Learning is togetherness

 

In the Open Networked Learning course, I have learned to understand and appreciate the social aspects of learning, the need for building networks and communities around what people learn or teach. I have always been part of various groups, both online and IRL, for fun, for help with solving practical problems, for achieving tasks that no one can do on his own and sometimes for making the world a better place, but I haven’t connected it to so much to learning before. That also means that I got an understanding that just making the lectures on zoom or record them isn’t by far enough to make a proper online course. You have to facilitate networking and social interaction even more in an online context.

 

I already use a forum in one course and found it even more used and useful in an online context, but I will probably expand further on that, maybe make some exercises more group oriented.  

 

Digital literacy

But from the beginning we were discussing digital literacy. Smashing the Natives – Immigrants dichotomy makes sense out of my experience. I myself met digital technology at an age of about 25. After that I have spent much of my working life and some of my spare time teaching and helping younger people handle digital stuff. During the course I have been more convinced that many “digital” skills are not so uniquely digital. Social skills, writing, drawing, explaining, talking, acting, storytelling in pictures or movies are ancient “analog” skills becoming even more important in a digital context.

 

Open Educational Resources

I have also learned that some teachers are sceptical to making their learning resources open. As an open-source advocate, I think this is sad. At least in Sweden the material is made with taxpayers’ money and should in a much higher degree be available to the taxpayers. Much of my stuff is available on the local Kaltura instance (play.lnu.se) for what I do at work and YouTube, Instagram etc for the private works.

 

To do list

In IRL contexts I will make more movies instead of lecturing and save the precious time together for more interactive discussions and also practical training.

 

In my IT-support role I already have begun recommending opening Zoom-rooms 15 min before the actual lecture or meeting begins and welcome all participants. That gives time for “sound check” and technical problem-solving and hopefully also for some social chat or some questions. The actual lecture or meeting can start at the scheduled time, sharp.

I will add to this list and maybe fail some more …

 

Fixing education with duct tape and some wire (Topic 4)

When the covid-19 pandemic struck the world in spring 2020 many schools and universities went digital over a night. There was no time for design(1). Not much time to learn the tools. Just barely time to substitute traditional campus lectures with the same traditional lectures in Zoom or other e-meeting tools. In a moment delivery times for webcams and headsets got long so the experience of the Zoom lectures got worse than normally needed. And in the beginning servers broke down under sudden and unplanned overload.

Emergency repair? Title: Broken heart Photo:Urban Anjar

 In the course Open Network Learning we learn much about designing meaningful online education using digital tools and open learning resources. I said designing! That is something you do before the course and that needs time, creativity, know-how and consideration(2)(3)(4)(5).

Emergency repair

Now we have lived with sort of online, mixed and hybrid learning for a while. Not in a planned and designed manner but as an emergency repaired form of traditional campus education. Apollo 13 taught us that you can do wonders with duct tape and creativity, but still that is not the ideal situation that we ought to plan for. Apollo 13 didn’t fulfill its goals and never landed on the Moon, but even with a severely damaged spaceship the crew returned alive to Earth.

Let’s have a critical look at a very traditional campus course “design”. Students listen to lectures and take notes. The lectures are sometimes inspiring, pedagogic and enlightening (and other times not very much so). Then students go home to their dorm rooms and try to read and understand the notes, and hopefully the course book, and after a while students have to do an examination. But in the coffee-brakes, at the lunches the interesting things happen. Students meet, asks each other questions, explains, networks, falls in love, sets up times to study together in the library, or to have a beer in the student pub. The lecturers may not care or even know, but the students more or less fix the missing links together.

We have learned together in our course that learning is to a high degree a social process(6), something we do together with others in networks or communities. Working the information to knowledge together with others should be an integrated part of a course. The traditional course design I described above is in that perspective always a bad idea, but at campus many students can manage to fix the bug themselves by organizing the missing parts of the course themselves, so teachers may be unaware of that their courses are Broken As Designed.

In a wider perspective the student time often is a time for forming a rich and sustainable personal network for learning, friendship and career. A time for finding the love of your life and maybe make an innovation and find a business partner. When going remote and digital we have to be more aware of that role.

Finding the bug

Going to digital and remote in the emergency repair mode makes the bug in the traditional course model more obvious. Students don’t understand, feel lonely, get confused, get bored, lose interest, drop out or begin pestering their teachers with questions day and night through mail, telephone or social media channels. Questions that other students could have answered if the students knew each other and had somewhere to meet and discuss. They have difficulties to get in touch with the other students and maybe they don’t really realize what’s missing and just feel too stupid.

Improved emergency repair

It may still not be easy to find time and other resources for a complete redesign of your course but making room for some more social and group-oriented activities could easily be made.

Some ideas for an improved emergency repair:
•    Open the Zoom “room” 15 minutes earlier (and announce that to the students). Let’s say your lecture starts at 10:00 sharp, open the room at 9:45 for “soundcheck”, time for you and the students to fix technical problems with cameras, headphones and microphones. If you get things working earlier, use the spare time for questions and social talk.

•    Make use of breakout rooms in Zoom. Prepare an exercise, something to discuss, a problem to solve and give students some time together to work with it and to prepare to present their work.

•    When you leave the “room” for a break or when ready, make a student host and keep the room open.

•    Suggest that the students make a group or chat on a social media platform of their choice. Give them some time to come to an agreement and organize it. One advantage with a social media platform is that their community can sustain even when the course is over.

•    Set up at least one forum or chat, where the students can ask questions and get answers in your learning management system. Make taking part in the forum, both asking and answering a mandatory task for the students.

Fight for the practical moments

In some courses there are practical laboratory exercises, excursions, simulations, study visits, artistic work et cetera that is needed to give the kind of course you work with. In a few cases those activities can be executed at home by watching a movie, using some affordable small things or doing some experiments at the kitchen sink. In most of the cases there are safety reasons, space requirements or forbiddingly high costs that makes it an absolute need to do that kind of work at the campus or together out in the field. Then take the fight for your students’ rights to a proper education whatever it takes. You cannot learn practical skills by just reading a book or watching a movie. You have to do with your hands and often do together with others in real life.

Dealing with the messiness

Students also have to deal with what a PBL group member called “how to deal with the messiness of an actual problem”. I recognize that from quite different courses. Exploring the ecology in a lake and making fashion photos on location are quite different subjects, but both require planning, teamwork, logistics, coordination, practical problem solving and learning to handle various kinds of specialized equipment (and people). Most times without the teacher nearby and even if you are wet, cold or hungry. That is learning! There is also lots of work left to do (most of it, in the first case) when you come back to campus with your samples or memory cards.

Redesign, but how?

When times come for a more radical redesign or for designing a new course. There are several pedagogical models. I have tried to condense three of them into one picture, to give a quick introduction (or a reminder).

Combining different models

From the Community of Inquiry (CoI) I have borrowed the three kinds of presence that should be designed into a course, teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence. I will come back to that model, there is more to it. From the Five Stage Model (7)  I borrowed the staircase, where you go from the bottom and up. From the beginning you have to make sure that the students have access to the learning management system and other services that they will need and of course that they know the basics in how to use all tools needed. You have also to make sure that the students know how to get IT-support and other kinds of help they may need. You also have to create motivation for the course subject and the chosen working model. The seven Cs, blue clouds, are borrowed from (8) but inverted to better fit the five stages.

Community of Inquiry

The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework to use a meaningful online community to facilitate online learning. The framework describes three levels of presence that should be in an online course Social presence, Teaching presence and Cognitive presence. In (3) you can, beside some theory, find lists of practical elements you can use in your course.

Community of Inquiry, simplified after (3).

Five stage model

Five stage model after (7)

 

The Five Staged Model (7) gives a scaffold for a structured learning progression with different activities and different need for support, moderation and cooperation. I mentioned the first step Access and Motivation above. The second step is Online Socialization where students get to know each other and the digital platform. In the third step, Information Exchanges students begin to learn together and fulfil co-operative tasks. The fourth stage is Knowledge Construction where our student is a valued member of the community of learners. The fifth stage, called Development is about applying and integrating the new knowledge into the student’s context.

The seven Cs

The seven Cs (8) are made to be hints for the teacher or course designer, what to do and think in different phases of course design. The words are

1.    Conceptualize
2.    Create
3.    Communicate
4.    Collaborate
5.    Consider
6.    Combine
7.    Consolidate

The seven Cs after (8)

Discussion

There will come a time when covid-19 is more or less forgotten. When we hug, dance, hang in bars, talk to strangers and go to music festivals, theatres and meetings. I hope it will be very soon.

Still I think schools, universities and work life will have changed in a more permanent way.  Some activities are better without commuting, parking, bad coffee and MacDonald’s. Saving time and environment will be considered more important. Living where you love to live. And is really a 20 minutes speech worth almost a whole workday travelling? We have learnt other ways. Students have also.

I think we will do other things when we meet IRL. Not traditional meetings or lectures and definitely not reading and writing behind a screen. The ways we work, and study will continue to change. The way we define a University and a Course will also change.

Redesigning a course can be done as an iterative process. Use the time available to fix the parts that “sucks” most. Then run the course, evaluate and repeat. There is always a part that requires your attention.

References

1.     The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning [Internet]. [citerad 16 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning
 

2.     ONL202 Topic 4 - Design for Online and Blended learning [Internet]. Padlet. [citerad 16 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://padlet.com/larsuhlin/ONL202T4
 

3.     Fiock H. Designing a Community of Inquiry in Online Courses. Int Rev Res Open Distrib Learn. 01 januari 2020;21(1):135–53.
 

4.     CAST: About Universal Design for Learning [Internet]. [citerad 16 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://www.cast.org/impact/universal-design-for-learning-udl
 

5.     Boelens R, De Wever B, Voet M. Four key challenges to the design of blended learning: A systematic literature review. Educ Res Rev. november 2017;22:1–18.
 

6.     Anjar U. The IT-guy among academic teachers. : Under construction (Topic 3) [Internet]. The IT-guy among academic teachers. 2020 [citerad 19 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://nanur-lnu-onl.blogspot.com/2020/11/under-construction-topic-3.html
 

7.     Five Stage Model [Internet]. Gilly Salmon. [citerad 16 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html
 

8.     Grainne-Conole-the-7cs-of-learning-design.pdf [Internet]. [citerad 16 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://www.opennetworkedlearning.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Grainne-Conole-the-7cs-of-learning-design.pdf

Why am I writing this?

-The Ultimate Question of Life, The University, and Everything

 

 

Why do students deliver their awesome work? Why do scientists explore and publish? Why do people do Ironman or climb mountains? Why do people create poems, music, craft and art? And why are people creating free and open source software? (By the way, reread the subtitle, the answer is NOT 42!)

 

Activities like those above is not about survival. In many cases it costs money and it takes lots of time and effort that could have been used finding food or earning some money to buy food. You probably need to have enough at least for your most basic needs before you reach for the other goals. Still have people long before us made works of arts and have been enchanted by the stars and planets in the sky.

As a biologist I begin to seek an evolutionary explanation

Why great antlers make female deer “horny”?

Some animals have developed extravagant ornaments like peacock feathers and deer antlers. Ornaments that are costly to grow and heavy and risky to carry around. Already Darwin was puzzled about that and suggested that it had to do with sexual selection.

 

Peacock (1)

 

But why do female deer prefer guys with great unpractical antlers? Zahavi (2) came up with a possible solution. Only the males with the best genes (and some luck I suppose) could grow and survive carrying around those great ornaments. With help of the ornaments the female deer can choose a good father for their offspring.

 

Red deer (3)

I have seen some author, but I couldn’t find the reference, suggesting that the same applies to humans. That great works of sports, culture and science are a way to signal to the opposite sex that you have the capacity to carry some extra weight and still survive and hence have good genes.

Am I just trying to show my antlers or peacock train by writing this text? Well, I may not need to be that desperate. I’ve got a wife, three kids and four grandchildren. Maybe young students find more need to show off their antlers?

But if it’s not about getting laid

The psychologist Maslow (4) puts things in a little bit different order. Still he leaves us with needs that haven’t got to do with basic survival. 

 

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as interpreted by Wikipedia(5)

 

I have got lunch, I feel rather safe here, I’ve got friends and a family. Maybe I’m just trying to get respect, self-esteem, status and recognition?

How about students then? Could respect, self-esteem, status and recognition be things that get them ticking too?

I know that Maslow has been criticized for lack of evidence. Maybe someone active in the field can point me to some more modern research.

Linus Law

Linus Torvalds defines in his prologue to (6 pp xiiv-xvii) a similar model where he divides human needs in three parts; survival, social life and entertainment. He shows clearly though that he has pretty high standards for what he defines as entertainment and exemplifies with painting, chess, Einstein’s physics and things like that and of course exploring the inner work of a computer.  Writing this is certainly entertainment according to Torvalds.

Himanen (6 pp 3-6) continues with quoting different well-known hackers describe their work using terms like “amazingly enticing”, “most intriguing”, “excitement”, “joyful”, “passion”

He thinks “passion” is a better word then Torvalds “entertainment” and I think I agree.

 

The hacker learning model

Himanen (6 pp 73-76) describes what he calls the hacker learning model. “A hacker ‘s learning process starts with setting upp an interesting problem, working toward a solution by using various sources, then submitting the solution to extensive testing". Learning about the subject becomes the hacker’s passion” that sounds to my ear as problem-based learning. He describes it as “a continuously evolving learning environment created by the learners themselves” and calls it a Net Academy.

 

The monastery

Himanen also criticizes universities for being hierarchical and means that universities four hundred years after the industrial revolution more are as monasteries “It seems quite strange that we expect scholastic teaching models to be able to produce modern individuals capable of independent thought and the creation of new knowledge”(6 pp 76-77)

 

Discussion

There seem to be other forces driving human curiosity and creativity then grading. Still, I have taken courses where tests and grading were the only thing that made me study, the least needed to get a PASS. Maybe that was a bad course or maybe it just wasn’t the right course for me.What do you think?

Resources

 

1.    Peafowl. I: Wikipedia [Internet]. 2020 [citerad 09 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peafowl&oldid=985420240

2.    Zahavi A. Mate selection—A selection for a handicap. J Theor Biol. 01 september 1975;53(1):205–14.

3.    Ebbesen B. Red_deer_stag_2009_denmark.jpg (JPEG Image, 2832 × 4256 pixels) - Scaled (16%) [Internet]. [citerad 09 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Red_deer_stag_2009_denmark.jpg

4.    Classics in the History of Psychology -- A. H. Maslow (1943) A Theory of Human Motivation [Internet]. [citerad 09 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm

5.    U3155259. English: Figure 3: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs [Internet]. 2019 [citerad 09 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maslow_hierarchy.jpg

6.    Himanen P, Torvalds L, Castells M. The Hacker ethic and the spirit of the information age. New York (N.Y.): Random House; 2001.

 

Under construction (Topic 3)

What is knowledge? A social construction? That the Earth (approximately) is a globe and that E = mc²  are in my not so humble opinion non-negotiable facts, at least until science finds facts that proves them false. Other areas of human knowledge may be, at least for the moment, more open to new results, debate, interpretation and contextualization.

The Earth is a globe, Photo: NASA (1)

One such field is learning. I saw brain researcher Dr. Lara Boyd in a TEDx talk explain that the also the adult human brain is subject to reconstruction as a result of learning and that is promising.(2)

Your brain is still reconstructing itself to handle new knowledge

The topic for this and next week is Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning. A promising tool for learning is a PLN, Personal Learning Network.(3)(4)(5)

PLN, Personal Learning Network

Your PLN can consist of different resources. Other learners, experts, texts, images, movies databases some locally available others spread around the world and accessible through different means of communications.

 

Your PLN contains different sorts of resources spread over the world.

 

Sometimes we use the words community and network as synonyms but there is a reason to keep them separated. Then we reserve the word community for a more structured and permanent constellation and network for a more ad hoc constellation around your personal goals. A community can be part of your network.

Keep the words community and network separated

Connectivism

Connectivism is a way to explain how people learn (6). It explains learning as creating connections between nodes.

Learning as connecting nodes.

Nodes can according to Siemens be be

“

• ·      content (data or information)
• ·      interaction (tentative connection forming)
• ·      static nodes (stable knowledge structure)
• ·      dynamic nodes (continually changing based on new information and data)
• ·      self-updating nodes (nodes which are tightly linked to their original information source, resulting in a high level of currency
• ·      emotive elements (emotions that influence the prospect of connection and hub formations).”

Frustrating!

Collaborative on-line learning can be frustrating. According to Capdeferro and Romero (7) the most common sources of frustration are “Commitment imbalance, unshared goals, communication difficulties and negotiation problems”. My experience from my student years back in late seventies and early eighties is that she same applies to ordinary on campus non-digital group work. and by about the same reasons. As one student pointed out “Some people just want to pass courses while some others only want to be the best one.” I think it would be interesting to compare between two courses one on campus and another on-line with the same content, teachers and comparable student groups.

 

Does grading make group work more effective?

Brindley, Walti, and Blaschke (8) has studied if students became more active in group work if they got graded and found no correlation. They point out some other strategies that instructors should focus on:

1.     Facilitate learner readiness for group work and provide scaffolding to build skills.

2.     Establish a healthy balance between structure (clarity of task) and learner autonomy (flexibility of task).

3.     Nurture the establishment of learner relationships and sense of community.

4.     Monitor group activities actively and closely.

5.     Make the group task relevant for the learner.

6.     Choose tasks that are best performed by a group.

7.     Provide sufficient time.

Maybe the studied student population may have impacted the results. Students in Master of Distance Education may be (or become) more motivated for on-line group work than average students.

How to act as an instructor in an asynchronous forum?

Mazsolini and Maddison (9) studied student – teacher interactions in an asynchronous forum. Should the instructors take a prominent role, be more a guide or keep a very low profile. They found weak or no correlation between the students learning activities and the instructor behaviour, but students considered the more active instructors more enthusiastic and expert.

A methodological problem is that the study uses length of threads as an indicator of more or deeper learning. I have been using asynchronous BBS, USENET, mailing-lists, forums and Facebook-groups since early eighties. I consider long threads often correlated to bad network behavior like trolling, bikeshedding(10), not reading the thread before answering, ad hominem-arguments and polarized discussions wich doesn’t converge.

Resources

1.     Earth - Apollo 11 [Internet]. [citerad 06 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/a11_h_44_6552.html

2.     After watching this, your brain will not be the same | Lara Boyd | TEDxVancouver [Internet]. [citerad 02 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNHBMFCzznE

3.     ONL202 Topic 3 Learning in communities [Internet]. [citerad 04 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://padlet.com/alacre/5monn8ds0wrtwck4

4.     PLNs Theory and Practice [Internet]. 2019 [citerad 02 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8mJX5n3IEg&feature=youtu.be

5.     PLNs Theory and Practice part 2 [Internet]. 2019 [citerad 02 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqSBTr9DPH8&feature=youtu.be

6.     Siemens G. Connectivism: Learning as Network-Creation. 01 januari 2005;

7.     View of Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences? | The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning [Internet]. [citerad 02 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1127/2129

8.     View of Creating Effective Collaborative Learning Groups in an Online Environment | The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning [Internet]. [citerad 02 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/675/1271

9.     Mazzolini M, Maddison S. Sage, guide or ghost? The effect of instructor intervention on student participation in online discussion forums. Comput Educ. 01 april 2003;40(3):237–53.

10.   Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is? [Internet]. [citerad 06 november 2020]. Tillgänglig vid: http://bikeshed.com/

 

Being open (Topic 2)

  ”Open” and ”free” are nice words almost everyone loves, but they are rather fluffy and ambiguous so we have to make things clearer. But first maybe a look at the context and the “zeitgeist” where the term “Open learning” may be a part.

Digitalization and a global Internet opens new possibilities and brings in new thoughts. If I have a physical book and give it to you it means that you get richer and I get poorer. If I have a text file and give a copy to you, we both get richer you of course but I get someone to discuss the text with. Digital files can be copied at a minimal cost in millions of copies and transferred around the globe and the copies are exactly identical with the original. As long as network capacity was a scarce resource people had to meet, copy files from and to magnetic tapes, floppy disks, hard drives, and compact disks. As the Internet in the nineties got more commonly available much happened.

 

But some things had happened long before. The word Copyleft could at least be traced back to 1976 (1) but the word got more well defined by Richard M Stallman in the GNU Manifesto

 

 “GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free.” (1)

 

GNU is a free operative system Stallman by that time intends to create and he and his organization creates most of the parts of the operating system but not the central “brain” called a kernel.

 

In 1986 Stallman defines four freedoms for what he calls free software (2)

• Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
• Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
• Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbour.
• Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

 

In 1991 Linus Torvalds releases the Linux operating system kernel.(3)(4) Together with the tools created by the GNU-project (1) and some other free software the world now has a complete free operating system. Today Linux dominates the market for supercomputers, web servers and mobile telephones, even if the market share on desktop computers is rather small.

 

A community

Torvalds uses the Internet not only to distribute the early versions of the Linux kernel but to create a community of developers. He releases new versions often and receives bug reports and patches with corrections and new features from people all over the world.(5)

 

When I as a representative for a Telecom company travelled around Sweden talking about the Internet and what people could do with it, Linux was already a main example of people could achieve with the Internet.

 

The moral freedom argument was not easily adopted by business. Raymond and others coined the word Open source and put more focus onto that the source code, the blueprint of the program, should be available for inspection and improvement. They compared with peer-review in the academic world and argued that access to the source code gave better code and better programs to the users. In 1998 the Open Source Initiative was founded

 

Open access

For publication of academic papers there has been a tradition that commercial scientific journals have received the articles for free, the research has often been financed with taxpayer’s money. Then other scientists have, with taxpayer’s money, done the peer-review and editing work. Then the universities have to put lots of taxpayer’s money into subscriptions for the journals. For the ordinary taxpayers without access to a university library access to research papers has been difficult and at high cost.

 

For a couple of decades there has been a movement towards Open Access publishing of scientific output(6).

 

Open outlaws

What we have been talking about is within the law. Using copyright for sharing and openness. There has also been a great outlaw movement ignoring copyright and other laws to make software, music, movies, scientific papers, and secret documents publicly available. There has also been a political branch of the piracy movement represented in some parliaments. I wouldn’t go further into that because that would make the introduction too long.

 

Open educational resources

 

“Open” is a beautiful but rather “fluffy” word and we need a definition. One is made by David Wiley(7):

 

– Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
– 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)
– Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
– Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
– 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)

 

Looking at it make me feel that it seems rather analogous with Stallman’s four freedoms (2)

Wiley also describes education as an act of giving but in a sense that you don’t loose your knowledge or skills by giving it to your students or others. (8)

 

What’s in it for me?

There is always a reason for skepticism. Why should I share the fruits of my hard work? Why should I expose myself for criticism from peers and from laymen outside my field?

 

There are different motivations for an open approach(9)

·      Increased audience

·      Increased reuse

·      Increased access

·      Increased experimentation

·      Increased reputation

·      Increased revenue

·      Increased participation

 

I also would add improved quality. Sometimes I am plain wrong, more often I have missed some aspects or there are better ways to explain. Almost always I make typos or (at least in English) use the wrong words. Getting feedback, inputs and contributions makes things better. According to Linus Law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"(5)

You give something away (red) but you also get feedback and learn (blue) and get contributions from students and peers (green).

 

A reputation game?

Scientist are used to publish the results of their research. The more readers and citations they get the more important are the results considered and the more such publications the better scientist according to university management.

 

The same should apply when scientists enter the classrooms and teach the next generation of scientists. A course using material by well-known teachers at well-known universities should be considered good and meeting those teachers IRL or at least through digital means should be even better. Being part of such a community will attract good students to the courses.

 

Making a better course with less effort

Making or improving course material in a community could also reduce the effort by needed from each teacher to create a new course or to keep the material up to date. Combining different skills in the team could also make the material more varied and pedagogical.

 

Keep it simple

Creating a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) could a great undertaking (10)(11). You probably need a team and some great support to do that. It is not something you do today or the next day. Still an open course may not be so scary. I run a photo course in my spare time, it is not by all means massive, but it is open and online. It consists of some videos on YouTube(12) and a Facebook group(13) for discussions, assignments and collection of relevant links.

 

Publishing a short text, a picture, a diagram or a PowerPoint presentation or maybe a short instructional movie on an open place with an open license may be more within reach. Maybe already today. You have lots of good stuff on your hard drive already.

Making it open

Still you have to think. Let’s say you have a presentation that you will make open. Give it a careful look. Is there any stolen copyrighted material (photos, graphics, films, texts or music), that you have to take away or substitute? Have you checked licenses and given proper credits to others work? 

 

Making your available material open

 

Choose a license

Most common for the kind of material we are talking about is Creative commons, but this is a kit of building blocks that you can combine in various ways. (14)

 

CC BY is the basic building block and demands that you get credit for your work. Except for that people can use, share and remix

SA, share alike, requires that remixes of your material still are open and shared with the same license.

NC, non-commercial, doesn’t allow commercial use

ND, no derivatives, doesn’t allow changes

CCØ is giving up the copyright and giving the work to public domain

 

I think we have to also care a little about in what formats we share. What is "the source code" of your material? How do we make things easy to change and remix. What formats to use? 

What file formats and programs to use to make stuff really open?

Still scared?

Try sharing with a smaller group. Your colleges at the university, colleges you know at other universities etc. That may nor be “openness” as we think of it, but at least a step in the right direction.

 

Open learners and campus students

But students (or taxpayers) pay for university courses. What if learners can access the course material for free on the Internet. Well, even without OER you can buy textbooks or borrow at a library and read them on your own.

 

Studying at a university is another experience. First you have to get admitted. Then the experience is broader than the academic part your teachers stand for or what you can find in the university library. The university may be the place where you find the love of your life or where you start your business or get interested in a subject you haven’t even heard of before.

There are also often parts of the course that requires physical attendance. That could be excursions, study visits, lab exercises, using simulators etc. Being an admitted student also means that you can get credits and an exam.

 

Open learning (to the right) compared with taking an ordinary university course (left) can be two very different things.

 

 

All resources at the university cannot be open or done from home. Here some students operating a navigation simulator at the maritime academy, Linnaeus University, Kalmar. Photo: Urban Anjar

 

As an open learner you may not be interested in the whole course. Maybe you leave when you got the answers you were looking for.  Maybe you are shopping around for a university, a teacher or a subject that fits you. Maybe you are there more for learning then for getting academic credits. Maybe you cannot afford to go to the university, or your job and family situation creates barriers.

 

Also, competition between different universities can still exist even with common open courseware. Universities are different. They have different faculties, different equipment, different traditions, different activities for students etc. The textbooks and slides don’t make a university.

Competition and openness are compatible

 

 

 

Resources

1.   Copyleft. I: Wikipedia [Internet]. 2020 [citerad 18 oktober 2020]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Copyleft&oldid=980794227

2.   Free software. I: Wikipedia [Internet]. 2020 [citerad 18 oktober 2020]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Free_software&oldid=983107874

3.   Linux. I: Wikipedia [Internet]. 2020 [citerad 18 oktober 2020]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linux&oldid=984186818

4.   Torvalds L, Diamond D, Torvalds S. Just for fun: mannen bakom Linux. Stockholm: Alfabeta; 2001.

5.   Raymond ES. The cathedral & the bazaar: musings on Linux and open source by an accidental revolutionary. 1st ed. Beijing ; Cambridge, Mass: O’Reilly; 1999. 268 p.

6.   Open access. I: Wikipedia [Internet]. 2020 [citerad 18 oktober 2020]. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Open_access&oldid=983546920

7.   The Access Compromise and the 5th R – iterating toward openness [Internet]. [citerad 22 oktober 2020]. Available at: https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221

8.   TEDxNYED - David Wiley - 03/06/10 [Internet]. 2010 [citerad 14 oktober 2020]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb0syrgsH6M

9.   Weller M. The Battle for Open [Internet]. Ubiquity Press. Ubiquity Press; 2014 [citerad 14 oktober 2020]. Available at: https://www.ubiquitypress.com/site/books/m/10.5334/bam/

10. What is a MOOC? [Internet]. 2010 [citerad 14 oktober 2020]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW3gMGqcZQc

11. MOOCs: knowledge at your fingertips | Sophie Dandache | TEDxUCLouvain [Internet]. 2010 [citerad 21 oktober 2020]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnFg7cGYFrk

12. Anjar, U - YouTube [Internet]. [citerad 21 oktober 2020]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/user/urbananjar

13. Fotografins grunder HT20 | Facebook [Internet]. [citerad 21 oktober 2020]. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/999362803825274

14. Creative Commons licences explained [Internet]. 2011 [citerad 14 oktober 2020]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZvJGV6YF6Y