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.

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.

Afterthoughts

Used the wrong title for my session: it’s really all about the power of micronetworks.  Maybe the key factor in the way ahead.  The benefits to the participants that are benefits of the heart, the morale.  As well as efficiency and focus.  And quality.  And learning.

I’ve rarely felt quite so nervous before in a presentation. First, I was way out of my comfort zone.  My expertise in OER and is very embryonic, my track record is small and my approach chaotic.  PLUS:  Microblogging.  I could see at any given time 5 or 6 typing.  Including Stephen Downes. There were 400 new tweets in 45 minutes:

A few of these were about my session, from the audience.

Can entities like ccLearn OpenEd REALLY provide the technology for the communities to support? Will it be easy enough?  They have some small communities.  Will the system work?

One question was about the micro-network vs the organisation.

Stephen Downes tweeted: Downes #opened09 – role of micronetworks (community of communities) in OER… vs. large nets, broadcasts… small nets propagate, large nets grow

Jon Mott: jonmott @Downes: micronetworks are consistent with Shirky’s discussion of barriers to organization & coordination.

kiyanwang RT @boonebgorges Chirnside: The prospect of further audience heightens sensitivity to the quality of one’s own work #opened09

jonmott Chirnside: Little, informal networks for sharing & making personal recs=effective OER adoption strategy. #opened09

kiyanwang RT @boonebgorges Chirnside: Resistance to releasing teaching resources result of disproportionate attention on research v teaching #opened09

As usual, I learned more anyone I suspect, what with the thinking, the writing, the paring down to 17 minutes.  My methodology is a little chaotic, pragmatic and local.  How much do I also need to pay attention to the bigger issues of the Global, the International, the BIG repositories.  I was please to follow Arash.

Edited Phillipas 40min exam programme, slept in, laundry, cabbage rolls for breakfast, (Chitako is an awesome cook), bus, library, missed Randy sadly.

Then off to the afternoon session with Downes and Wiley.  Two guys talking for 3.5 hours. I had little awareness of the breadth of the issues around commercialisation, not in theory, but in practice, and being faced now.  I’ll try to find something more concise than the audio stream.  I have a lot to learn.

Things to check out; connexions, ccLearn.

From David Wiley: If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plan.

Home, snack, out to man the Chilli Wagon at a local park with the guys I met on Sunday.  Served up 120 pieces of Banana Loaf to accompany chilli and buns.  Fascinating, and an interesting experieince.

Home, just feeling a little nervous about tomorrow, phone call to Christchurch, skype with Raewyn.

OpenEd: already too much to think about.

Random sessions of particular interest

1. John Mott: PLE’s and LMS’s: “Traditional LMSs are not open. PLEs are. But there’s a gap between the two that poses problems for higher education. While PLEs promise significant improvements in student engagement, flexibility and transparency, institutions are struggling to manage student enrollments, gathering of student work, conducting assessment across various PLE spaces, maintaining secure student records (compliant with FERPA guidelines), etc. ”

Hmm.  What do I think of this?  One person I’d like to chat to.

2. More on this topic: “It is vital that education realizes the informatics ground has shifted.  We can now realize the pedagogical and information-architectural limitations of the CMS, and so choose wisely when to use it.  We can devote our energies to using social media more widely, but also more effectively.  A greater participation in Web 2.0 means more use cases, further discussions of practice, and further development of our collective knowledge.” Brian Alexander’s session.  Social media is Killing the LMS star.

I still like the secure home base as a lunching ground.  The wild west of just everything public is still a bit much for me.  Maybe my students also.  These two sessions look really well balanced.

More sometime.

Here is my handout/summary. Summary Notes (Word format)

An Approach to the Problems of Personalisation and Context Dependency in Open Educational Resources

We had some initial conversations: how are we going to move ahead in our programme, that developed into a set of interview questions.  Some roadblocks were clear. Two interesting problems emerged from those keen to share more: resources that were less useful because they were highly personalised and contextualised.

Some things were actually working. Even in a very small scale way.  There were identifiable pockets of success, and small leaps forward.  What were some of the features that contributed?  A few comments.

1. The power of the tiny network

In this tiny informal study, most of the success occurred in small groups.  Not in the larger scale.  No doublt there are some good reasons for this: scalability, networks of relationships becoming more complex, trust, synergy etc.

There is the reports from quite a large scale project where small informal networks seemed to work better than the big mother ship, described in the first post in this series.

Another story: a lecturer is teaching in a subject and course unique to the University. In other words, there are no others doing this. This lecturer has established a personal network with two other staff, one each at two other universities. Even in the initial stages it is showing good promise. The proposal is to put material online, which is sharable.

2. The power of a further audience of one

This was an observation that emerged several times quite spontaneously from those interviewed.  It seems that at the development stage, writing with even one other person/context in mind can see the product becoming more generic and more reusable, more transferrable.

It may even become easier to do the writing/creating with this added element.  Maybe as one person suggested it helps “provide focus”.  “I’m learning to make my work more generic, less time bound and less limited to use in just one course/level.”

3. The power of feedback

Quite obvious really, and may seem like a no-brainer.  However some teachers see asking for feedback as being an imposition.  My view is that they can perceive their work as being siloed.

It was unclear of the exact parameters and features of this attitude, to suggest more detail would require some more unpicking of the themes. There are a wide range of factors involved: security and confidence of the lecturers, the lack of competition for jobs, and interestingly, just plain personal organisation.

Sharing ideas and outlines with others, the reports say, has been hugely beneficial. This may be stating an obvious fact but such sharing has been proved to be not very common, or easy for some.

I revisited a few of my initial contacts to ask about this. They report pressures of time, lecturers preparing material quite late, often a day before it’s due to be used in class.  Also a feeling of not wanting to worry someone else who was also very busy.

As a corollary there was mention of the desirability of tweaking resources soon shortly after an initial use as being desirable but it rarely happens in practice.  There is a little more in the handout.

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.