(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?

Odd how little connections can somehow open whole new doors.  John Fountain’s sister Renee spoke recently at a wiki conference in Canada, something I hadn’t discovered even with a bit of last minute Googling to prepare for the workshop.  Instead I discovered this through a quick note from John.

No Ordinary Conference: WikiSym is the only international scientific conference dedicated to wikis. It brings together wiki researchers, practitioners, and users. The goal of the symposium is to explore and extend our growing community. It has a rigorously reviewed research paper track as well as plenty of space for practitioner reports, demonstrations, and open discussions. Anyone who is involved in using, researching, or developing wikis was invited to WikiSym 2007.

We recognize that the online world is always evolving, and therefore made a special effort to welcome people interested in other online media consistent with the wiki philosophy of being open, organic and participatory.

I Googled Renee some more to find she has written an e-book thingy on wikis.  A Little old now, but a fascinating background.

There are some nice papers in the WikiSym proceedings. One of these is Wiki-based Process Framework for Blended Learning – Marija Cubric – University of Hertfordshire, UK (a PDF) Here is her first comment on “Tips” for use . . .

Provide necessary “scaffolding”
Many reports on the use of wikis have concluded that less scaffolding” results in better quality of the created content [16]. However, we believe that some guidance on the content is essential, but the amount of scaffolding depends on various factors, such as: the study level (e.g. postgraduates or undergraduates), group composition (“digital natives” vs. “digital immigrants” [15], local vs. international students) etc.
Reference 16 is Will Richardson’s book: Richardson W. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other powerful web tools for the classroom. Corwin Press, 2006. Reference 15 is Mark Prentsky. (Who else?)

This is a good paper and is worth a read. [Another of Marija's papers is here] When wikis and education is under discussion, this question of providing structure or not often emerges as a theme.

I tried to find a few of Will Richardson’s comments online, but was unsuccessful. I have a hunch Will may have brought a little extra to the classroom: he is an innovative and engaging teacher, and this presence may have provided the ‘scaffolding’ needed, and hence is view “less scaffolding is better” may be missing what was actually going on. I hear many presentations and stories where teacher presence is basically an unrepeatable variable. In my search, I discovered Ulises Mejías’s blog (out of Mexico). He posts on a “social literacy” the environment of the wiki. http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2005/03/social_literaci.html

A small quote:

Thus, social literacy (as I am using the term) is not a metaphorical extension of the concept and does not refer to the skills necessary to perform in society, but to the use of the resource of writing in social contexts. Social literacy amounts to the textual practices not (as has been true so far) of a single author, but of multiple and simultaneous authors. Wikis make social literacy apparent by allowing us to witness the evolution of text in time, and evolution that reflects the decisions not of a single individual, but of a community.

What is the purpose of a wiki? merely gathering links, data and ideas? (You can then get the mess described by Graham Wegner: (Will’s blog post, see the comments)

I used a wiki as a basis for a Problem Based Learning program with 4 middle school classes last term on a unit on Australian Identity. I’m not sure that it will make anyone go “Wow” but it certainly demonstrated Messy Learning in action. How I set it up isn’t the way it eventually unfolded and you might be appalled at the cut’n’paste slabs, the links that are dead etc. but this ended up as a worksite, an area for experimentation and the first attempts at digital collaboration for these kids. Like a lot of worksites, there’s a bit of litter and abandoned clutter about but the learning was amazing as the kids unpacked what being an Aussie meant in terms of our country’s culture, achievements and history. There is heaps in the aftermath for re-visiting that could cover the topics of fair use, publishing, plagiarism, what is actual research,citation and copyright (and has been covered, by the way.) This led to the students creating digital stories that celebrated aspects of Australian life and ultimately they would have been great to share online with a wider audience but the conflicting aspects of copyright images being used (fair use in a school setting but not publishable on the web) while the difficulties in accessing suitable and interesting public domain and CC images when sites like Flickr are blocked by our education system’s filters meant that we couldn’t produce anything shareable beyond the school community. But the wiki was an excellent tool for the housing of snippets of information, distilling of ideas and the planning of the solution to the posed problem, “What does it mean to be Australian?”

I’ll stop there.

The research on wikis is yet young.  To provide structure or not?  How to do it, for example by modelling, by setting up pages . .  ??  What’s it like for different ones of us in a genuinely collaborative wiki environment?  Identity – who are we in a wiki?  I’m just poised to delve into wikieducator.com, but I really want to start the page with “Derek’s Project”.  I think tjhis breaks the paradigm.

If you live close and would let me eaves drop in a class of students with a wiki, eventually letting me chat to them to see a little bit in their minds – let me know. Ethics approval, formal stuff and all that.