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Category: Digital Literacies

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/

Literacy: not a desk job, but an identity job.

It’s funny where an image can take you and what associations pop into your head. Steve Wheeler @timbuckteeth, egged on by Amy Burvall @Amyburvall, have unleashed a bit of a blogging sensation this week #blimage. The idea is, you’re presented with an image and you have to craft a blog post based on the thoughts that it conjures up. Steve threw down the gauntlet with this image of old school desks.

The image immediately made me think of the school in Beamish Museum (the living museum of the north); I’ve always had a thing for the social history of ordinary folk. Any way, I couldn’t help thinking of how reading and writing was done back then. I thought of the evolution of writing on slates with chalk, to writing in your jotter with a fountain or ball point pen, to nowadays when keyboards process your words. I thought of how you were made to sit at your desk, in rows, and how learning is heavily associated with classrooms. I thought of how these experiences of reading and writing are powerful and how they come to mean things to people, to mean different things to different people, and that these meanings are dependent on their situatedness.

I remembered (gosh, I’m starting to sound old) when I was doing my teaching placement, when I was confronted by one young lad, a recent school leaver, who would hardly pick up a pen in class (who am I kidding, it wasn’t just one). Any way, in the jottings of my reflective practice, he would have been called a ‘reluctant writer’. That is, until I encountered him in the Student Services, or Guidance, office where he was flourishing his pen with gusto as he completed paperwork to join the Army. He was reluctant to write in class as the tasks being set were, in all honesty, not ‘authentic’ and not aligned with the identity that he wished for.

So now, with all the talk of digital literacy and digital skills, I think it’s important to remember this little tale as it’s not just a matter of prescribing a set of skills for individuals to acquire, but a matter of developing them in context, mindful of the fact that it’s an identity job.

The #blimage challenge can be taken up by anybody. Go check out the hashtag.

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Meet your maker #teachtheweb

I think I’m becoming what you might call a “webpie”. That is, like a magpie I’m attracted to shiny things, shiny things on the web that is. This week I’ve been dazzled by the “Teach the Web” MOOC being offered by Mozilla. Although I’d been aware of  the open course for some while, I hadn’t actually thought of participating in it. I was looking forward to easing off from my recent online learning bonanza, but something about it caught my eye and drew me in.

Teach the Web
So shiny, “Teach the Web”.

Week 1, entitled “Making as Learning” is a topic with which my curiosity had already been piqued. A tweet, by Mary Loftus at the PELeCON conference, had firmly lodged it in my head. Relating to maker culture, it made the point that individuals who can demonstrate their skills will have an advantage over those who rely on qualifications. I’m familiar with the idea of literacy and the ability to write the web through coding, but I’m largely unfamiliar with the wider “Maker Movement”.

Without doubt, the blurb in the introduction to the course was highly appealing.

Teach the Web is:

  • about connecting with other people who are passionate about spreading digital and web literacies
  • meant to be a social collaboration, rather than a solo deep dive into content.

Topics will include:

  • teaching digital literacies through making, remixing and sharing
  • incorporating openness and online innovation into teaching practices
  • adapting educational resources to meet your learners’ interests and needs
  • getting feedback from peers on your own resources and lessons

Is this for me?

  • Estimated time: 2hr/week or as much time as you have. This experience is completely self-serve.
  • Equipment needed: Laptop, internet and a G+ account
  • Skills required: Just an interest in helping others to learn how to make things on the web. Oh, and a spirit of adventure.

Q: Sound doable? A: Yeah, I suppose I just about have 2hrs. It sounds like fun.

Week 1 tasks:

The “make” this week was to create a “webby” introduction, and post it on G+ Webmakers. A range of Mozilla Webmaker tools were signposted, but seeing as I’d only recently created a web-style introduction in another application, I decided not to go poking around with new tools right this minute, so I posted “one I made earlier”. And I’m glad that I did, because straight away other “makers” in the community started to make comments and pass the time of day. It was good to feel connected and welcomed in. So, here it is; I cordially invite you to meet your maker (2 mins):

I also joined the “writing as making/making as writing” study group, which, within the many facets and interpretations of web and digital literacies, is probably closer to my “making” proclivities.

The reading and reflection for the week offered a nice sample of readings and resources to start us off thinking about “making as learning”.

We are all makers in some form. In the act of making we express ourselves through our creations, and in the process we reflect, share and learn. The “Maker Movement”, as Rufi Santo’s article explains, takes its core ideas from Constructionist learning theory and the foundational work of Seymor Papert to espouse that “making”, when it’s done in and is contingent upon well configured social contexts, such as communities of practice and affinity spaces, as opposed to more solitary expressions, offers exciting possibilities for learning in this day and age.

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