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Category: SelfOER

Enacting the Value of Openness by Sharing #OER19

(and by doing ‘free’ labour).

This post presents the script of my #OER19 presentation and curates links to the recording and to the slides.

The Script

Oh, it was a 20 min presentation, so it’s gonna take 20 mins or so to read this post.

Networked Participatory Scholarship

My research is into open educational practices within the context of networked participatory scholarship (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012).

In this presentation, I’ll outline how I conceptualised openness and how I utilised the idea of selfOER that Suzan Koseoglu and Maha Bali proposed at OER16. And how I used it as an interview prompt for discussion about open practices and the relationship with open educational resources. I’ll then go on to outline how my analysis and interpretation is progressing, highlighting the role of sharing and ‘little’ OERs (Weller, 2010) in open practices before going on to consider how value is created and the nature of labour that this involves.

Openness in Practice: SelfOER

Coining the term selfOER, Koseoglu & Bali proposed that understanding of open educational resources should be widened from one that primarily regards OER as openly licensed content to include individuals in the learning community. That is, to see individuals, or their practice, as open educational resources. They contend that an individual, or the self, and their practice can become an OER via the ‘process and products’ of open scholarship. Essentially, this is the connections, or relationships, that are formed and the resources that are produced. Within this, they also contend that many individuals hold openness as ‘a worldview’ or are open as ‘a way of being’ and that this is manifested in their practice.

The idea of openness as a way of being really resonated with me. What’s more, I was certain that this would resonate with others, so I used the idea of selfOER to facilitate interviews with 11 participants. Relative to their own practice, participants were asked to comment on the particular framing of openness and the depiction of practice within the idea of selfOER and to present a selection of texts, or resources, that exemplified their openness. This ‘show and tell’ method proved a very useful way to surface aspects of open practice, particularly the meanings that participants attribute to it and the relationship between practice and resources. And, yes, the concept of selfOER resonated. All 11 participants, for a whole host of different reasons, said openness as a worldview, or as a way of being, was how they framed their practice. And for many, openness directly equates to sharing. 

Openness as a ‘Way of Being’ or ‘Worldview’

Participants said openness for them was:

  • The human element
  • Sharing
  • Identity
  • Being open to others
  • It’s about life
  • It’s about freedom

Openness as Entangled Phenomenon

However, before I move on, I have to say that I was really challenged in the early stages of my research with questions like how does the self become an open educational resource and how might practice be seen as a resource? And also, the nature of the relationship between discourse and materiality, which came out of my MRes study. To resolve this I adopted Karen Barad’s idea of a ‘phenomenon’, which derives from quantum physics. Instead of focusing on separate entities or agencies with inherent boundaries and properties it means that openness is seen as a phenomenon in which there are no pre-determined boundaries between the individual self, the resources produced and technology. Consequently, within my study, openness is regarded as a single phenomenon, it is a process, or a doing, that is enacted in practice, material-discursive practice. It is the entanglement of meaning and matter, of human and non-human actors.

My study is an interpretive case study that essentially seeks to describe openness and its distributed nature.

Big and ‘Little‘ OER

At this point, I need to highlight the sorts of texts, or resources, that participants presented as exemplifying their openness, and that they share in practice.

Veletsianos and Kimmons (2012) regard open, or networked participatory scholarship, as referring to teaching and research practices that espouse openness, and this takes three particular forms: (1) open access publishing, (2) open education, including OER and open teaching, and (3) networked participation. Participants referred to all these forms of scholarship and the texts, or resources, they presented covered this spectrum, but what was most noticeable was that everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, positioned their openness in relation to networked participation. This was either exemplified by their blog, their Twitter, an online community that they belonged to, or a combination of similar such things. Flickr and Instagram, even.

It seems that the aspect of social media and networked participation adds a certain vibrancy to openness. That is, it adds the human element. I was really struck by just how much meaning, purpose, desire and support, or care, was on display.

There was just so much life!! So much humanity!!

As such, the majority of texts, or resources, presented were not typical institutional OERs. They were what Martin Weller refers to as ‘little’ OER: individually produced, low cost resources that don’t have explicit educational aims or learning outcomes. Consequently, their use can be unpredictable and in unpredicted contexts.

Broadening the definition of OER to include ‘little OER’ now means that we can consider a continuum of resources. But, this begs the question, how little can a ‘little OER’ be, and what exactly is viable as an OER?

Big and Little and Human(?) OER

Back in 2006 Stephen Downes asked whether people could be considered open educational resources. And since then a number of people have asserted that yes they can.

“Can a guest lecturer be an OER?” “Any resource that supports education is, at this point, is under consideration.” (Downes, 2006)

“I am a human OER” (Funes, 2014)

“I am an OER” (MacNeill, 2015) at OER15

“We are all an OER” (Sallah, 2018) at OER18                                                                                      

Sharing: Boundaries of Sharing in Network Culture

When researching a phenomenon, Scott & Orlikowski (2014) ask ‘what does the phenomenon depend on?’ ‘What drives practice?’ Well, overwhelmingly, and no surprise, openness is enabled by sharing.

Kennedy points out that although sharing is a central concept of networked culture, its conceptual boundaries with other social theories of exchange haven’t been established, nor has the concept been adequately critiqued. Moreover, there are few empirical studies of how sharing is practiced when mediated by social media.

Added to this, the notion of sharing presents many possible meanings. It relates to the distribution or division of physical resources, as well as to the sharing of an experience or the disclosure of personal information. Goods shared can be material or immaterial.  And immaterial goods can be intellectual or affective.

Consequently, sharing then has both social and economic dimensions, which are counterpoised in networked culture. A condition in which opposing forces are equal to one another and have balancing or contrasting effects.

Typically, sharing in networked culture is explained in relation to gift giving and its feature of reciprocity. Across the board, in some way or another, participants in my study equated openness with reciprocity.

Explaining sharing in terms of gift giving and reciprocity distinguishes it from commodity exchange.

Sharing as a Demand, NOT a Gift.

But, do you know what? It turns out that there’s no discrete theory of sharing. Following the work of Marcel Mauss (1954), sharing has conventionally been explained as a sub-category of gift exchange theory. However, anthropologists, such as Widlok (2016), who mainly study hunter-gatherer societies have a host of empirical evidence that refutes sharing as being reciprocal.

Gifting involves giving, receiving and reciprocating. As such, it’s a two-way exchange between two people. It’s about establishing and strengthening social bonds, as in kinship relations. Sharing on the other hand is not reciprocal because although you might receive something through sharing, you’re not obligated to give something back to the same person. Sharing then is a one way transfer that’s multi-directional. It’s not about strengthening social bonds per se; it’s about enabling, indeed maximising, access opportunities all round. It’s an economic mode of transfer that enables others to access what is needed, or is of intrinsic value. Sharing provides an alternative to both gift-exchange and market exchange.

What’s more, sharing’s not initiated by the giver; rather, it’s prompted by the receiver in the form of a demand. This demand is made on the basis of individuals, humans, sharing needs derived from the fact that they share the experience of life itself and that they recognise this. The demand can be spoken or silent. This silent demand is founded on bodily presence. In the context of human sociality, bodily presence by itself constitutes a demand, a demand for being acknowledged as a human being with legitimate needs. For example, in anthropology, it’s frequently observed that a person who silently positions themselves next to a fire or a cooking pot will most likely be given something by those tending to it. Online, bodily presence equates to embodied presence and the invisible ‘other’, or the ‘lurker’.

Sharing practices are established through bodily co-presence, but they also involve communication, or speech acts, to structure the process. Plus, they also depend on the relationship, or affordance, of the thing being shared, as well as being influenced by the nature, or materiality, of the physical space involved.

The Internet is fundamentally a sharing technology. Its surveilling properties enable us to imagine the watching presence of others; its infrastructure facilitates efficient resource sharing and the addition of social media enables the social dimension of communication. The upshot is that the Internet enables both the ‘sharing out’ of resources and the ‘sharing in’ of life’s experiences.

Seen like this, and in contrast to gift giving, sharing is about creating opportunities and gaining access to what’s needed or valued. It’s not a matter of obligation and the imperative to reciprocate. Rather, it’s about the “opportunity to request” (Widlok, 2016, p.80), which means that the initative is with the potential recipient. It enables them to request what they need, things that are not already out there or easily located.

Sharing is a way to achieve one’s needs, or reach one’s goals, through the help of others. It’s the recognition that fellow human beings can provide what’s needed and the power that’s asserted based on the recognition that we share life and understand what others require.

Sharing in Open Practices

Verbal demand – Given this understanding of sharing in relation to openness we can see that when Pearl says “I ask for help” that we’re not talking about gift giving because people don’t generally ask to be given gifts. She’s demanding access to what she needs. Pearl was struggling with an aspect of her research so, in order to get help, she set up a Facebook support group to get the help she needed. Now others can join the group and similarly ask for help.

“I ask for help.” “Me myself, […] I’ve needed help from other people, so I’ve been relying on others’ self as OER to help me.” Pearl (anon)

Silent demand – Then there’s the silent demand from the invisible, imagined, other. It was noticeable just how many participants were conscious of having an audience, and the possibility that there were people out there with unfulfilled needs or who’d find something they had to be of value. They hoped their posts, or their comments, or their resources would be useful to others.

“Maybe one sentence I’ve said somewhere in the blog will be useful to someone somewhere in the world.” Gabi Witthaus

I’m quite conscious is this going to be of use to somebody else.” Judy (anon)

Sharing life – It was also noticeable just how much the texts or resources presented exhibited personal or social aspects. That is, affective goods. There was such a lot of ‘lived experience’ on display, relating to both professional and personal life. Jeff (Merrell) narrates his course design decisions, Sheila (MacNeill) blogs about her “struggles” with openness, Rebecca (Hogue) shared her breast cancer story and now researches this area, and Laura (Gogia) openly documents, or narrates, aspects of her personal life and professional practice .

Creating opportunities – As we can now appreciate, sharing is about opportunity, the opportunity to request access to things we need or solicit opportunities for ourselves. Laura puts her finger on it when she says, the interrelated practice of sharing and openness is partially controlled and partially serendipitous. Either way, she says it’s about creating opportunities for yourself. She gives the example of provoking a discussion on Twitter by making a deliberately controversial statement. The exchange resulted in her being invited to contribute to a podcast.

“It’s partially controlled; it’s partially serendipitous; it’s very active, but also it’s creating opportunities for yourself.” Laura Gogia

Value

People participate in communities and networks because there’s value in it. If people don’t get value, they won’t participate.

In the first instance, value is derived in the immediate term, from the experience of participation itself. This can simply be through connecting with others, asking a question, passing on information or providing feedback. Or just being with others who understand your challenges can also be a source of support and motivation.

On the other hand, value, in the form of knowledge capital is something that can be realised later, and this can take a number of forms. Participating in communities and networks helps develop an individual’s knowledge, skills and competencies. That is, it develops their human capital.

Social relations and connections are also a form of knowledge capital, and the cultivation of one’s reputation is a social achievement that can also operate as a knowledge resource.

Undoubtedly, open practices contribute to a reputational economy. Amongst the participants there was no shortage of benefits derived from cultivating one’s reputation: invitations to speak at conferences, for example. Reputation translates into a form of exchange value, as does human capital.

Value of Open Practices and the Labour Market

However, it’s the role of use value that intrigues me in all of this, and commodification. It seems that open sharing practices are built around the concept of value as use and that this helps foster the way in which value is created.

Scholars such as Benkler (2006) and Bauwens (2005) argue that the peer2peer sharing economy is founded on the promise of use value over exchange value and a partnership between the peer economy and the market.

However, I’m not sure how this works exactly. We’ve already acknowledged that once something like a little OER is ‘out there’ its use is unpredictable in unpredicted contexts. It could easily become a commodity.  

Moreover, as Kennedy (2016) points out, the exchange of information data and immaterial labour that constitute open sharing practices gets transformed into a commodity to be exchanged. Indeed, Audrey Watters (2018) has recently highlighted the aspect of value and the “invisibility” of labour in open practices.

The relationship of openness to the labour market and the precarity of higher education was a noticeable feature in my study. 5 out of 11 participants related to it in one way or another. Maeve and Libby acknowledged that they could see the benefit of sharing and open practices in order to secure employment in precarious circumstances. And Gabi, said she was appreciative of the identity and support that open scholarship afforded her when she was in-between institutions.

When I’ve been on short term contracts I also was able to see the benefits of sharing practice so that people […] could Google me and they could see that I was motivated and interested.” Maeve (anon)

I’ve managed to keep myself permanently employed in a field that moves very very fast and is very very precarious.” Libby (anon)

“Being an open scholar gives me an identity that’s not tied to an institution and I’m very appreciative of that because I can quite imagine a scenario if I’d been in a very closed environment and then was suddenly without an institutional home, I’d be feeling very isolated right now.” Gabi Witthaus

Invisible ‘Free’ Labour and Biopower

It’s important to analyse what’s not included in material-discursive practices. What’s excluded matters because it remains in play as a constitutive element. And guess what’s not included in the discourse of open? Labour!! Overwhelmingly, the emphasis is on the product, not the producer. Labour is downplayed and labelled as ‘creativity’.

Considering that networked participatory scholarship requires the construction and performance of identities, which are essentially established through a range of strategies involving some aspect of our life, or our “bios”, I’m drawn to Foucault’s idea of biopower, a disciplinary form of power over life itself, and how this seems to have become appropriated into the workplace for productive purposes. Moreover, how sharing seems to feed into this, considering that we’re practically compelled to share as we recognise our needs in others.

Under the term biocracy, Fleming (2013) highlights how productivity is increasingly dependent on social and personal aspects of human life for its value-creating qualities. Much of this ‘tacit’ dimension can’t be sourced or nurtured inside the institution. It’s not just a matter of formal learning and explicit codified knowledge anymore. Value is increasingly derived from aspects of tacit knowledge that’s learnt socially or informally. Moreover, it’s generally developed beyond the formal remuneration process and as such it takes on the form of ‘free work’. Free work, or free labour, in the biocratic academy harnesses our ‘free time’; and it relies on our autonomy and ability to self-organise and our drive for self-development.

What’s at Stake? The Social Commons

So, why does this matter? What’s at stake? Because it represents the enclosure of social value. It’s the social commons that’s at stake. It’s the onslaught of the social factory (Hardt and Negri, 2000).

After transcribing participant interviews I wrote in my notes the words “total capture”, and I’ve been trying to understand what this means ever since. 

Enclosing social value and the capture of the social commons forms the basis of neoliberal human capital theory (Hanlon, 2012). That is, we’re no longer just participants in an economic exchange relationship, rather we’re the living embodiment of capital.

Sharing practices operationalise, or CAPTURE, value production from forms of socialisation founded on a communistic nature. Utilising our life, or our bios, the diffusion of sharing practices promotes the systemic integration of ephemeral forms of sociality into value creation chains.

Consequently,  scholars are beginning to see sharing as the indication of a broader process of re-socialising economic exchange. That is, market exchange, or commodification, is becoming increasingly embedded in society in new and antagonising ways (Pais and Provasi, 2015).

Life is Sharing

Yes, indeed, life is sharing, but to what extent is life capital? That is the question.

And to what extent is the self an open education resource, or simply a human resource?

Because, as Maeve (anon) concludes:

“Ultimately, I am the resource.”

Thank You.

I hope I’ve explained my research clearly, and my concerns.

References: available here
Image: Jonathan Saavedra on Unsplash
Note: a number of research participants chose to waive their right to anonymity.


My posthuman, possibly cyborg, awakening.

Well, this penny has taken an awfully long time to drop!! But I guess you don’t go around talking about philosophical paradigms everyday of the week. It’s just when you’re engaged in PhD research you’re more or less expected to situate your research in one. Having said that, I now recall that posthumanism was pretty much the focus of #EDCMOOC, e-Learning and Digital Cultures, that I did way-back-when, when I said I’d “forgo any attempt at putting my thoughts down about ‘redefining the human’ and the implications for education of such a paradigm shift”. Well, it looks like I can’t duck that one any longer as my focus of study, selfOER, seems to be increasingly pushing me in that direction and to consider what it means to ‘be open’ and indeed to ‘be human’.

As you may know, I’ve already conceived my research topic, the practice of selfOER, from a sociomaterial literacies perspective and as a sociomaterial assemblage, that is a relational coming together of human and non-human actors in an actor-network theory (ANT) way of thinking. Because I’m interested in how selfOER gets enacted and how subjectivity of the self is constructed, not only materially but discursively as well, I’m also drawing on Foucault who, because of his critique of structuralism and it’s focus on language, often gets labelled as a poststructuralist. Indeed, ANT can also be considered in poststructuralist terms, so it’s no wonder that I didn’t see the posthuman, or the cyborg, coming sooner. It was rediscovering ‘Cyborg Literacies and the Posthuman Text’ by Lesley Gourlay (2011) that stirred this deeply sown seed and prompted my turn to the posthuman. And I have to say that the omens are looking good because hadn’t I just checked out a copy of ‘Simians, Cyborgs and Women’ (Haraway, 1991) when Bonnie Stewart, in her awesome keynote at ALT earlier in the week, calls out Haraway’s cyborg as a possible way to understand the relationship between technology and open practices and perhaps as a way to deal with the political implications.

Clearly, I’ve got a lot of reading ahead of me in order to understand how such a theoretical orientation can be applied to my research and help understand what’s happening in practice. However, it’s fascinating, not least because it requires a lot of recalibrating of previously held assumptions.

So, how/why does posthumanism redefine the human, and what are the implications for digital and open education? Quickly, drawing on thinking from poststructuralism, feminism and science and technology studies, posthumanism builds on critique of the humanist project that’s underpinned much of Western thinking for over the last 400 years or so and calls into question what it is we mean when we speak of the human. In particular, it de-privileges the human and considers them alongside nature and the technological other, and in doing so it brings into question the essentialism and autonomy of the human subject, which in turn has implications for how we view human agency.

There are a number of reasons why humanism is being called into question. These range from the ‘Death of Man’ thesis in which Foucault asks whether we are closer to gods or to apes; the generic postmodern/feminist critique that sees humanism as a mechanism of elite white male hegemony and the ecological critique that considers actions predicated on humanist assumptions as destroying the planet etc. Indeed, in the last 12 months or so, the anthropocene has been declared, which proposes a new epoch dating from the commencement of significant (detrimental) human impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems.

Equally, with the rise of artificial intelligence and accelerating technological mediation, what it means to be human is also being questioned. Mind you, as Professor Steve Fuller points out, ‘it is very difficult to define what it is to be human’. It turns out that ‘humanity’, as a social category, has variously been defined throughout the ages (ancient, medieval and modern).

In relation to education then, the implications of this discussion and the critique of humanism are clearly profound. Rather than ‘bringing out’ the potential of the individual subject (Biesta, 1998), it may well be that education, viewed  in terms of assemblages, is more about ensuring the creative ‘gathering’ of human and non-human actors (Edwards, 2010).

Therefore, as Sian Bayne (2016) asks, “how, as researchers and scholars, can we move beyond the humanistic orthodoxies which assume the individual – the human subject – to be a rational actor in possession of a pure agency which allows it to view the world from a position of autonomy and disconnection from its material and discursive contexts?” (p.83). Well, I don’t know, but it would seem that I’m about to start giving it a go!

References:

  • Defining Humanity (2009) [Film]. University of Warwick, TEDX.
  • Bayne, S. (2016) ‘Posthumanism and Research in Digital Education’, in The SAGE Handbook of E-learning Research
  • Biesta, G. J. J. (1998) ‘Pedagogy Without Humanism: Foucault and the Subject of Education’, Interchange, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 1–16
  • Edwards, R. (2010) ‘The end of lifelong learning: A post-human condition?’, Studies in the Education of Adults, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 5–17
  • Gourlay, L. (2011) ‘Cyborg literacies and the posthuman text’, Workshop on New Media, New Literacies, and New Forms of Learning, December. Retrieved from: http://blogs. ubc. ca/newliteracies/files/2011/12/Gourlay. pdf
  • Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London, Free Association Books.

An open reply, realisations and a request #selfoer #CR2518

This post is first of all a reply to Suzan Koseoglu’s recent post Boundaries of Openness, which continues the conversation about the self as an open educational resource, #selfOER, that she and Maha Bali have been developing since #OER16. It’s a conversation that I’m glad to say I’ve been welcomed to join, after I instinctively took up the idea as the focus of my PhD study having watched their recorded GO_GN webinar back in February. Since then, not only have I been developing my fledgling ideas about how to research this, but so too have Suzan and Maha. So this post kind of outlines a bit of my thinking on this as well. It turns out that we might be taking two ‘completely different readings’ on this, which, wouldn’t you know, just so happens to be the name of Suzan’s blog. 🙂 After outlining a few realisations about how I’m going to conduct my study, the post finishes with what amounts to something like a ‘negotiating access’ request to the open community.

OK, so Suzan’s question was “if you were to research the open self how would you define the boundaries for research and participation”? First of all, what attracted me to the concept of selfOER was that it seemed to be a great example of a sociomaterial assemblage; that is, it combines a human actor (the self) with non-human actors (texts and technology etc.). All very actor-networky (ANT) I know, but I’m interested in this because literacies studies are starting to see the production of texts as sociomaterial practice (Goodfellow and Lea, 2016; Gourlay and Oliver, 2013), and the concept of selfOER that Suzan and Maha advance foregrounds textual practice as the way in which the self might become an OER. Citing Catherine Cronin, they say

simply by engaging in public activities (e.g., blogging, Tweeting) we open ourselves to an authentic audience where our work and ideas “can be read, viewed, used, shared, critiqued and built upon by others” (Cronin, 2014, p. 408).

In terms of defining boundaries, what’s interesting about an ANT perspective is that it takes a a relational view, or network perspective, that sees boundaries between the social and material, or human and non-human, as emerging from the strength of their relationships. Defining boundaries or, in ANT terms, cutting the network is clearly tricky. And I don’t see boundaries easily. I want to be free to explore everywhere and everything, so no wonder an ANT perspective appeals to me.

However, I’ve got to develop a conceptual framework for my study so, just for now, I’d better identify a few boundaries. It’s no surprise that how the self is conceived in all this is crucial. What’s interesting is that in considering selfOER as an assemblage, I was drawn to thinking about how the self was constructed in this. So I started to think about subjectivity.

Subjectivity is different to identity. It’s about how individuals are ‘subjected’ to outside forces such as economics, the law, society, the circumstances of history and the physical world in general, and consequently how they’re made subjects of these forces. From this perspective it’s not so much what kind of OER you’d like to be, but rather what kind of OER you can be.

Some of you might be starting to see that this presents a post-structuralist take on things. Following the work of Michel Foucault, it signifies the ways that individuals must situate themselves in relation to power and the role that discourse plays in constructing the subject. I just read an article by Katia Hildebrandt and Alec Couros that neatly discusses this very thing – applying a post-structuralist, or Foucauldian, lens to digital identity. Rather than possessing a core identity the individual, or subject, is discursively constituted and re-constituted within the productive relations of power and knowledge. Within this there are technologies of power that act upon the subject and technologies of the self in which the subject acts upon them self. Undeniably, this perspective can present a more restricted, or challenging, view of individual agency than some might usually be comfortable with.

It’s interesting to think what synergies and divergences our two investigations will bring up. I was interested to follow Suzan’s reading of Parker J. Palmer’s, The Courage to Teach. I have to admit, I’d never come across his work before, but what struck me, in the quick skim that I did, was his reference to self knowledge, which seems very similar to Foucault’s idea of self care, a technology of the self in which the individual essentially might speak, think and write them self into particular ways of being. Discourse, as explained by James Paul Gee, has similarly been identified as a key dimension of identity formation.

Part two of Suzan’s question was about the boundaries of participation in relation to researching the ‘open self’. Great question. Just last week or so I wrote ‘observer-participant’ as part of my proposed methodology. However, events have subsequently made me realise that this isn’t right. As the proposed research is about people being open, and is in the context of an open community, the fact that I had interviewed an open practitioner as part of my pilot study quickly became open knowledge, which furthered conversation with further members of the community. This made me realise that I’m seen as a member of the open community and that an observer-participant role just wouldn’t wash. I’m a participant, observing and trying to make sense of the development of openness as practiced by individuals, and as I’ve also come to realise, this brings with it a whole bunch of responsibility. Extra responsibility that requires great care, precisely because it is in the open.

For example, in setting up my pilot study one participant, Rebecca Hogue, someone who identifies herself as a selfOER, blogged about her objection to being asked to participate anonymously in such a study.

I find it odd/annoying when I’m asked to participate in a research study about open practice, then the consent form for the study says that all identifying information will be removed and my contribution will be anonymous. To me this is a huge contradiction. The study is looking at practices that I do in the open, and yet my participation in the study itself is not allowed to be open.

Rebecca made the point that she didn’t want her data to be anonymized. Moreover, as I quickly came to realise, it’s difficult to guarantee that anything taken from the internet can be totally anonymous. Ethical guidelines have been developed over time for good reason, as any identification and interpretation risks causing harm. New contexts, like this, clearly present a challenge. I spent some time thinking about the implications of this. It’s on a Google Doc, if you want to take a look.

Being open requires a level of vulnerability, which thankfully I’ve been able to summon in the past, and which has brought its rewards. However, researching selfOER as a participant observer seems to require that I make myself vulnerable all over again. What’s more, I’m also asking individuals in the open community to make themselves vulnerable too, and possibly others by association.

After attending #OER17, I have Laura Czerniewicz‘s words ringing in my ear, ” what is it that we’re not seeing?” Well, I would ask first, “have we looked at ourselves”? Others too have asked the open community to engage with the construction of the subject (Knox, 2013) and to take up critical approaches (Bayne et al., 2015). Indeed, the open community is responding, as #OER17 stands testament.

I listened to a podcast by Catherine Cronin at the weekend where she spoke about the risks and rewards of open education and how things are changing so fast that we have to learn by doing and that we have to do this both individually and collectively. So, I guess what I’m asking is if the open community is OK with the idea that I’ll be researching selfOER, or the open self, and that this will mean my participation essentially involves two aspects: Helen the participant and Helen the critical observer.

I welcome your thoughts.

References:
    • Bayne, S., Knox, J. and Ross, J. (2015) ‘Open education: the need for a critical approach’, Learning, Media and Technology, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 247–250 [Online]. DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2015.1065272.
    • Goodfellow, R. and Lea, M. R. (2016) ‘Literacy and the Digital University’, in The SAGE Handbook of E-learning Research, London, SAGE Publications Ltd, pp. 423–442
    • Gourlay, L. and Oliver, M. (2013) ‘Beyond the social: digital literacies as sociomaterial practice.’, in Goodfellow, R. and Lea, M. R. (eds), Literacy in the Digital University: Critical Perspectives on Learning,  Scholarship and Technology., London, Routledge, pp. 79–94
    • Knox, J. (2013) ‘Five critiques of the open educational resources movement’, Teaching in Higher Education, vol. 18, no. 8, pp. 821–832 [Online]. DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2013.774354.
    • Hildebrandt, K. and Couros, A. (2016) ‘Digital selves, digital scholars: Theorising academic identity in online spaces’, Journal of Applied Social Theory, vol. 1, no. 1 [Online]. Available at http://socialtheoryapplied.com/journal/jast/article/view/16

Image courtesy of: https://unsplash.com/@samuelclara

 

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