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Tag: “open learning”

The #OEP jigsaw pieces are out of the box, or is that #selfOER?

There’s nothing for it! I’m gonna have to blog messy – confused and conflated as I resume my passion for open learning and rejoin the conversation on all things open and education. Well, actually, as I try and firm up a PhD research proposal and, fingers crossed, get down to the business of carrying it out – as an open researcher, possibly.

I’m a full-time research student funded on a 1+3 deal, which means that I had to undertake a Research Master’s before embarking on the PhD proper. The good news is I passed my MRes. I received final confirmation just last week. The thing is, although I gained valuable skills, I think the exercise dealt me something of a curve-ball with regards to my relationship with open learning. No, what I really mean is learning in the open. It served to funnel me into an institutional programme of prescribed assignments and to undertake a dissertation at breakneck speed. There was no time to learn outside of these parameters and, once the programme had commenced, no time to reflect on the implications of decisions made for pragmatic reasons. Any way, I’m now in a position to reflect on my experience and to plan the way ahead – back on the open road 🙂

Originally, I responded to a call for research proposals under the theme of ‘Literacies for Learning in a Digital Age’. I proposed something relating to literacies and professional learning in open networks. However, from the get go (interview) the question was “what professionals?”, “what context?”, to which my non-plussed answer was “professionals, people, in networks, the Internet”. And then the momentum of the MRes programme kicked in and there was no time to unpack my thinking and to take this forward. But now that I can go back, I see where the impasse occurred. There was much that was conflated.

The call itself was conflated. Areas suggested for investigation were conflated across contexts for learning and across the disciplines of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) and literacies studies. These are disciplines that I’m conflated over myself as I have a subject specialism in Adult Literacy and a Master’s degree in Technology, Learning, Innovation and Change, which presents equally a source of synergy and challenge. There are different epistemological and methodological approaches associated with each respectively, and the uneasy relationship this causes is well-documented (Goodfellow & Lea, 2013; Gourlay, Hamilton & Lea, 2014; Lea, 2016).

I’m further conflated across contexts. I often fail to distinguish between everyday learning, lifelong learning, personal learning and professional learning, informal learning for continuing professional development and informal workplace learning. I’m also conflated across roles, or identities. Am I a learner, an educator, a researcher, learning support or learning technologist? Furthermore, am I positioned inside the academy or outside? Maybe I’m just me: living and learning, and liking it all the more when I’m participating in open networks.

It’s fair to say that I don’t easily recognise boundaries. There can be little doubt that I’m “a boundary creature [that] inhabits more than one world” (McGinnis, 1999, p.61). I think this is due in part because of my familiarity with network technology and learning in networks. Also, because the ability to adapt across contexts with the requisite change of identity is fundamental for a literacies practitioner so that they can support literacy as situated social practice wherever they’re deployed. Thankfully, the ability to perform work around boundary objects in interdisciplinary teams is an acknowledged imperative relative to TEL (Scanlon and Taylor, 2016), so all is not lost.

Given all this, and in terms of moving forward, I’m mindful of Maxwell’s (2013) advice that a conceptual framework for research is something that you build, not something that exists ready-made, and that the most productive ones often bring in ideas from outside traditionally defined fields and/or integrate different approaches or lines of investigation, or theories that hadn’t been previously connected.

It’s here that Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005 and Law & Hassard, 1999) speaks to my sensibilities. ANT does not countenance binary concepts and plays down context in favor of contextualization. To counter technological determinism and social determinism, it takes a relational view that sees boundaries between the social and the material as emerging from the strength of  relationships between human and non-human actors. This relationship is manifested, or enacted, in everyday practices.

It seems that Actor Network Theory might be a useful way to investigate Open Educational Practices (OEP). I provide the definition of OEP advanced by Ehlers and Conole (2010), although it must be noted there’s no singularly agreed definition.

‘Open Educational Practices (OEP) are the use of open educational resources with the aim to improve the quality of educational processes and innovate educational environments.’

Actor Network Theory would enable OEP to be framed as sociomaterial practice and to highlight the literacy practices and use of learning technology that OEP embeds.

I mean, how does OEP get done? What does it look like? What components hold it together as a practice – texts, tech, policies etc. etc. How does it hold together to become a recognizable practice? In terms of the relationships that hold it together, what are the relative strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

O.K, but the question still remains, where is this OEP; where are the open education practices situated that I hope to research? In the network, of course, in the network of practices that pertain to Open Scholarship (Weller, 2011), or Networked Participatory Scholarship (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012), and given ANT’s proclivity towards the symmetry of  human and non-human actants, the recent conceptualization of the self as OER (Koseoglu and Bali, 2016), indeed a human OER (Funes, 2014), seems an almost irresistible prospect to research from such a perspective.

“Open educational practices as resources for others to use” (Koseoglu and Bali, 2016).

That is, the informal everyday activities that arise out of the relationships and motivations of individuals participating in open networked activities such as blogging and Tweeting.

So, along with a range of concepts, the OEP jigsaw pieces are out of the box, or maybe the self-OER or human OER jigsaw pieces are out of the box, who knows. And who knows, as I progress my research ideas, how they’ll be assembled and what picture they’ll present.

References:

Ehlers, U. and Conole, G. (2010) ‘Open educational practices: Unleashing the power of OER’, UNESCO Workshop on OER in Namibia [Online]. Available at http://efquel.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/OEP_Unleashing-the-power-of-OER.pdf (Accessed 14 January 2017).

Funes, M. (2014) ‘A human OER’, doublemirror [Online]. Available at https://mdvfunes.com/2014/10/22/a-human-oer/ (Accessed 6 February 2017).

Goodfellow, R. and Lea, M.R., 2013. Literacy in the digital university: Critical perspectives on learning, scholarship and technology. Routledge.

Gourlay, L., Hamilton, M. and Rosalind Lea, M. (2014) ‘Textual practices in the new media digital landscape: messing with digital literacies’, Research in Learning Technology, vol. 21, no. 0 [Online]. Available at http://researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/21438 (Accessed 14 January 2017).

Koseoglu, S. and Bali, M. (2016) ‘The Self as an Open Educational Resource [1091]’, #OER16 [Online]. Available at https://oer16.oerconf.org/sessions/the-self-as-an-open-educational-resource-1091/ (Accessed 6 February 2017).

Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press

Law, J. & Hassard, J. (1999) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford, England: Blackwell

Lea, M. R. (2016) ‘Academic literacies: looking back in order to look forward’, Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL), vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 88–101.

Maxwell, J. A. (2013) Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach., 3 edition. Thousand Oaks, Calif, SAGE Publications, Inc.

McGinnis, M.V. (1999) Bioregionalism. Cited in Adams, A., Fitzgerald, E. and Priestnall, G. (2013) ‘Of Catwalk Technologies and Boundary Creatures’, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 1–34.

Scanlon, E. and Taylor, J. (2016) ‘Is technology enhanced learning an interdisciplinary activity?’, [Online]. Available at http://oro.open.ac.uk/46300/ (Accessed 14 January 2017).

Veletsianos, G. & Kimmons, R. (2012). Assumptions and challenges of open scholarship. International Review of Online & Distributed Learning, 13(4), 166-189.

Weller, M. (2011). The Digital Scholar: How technology is transforming scholarly practice. Basingstoke: Bloomsbury Academic.

Image: Erdenebayar https://pixabay.com/en/jigsaw-puzzle-puzzle-picture-pieces-712465/

Hanging back out in the open with #BYOD4L

I’ve been so preoccupied for the last year or so that I’ve had little time to engage in social networking or any open learning/reflecting. However, at the start of the week I happened to notice Sheila McNeil’s blog post extolling the benefits of participating in an open learning event called BYOD4L. She says “it brings people together to share practice […and] it’s a great way to reflect on how your own use of technology has evolved”. So, I thought I’d make time and give it a go. I’m glad that I did because it made me realise just how drastically my use of technology has altered in line with my learning practices. I’ve transitioned from an open learner, someone who is comfortable connecting and learning in open networks, to a PhD research student whose time and effort is more directed inwards or within closed communities.

 

The #BYOD4l activities centered on the 4Cs: connecting; communicating; curating; collaborating and creating. They provide an interesting  framework to reflect on the changes.

I would’ve said that I was pretty au-fait at using technology to connect, but Lord, you know the saying “use it or lose it”, well that’s what’s happened. What a performance I had on Monday night trying to figure out how to use TweetDeck for a Twitter chat. This can’t be right. Then I remembered, I used to use Hootesuite with its dashboard configured like NASA control center to stream a gazillion Twitter hashtags and lists. It was like finding old friends, all those streams of conversations on familiar topics 🙂

In terms of communicating, I haven’t blogged regularly about my learning for ages. It’s not that I haven’t been writing; it’s just that I’ve been writing for a select audience of supervisors, and it just doesn’t seem to be stuff that warrants a blog post. I wish I hadn’t fallen out of the habit of blogging so regularly because I now feel that a large part of my learning journey will go uncaptured and it’ll be tricky to see the rationale (or lack of) for how things have developed.

The tools I primarily use for communicating at the moment seem to be Slack and Facebook groups. Both have been excellent in terms of facilitating essential peer support. BTW, there was an interesting discussion about Slack as a teaching and learning platform, due to its easy affordances of channels and messaging.

Could Slack Be the Next Online Learning Platform?

Slack app at University of Southampton

The topic of curating was an interesting reflection because the course listed a whole pile of content curation tools, most of them that I’ve used to a greater or lesser extent at one time or another. What struck me though was that the primary curation I do now is curating bibliographic references, for myself. I use Zotero, which is open source, and   although it has the option to share your reference library, I haven’t actually done this. I might do in the future.

Collaborating is not really where I’m at at the moment. My primary focus is to develop a solid PhD research proposal, and that’s not a team sport.

The final C is creation. The BYOD4L course suggests that you create an artefact about your learning using a tool that you haven’t used before. Well, I cheated. I thought I’d use a tool I haven’t used in ages instead- my blog. And I’m glad that I did. And I’m glad that I joined BYOD4l this week as I’ve enjoyed hanging back out in the open – connecting and learning. It’s made me realise

I’m an open learner. Get me back out there!!!

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Celebrate success, acknowledge support – the Camino way.

Check this! I just finished walking over 1200km from Cadiz in Southern Spain to Santiago de Compostella in North West Spain. In a venture that took 5 trips to make the distance, I just walked 210km in 7 days to complete the final stage of the Camino de Santiago. Walking along each day gives you the chance to slow down, to think and to reflect. That’s what this blog post is really about, I’ve been reflecting on my learning journey and about the success and support I’ve had along the way. Before I come to that though, I’ll enlighten you a little bit about the Camino itself.

The Camino de Santiago is the name given to a collection of pilgrimage routes that lead from all over Spain and Europe to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostella and the shrine of St. James in Galicia in North West Spain. The place has been a site of pilgrimage since the middle ages, and indeed it continues to thrive as such today.

Easily, 500 to 1000 modern-day pilgrims arrive into Santiago each day in the summer months. Pilgrims come from all over the world. They walk alone, as couples, as families or as groups and associations. They are amazingly diverse: from the octogenarian undertaking a few kilometers each day, the life-logging speed merchant, the holidaying couple or professional on sabbatical to the infant being pushed along in its buggy or the joyful group of ‘jovenes’ who bounce along the track as they belt out their Camino ‘playlist’. Needless to say, motivations to undertake the journey are myriad, some deeply personal or religious, some to do with the physical or social aspects of the Camino whilst others take it as an opportunity to disengage from the frenetic pace of modern day life. What’s my motivation you might wonder. Well, the route(s) is signposted as a European ‘cultural itinerary’. Frequently the word cultural is scribbled out in favor of the word spiritual. I asked my husband, Steve, why we were walking the Camino; he said “because it’s an itinerary” – as in ‘because it’s there’. Sounds about right.

There’s fantastic infrastructure associated with the Camino. If pilgrims wish to gain the Compostella, the traditional certificate of a successful pilgrimage, they need to carry a pilgrim’s passport and get it stamped along the way. We were intent on gaining the certificate, but we were also spurred on by the thought of celebrating our success in a nice restaurant with a menu that included scallops and a bottle of fine wine, particularly apt as the scallop shell is the emblem of St. James and is worn by pilgrims to distinguish them as such.

There’s also provision made along the way for pilgrim accommodation or shelter. As is tradition, municipal albergues or religious orders provide dormitory accommodation for around €10 a night. You can however choose your lodging according to your purse, 5 star paradors if you like. We are in the complete minority and carry a tent as it gives you loads of flexibility in terms of the distance you can walk each day. Free camping is permitted in Spain. You can call it wild camping, guerrilla camping or stealth camping if you prefer; either way, it’s not for everyone. Besides, you actually have to carry the tent, plus the rest of the gear that camping entails, and no matter how ‘lite’ you go, it inevitably all adds up. I wouldn’t be able to carry it all on my own. I carry what I can (camping stove, food, water) but I don’t actually carry the tent. Steve has to carry that. This is where I got to thinking about the support we receive as we go along in life.

Support that without which we couldn’t do half of what we do or be half the person we are today.

This got me thinking further. As much as I might like to think of myself as an autonomous learner, you have to wonder if the notion isn’t just a little phony. I mean, if I read a book then surely I’m learning from the author. You get the point; the author is facilitating or supporting my learning. Similarly, since I started using Twitter, started blogging and learning in MOOCs and in open networks my learning has been marvelously facilitated and supported by a whole bunch of people, people who share their work openly online or who engage online and take an interest.

I’ve recently been fortunate enough to have been awarded a 4 year, fully funded MRes/PhD studentship with CREET (Centre for Education and Education Technology) at the Open University. I start in October. Such an occurrence wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for the help and support I’ve received from others. Here, I’m particularly thinking of people such as Jane Hart, who alerted me in the first instance to the potential of Twitter and whose workshops have helped me understand the evolving landscape of learning that’s both social and personal; Steve Wheeler who showed me the value of Twitter and nigh on chapter and verse regarding Web 2.0 and digital pedagogy;  Harold Jarche, blogging genius and formative thinker who prompts me to consider how life is altered in the network era; similarly, Jeff Merrell who’s opened up his master’s course to explore innovations in networked learning; Catherine Cronin, who warmly and inclusively engages the conversation about openness and the democratization of learning, and who’s wonderfully supportive on a personal level too, as is Sharon Flynn and Mary Loftus and the ‘Signals of Success’, or OLDSMOOP, group that includes Paige Cuffe, Sheila MacNeil and Yishay Mor.

As life moves from one phase to another, it’s good to reflect, to take stock and to show your appreciation for any support you’ve been given. It’s also good to pan forward and to set new learning goals or milestones, to outline improvement strategies you’d like to make to your learning regime and, most importantly, to imagine how you’ll reward yourself and celebrate success once all the hard work pays off. So, if I’m successful in my PhD candidacy (Steve, take note), I’d like to dine on lobster thermidor and sip Margarita cocktails on a yacht in the Mediterranean 🙂 In the interests of clarity and propriety, I’d better make it clear that I’m referring here to Steve, my husband, and not to Steve Wheeler. LOL

Finally, before I go, if you want to get more of a feel for what the Camino is about, you might like to check out the film, The Way, starring Martin Sheen; it does a fair job of capturing the spirit of the thing. Or, if you like, you can check out my FB photo album here.

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