Shannon Griffiths (essentiallyshannon.blogspot.com)Today I just wanted to quickly review an awesome tool called Hypothesis that I've been using all semester for two of my English classes (Currents in American Lit and Critical Theory).
Justin Pagano (Twitter)My wife and I recently got married and decided that neither of us would change our last names. Some people disagree with this approach, commonly critiquing with "what will you do with your children's last names?? How will they know they're a family?!" My solution: the blockchain
— Justin Pagano (@jp4gs) August 13, 2018
Jon Tennant (Twitter)Questions we need to articulate better answers to:
— Jon Tennant (@Protohedgehog) August 13, 2018
1. What is open science fighting against?
2. Who is open science for?
3. What is the ultimate vision for an 'open science ecosystem'.
If we can't answer these for ourselves, don't expect the message to be heard by others.
The OpenEd18 program – with over 350 presentations, posters, roundtables, lightning talks, panels, and symposia – is available for review below. In order to fully engage with the program – to make a personalized schedule, connect with other attendees, etc. – download the OpenEd18 app:
- in your web browser
- on your iOS device
- on your Android device
Robin DeRosa (actualham)I’ve spent some time talking about open pedagogy at several universities this Spring, and in each of those presentations and workshops, I have usually mentioned The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature, an OER anthology that my students and I produced last year for an American literature survey course I taught. When I talk about the anthology, it’s usually to make a point about open pedagogy. I began the project with the simple desire to save my students about $85 US, which is how much they were (ostensibly) paying for the Heath Anthology of American Literature Volume A. Most of the actual texts in the Heath were public domain texts, freely available and not under any copyright restrictions. As the Heath produced new editions (of literature from roughly 1400-1800!), forcing students to buy new textbooks or be irritatingly out of sync with page numbers, and as students turned to rental markets that necessitated them giving their books back at the end of the semester, I began to look in earnest for an alternative.
Most of the actual texts in the Heath were public domain texts, freely available and not under any copyright restrictions. As the Heath produced new editions (of literature from roughly 1400-1800!), forcing students to buy new textbooks or be irritatingly out of sync with page numbers, and as students turned to rental markets that necessitated them giving their books back at the end of the semester, I began to look in earnest for an alternative. ❧
Repackaging public domain texts and charging a steep markup too much above and beyond the cost of the paper is just highway robbery. Unless a publisher is adding some actual annotative or analytical value, they shouldn’t be charging outrageous prices for textbooks of this nature.
August 13, 2018 at 12:14PM
If OER is free, what hidden costs exist in its production? Making these textbooks is taking me a chunk of time in the off-season. Thanks to my salaried position, I feel ok about putting in the overtime, but it’s a privilege my colleagues who teach under year-to-year part-time non-contracts can’t afford. Who should be funding OER creation? Institutions? Students? For-profit start-ups? How will you invest time in this project without obscuring the true costs of academic labor? Right now, we pass the corruptly high cost of academic publishing onto the backs of academia’s most vulnerable members: students. But as OER gains steam, we need to come up with funding models that don’t land us back in the same quagmire of exploitation that we were trying to get out of. ❧
This is a nearly perfect question and something to watch in the coming years.
August 13, 2018 at 12:35PM
working in public, and asking students to work in public, is fraught with dangers and challenges. ❧
August 13, 2018 at 12:36PM
What David told me was his energy, enthusiasm in the class was at a much higher level with the OER approach. Sure we choose the polished “professional” textbook because of its assumed high standards, quality etc, but then its a more passive relationship a teacher has with it. I make the comparison to growing and/or making your own food versus having it prepared or taking it out of a package. Having produced our own food means we know everything about it from top to bottom, and the pride in doing that has to make the whole experience much more energized. ❧
As I read both this post and this comment from Alan, I can’t help but think again about scholars in the 14th century who taught students. It was more typical of the time that students were “forced” to chose their own textbooks–typically there were fewer, and at the advent of the printing press they were significantly higher in price. As a result students had to spend more time and attention, as Robin indicates here, to come up with useful things.
Even in this period students often annotated their books, which often got passed on to other students and even professors which helped future generations. So really, we’re not reinventing the wheel here, we’re just doing it anew with new technology that makes doing it all the easier.
As a reference, I’ll suggest folks interested in this area read Owen Gingerich’s The Book Nobody Read which I recall as being one of the texts I’ve read that references early teaching and textbook practices during that time period.
August 13, 2018 at 12:44PM
USNH students talk about open education
Imagine a jet plane cruising down a road. It’s possible, though a clear case of underutilization of the technology. Now take that imagery and apply it to Open Educational Resources (OER). While they are available for adoption by faculty as learning content, the full potential of OER goes underutilized. How so? At the Open Ed ’16 Conference, held November 2016, I learned how faculty are taking on that challenge and finding new ways to create and use OER.
Our work, said Campbell, is not to graduate more students, but to enable students to graduate themselves. ❧
August 13, 2018 at 12:01PM
Disposable assignments are the ones students hate to do, faculty hate to grade and are quickly forgotten. Think ten-page term papers. ❧
There’s no reason that the 10 page term paper couldn’t be repurposed for the greater good. Why not post it up on your own website and allow it to be part of the bigger part of academic research?
August 13, 2018 at 12:03PM
A week ago, I got into one of those spontaneous Twitter discussions with two of my good friends from the University of Oklahoma, Laura Gibbs and Stacy Zemke. Laura and Stacy are passionate advocates for open content, and innovative thinkers when it comes to online course design. Our Twitter conversation focused on the relationship between OER and open pedagogy. Not surprisingly, our tweets soon became a phone conversation that, in turn, became a draft list of qualities for open pedagogy.
They are allowed to operate independently and explore with personal freedom. ❧
There is still typically a “thing(s)” they need to learn, a goal they need to reach, or standards that are typically set, so the freedom only goes so far.
August 13, 2018 at 10:48AM
A fictional debate between JFK and Richard Nixon on the propriety of using blogs vs. wikis.
I deleted my Facebook account a few months ago and am not sorry I did. For the last couple of months, I've been thinking about deleting my Twitter account, too. It has become a creepy, toxic place. I'm stunned that Twitter has no problem with people who want to inflict additional misery on the parents of murdered children. It's not about the first Amendment. Twitter is a company -- it can choose whomever it wants to be on its platform. As my friend Sean Bonner posted, Twitter "didn’t start as an open forum for free speech, it started as a way for people to see what their friends were doing. Enforcing the same rules for everyone to promote civil discourse isn’t censorship. Bots spewing hate and attacking people isn’t fun." He's right. I'm joining Sean and others on August 17 by deactivating my Twitter account. The hashtag for this action is #DeactiDay. If Twitter doesn't fix its hate enabler problem in 30 days, I won't reactivate my account, after which it will be permanently deleted. It's very likely it will be deleted, because Twitter has demonstrated that it badly wants Alex Jones and his ilk on its platform. When CNN reported that Jones violated at least a dozen of Twitter's rules after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Jones hadn't and therefore couldn't be kicked off, Twitter didn't do a thing about it. Then Twitter admitted that Jones had indeed violated rules that had resulted in bans for other people, but said it wouldn't ban Jones. Twitter can have Jones, and I'll be happy to be the hell away from the place.
Dr. David Wiley is Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning, an organization dedicated to increasing student success, reinvigorating pedagogy, and improving the affordability of education through the adoption of open educational resources by schools, community and state colleges, and universities. He is also currently the Education Fellow at Creative Commons, an Ashoka Fellow, and adjunct faculty in Brigham Young University's graduate program in Instructional Psychology and Technology, where he leads the Open Education Group (and was previously a tenured Associate Professor).
As an academic, Dr. Wiley has received numerous recognitions for his work, including an National Science Foundation CAREER grant and appointments as a Nonresident Fellow in the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, a Peery Social Entrepreneurship Research Fellow in the BYU Marriott School of Business, and a Shuttleworth Fellow. As a social entrepreneur, Dr. Wiley has founded or co-founded numerous entities including Lumen Learning, Degreed, and Mountain Heights Academy. In 2009, Fast Company named Dr. Wiley one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business.
David was born and grew up in West Virginia. He is an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons). He served a two-year mission for the church in Fukuoka, Japan, and now serves as bishop of a student congregation at Brigham Young University. David lives in Utah with his wife and five children and enjoys hiking, running, playing basketball, listening to and making music, and reading.
I suppose it should cease to amaze me that educators are so far ahead of the curve on owning so much of their identities and content online. Many seem to be OG IndieWeb. I like the way his primary page sets up his identity and he’s owning at least all of his bigger article output. And then there’s a lovely blogroll on his blog page, with so many names I recognize and several more I’m going to have to add to my own.
As I look at his bio and see Degreed, it reminds me while shadowing Greg McVerry’s EDU 522 course, that I’ve been wanting to own more of my learning online. I’ll have to take a look again at how Degreed is set up from a UI perspective and see what I can glean from it, particularly as it takes data from multiple other platforms and pulls it into it’s own platform in a very PESOS sort of workflow. I wonder if Degreed might take personal websites as a source of content and then be able to add certifications? This might also fit in with using Webmention as infrastructure for doing badges and credentialing.
An overview of features for dealing with abuse and harassment
So that’s already a huge advantage over other platforms due the basic design. And in my opinion it’s got advantages over the other extreme, too, a pure peer-to-peer design, where everyone would have to fend for themselves, without the pooled resources. ❧
Definitely something the IndieWeb may have to solve for.
August 13, 2018 at 07:41AM
Mastodon deliberately does not support arbitrary search. If someone wants their message to be discovered, they can use a hashtag, which can be browsed. What does arbitrary search accomplish? People and brands search for their own name to self-insert into conversations they were not invited to.
What you can do, however, is search messages you posted, received or favourited. That way you can find that one message on the tip of your tongue. ❧
August 13, 2018 at 07:41AM
Another feature that has been requested almost since the start, and which I keep rejecting is quoting messages. ❧
August 13, 2018 at 07:43AM
Each individual message can either be:
- Fully public, appearing to your followers, the public timelines, anyone looking at your profile
- Unlisted, appearing to your followers and anyone looking at your profile, but skipping the public timelines
- Private, appearing only to your followers and people mentioned in it
- And direct, appearing only to people mentioned in it
August 13, 2018 at 07:45AM
A #MeTooSTEM story about requesting a change in tradition