
4. Comments?  (Anything?  Where do you think we are at at the moment, what about the way ahead?)
5. Two specific problems: personalisation & context issue – any comments?

Today, Saturday: Time off mainly. Vancouver has a superb system to handle cyclists. http://vancouver.ca/engsvcs/transport/cycling/ Johns partner Lyn has left a bike here, and complete with a cycle route map, I set off.

Firstly, I tried to sort a micro SD card for my phone. I forgot my camera, left it sitting on charge near the piano.  With a card I can take pictures and download them from cell.

Next, a coffee, in a Commercial Drive cafe.  My first in Canada. While I’m drinking a couple arrive and with dog and baby have no-where to sit outside except my table.  Nero and Anna, plus a baby of 7 months.  He’s tired still, I could tell.  They are really interested in chatting.  He confides that he is going away soon and is “Looking forward to a sleep”. 

In the cafe, they call what I know as a Long Black “Cafe Americano” a name I intensely dislike.  Served in mugs.  Later in the day I visited a place which John claims has the worlds best cinnamon buns.  I believe him. Grounds for Coffee: http://www.groundsforcoffee.ca/grounds_003.htm Served in same style of mug.

As an aside, I’m now getting the hang of the recommendation sites.  Check out YELP for example.  But I need a recommendation site for recommendation sites.

I cycled quite a way for me.  Down to False creek: Beer festival, and firemans games.  Then past the Olympic Village.  In one block alone, 10 stories, 5 apartments wide each site, two sides.  100 units.  16 blocks I can see = 1600 units.  Huge development, and a really cool setup of balconies, giving view plus privacy.  Cycle on to scores of holiday units, apartments.  Granville Island (car parking jams, several cool art galleries)

I passed beach soccer (6 games each, a sponsored competition from “Hells Gate” Lager”), hot dog at a Lions stall (people the same the world over), ice cream.  The bike track goes a long way: English Bay, Jerico Bay on to Spirit Park, nearly to UBC.  Very tired.

Then I turned back.  I found I have not been very sensitive, and discover that I’m cycling into a head wind.  Ditch all plans to go downtown, and go straight back up alternating between Broadway (main street) and Off Broadaway (the cycle friendly street).

I’m really missing people to talk to.  Struck out three times at the second coffee bar.  People just not interested in chatting.  But I have discovered a technique.  If you are lost, park your bike on the curb and sit and read a map.  Someone will stop.  Local micro-knowledge gleaned this way is invaluable.

Home. Omelette, walk up Commercial Drive, no Chinese places anywhere.  Buy avocado: toast and avocado for supper.  Download some images for the PowerPoint presentation of the talk.

Sleep again I hope. Tired, sore and stiff.  Wide awake at 12.00 local time.  Maybe Joel is right: tea has caffeine.  So, no bedtime cuppa tonight, drink orange juice and water instead.

No camera (left it charging by the piano).  I felt so naked.  On thinking about this, I realise there is just that little niggle of guilt at being away, at feeling so free and unencumbered, with everyone else back home still in routine.  I realise though that I’d not be here if it weren’t for Phillipa and Bill.  When I firstly take the wrong suitcase at the airport, then later get the right bus in the wrong direction I do realise I am probably not cut out for travel alone.  I need people also.  The reason I like cameras is I can take snaps of the quirky things to share back home.  Nine buses to get from airport to E 1st avenue, and the flat (where I am staying with 5 20-something temporary flatmates)

I had to check the definition of twenty something.  I was curious if this was a specific demographic (ie a particular group or general ie any 20 something)

Tne definition was this I found: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=twenty-somethings

A specific demographic group, those aged 20-29. Often Obama supporters (regardless of the country they live in), heavy drinkers, users of urbandictionary.com (and the souce of all the worthwhile-to-read definitions, as opposed to the adolescents that write the unfunny definitions that either profess their love for a gf/bf or proclaim their hatred of a schoolmate), students, servers, bartenders, clubgoers, in massive debt yet still optimistic, and believe that they can change the world if they just work together (until they reach the threshold age of 30, when 98% people realize the futility of their causes).
The author of this UD definition belongs to twenty-somethings demographic.
The courageous protesters at Tiananmen Square were mostly twenty-somethings.

The flat is cool. Takes me back 30 years.  Very very well organised, has various customs, welcoming, functional, and it’s only been going a short time.  I guess I put it down to Joel, who seems to have set it up. Shows the power of democratic leadership. Broadband.  Mainly vegetarian.  (I certainly will not cook meat here).

And the location. I have a choice of at least 60 places.  Tea is at an Italian place on Commercial Drive (Road?), with real italian spoken as 12 people congregate at the next table.  It dawns on me this is a very special part of town.  Music, cafes, organic shops, beggers.  To sleep.