OER’s, DL’s, Reuse and Culture
its about being a phd student researching digital resoures in a multicultural world.Archive for oer
mess and more.
this is a quick post, because it’s late. consider this more of a place holder.
i had a good time at the open education conference this past week. i made some nice connections with people, expand my own ideas, and had some ideas confirmed. it was nice to know that i’m not the only one thinking about the things i’m thinking about.
during one presentation the idea of being messy came up. social networks are messy – and thusly the social networks we hope to grow around educational content are going to be messy as well. my thought about that idea is – that when it comes to learning we really aren’t given permission to be messy. in educational settings, to be messy is to fail. to be messy is to get the grade we don’t want to get. it is the rare classroom that the messy are the top students, those that are the top students are the neat ones.
this neatness is encouraged, at least from what i’ve seen, in our formal institutions of learning. from pre-k through the phd, cleanliness is encouraged, and expected. i was talking to a friend after the presentation and i told her that the one place i felt i could be messy was in my relationship with the chair of my phd committee, but as i’m writing this, while i can be messy in that relationship, i try not to be. i try to follow the system. i try to make sure that everything i give to my chair to review is as neat as possible, is clean and doesn’t need much fixing.
so what are we to do? how are we to encourage mess in learning? how do we let people that yes, it is okay to be messy? well. then there’s the whole discussion of changing our own thought patterns about learning, which will eventually begin to change our institutions of learning. i know that there are people who are already doing this, and it needs to become more wide spread. i need to accept that i can be messy in my learning.
as i’m writing this i’m watching a documentary on the whirling dervishes. very very cool. she says at one point that at the beginning of silence is chaos. i think there may be something we can learn from this chaos, from this chaotic meditation, the trance of the dervishes. the mess that this meditation looks like. through this chaos they are able to reach a place of complete peace. this chaos leads them to a place of great knowledge and understanding. pretty cool, eh?
i’ll leave you with this final, not at all related thought, just because it is so beautiful:
i discovered that the roots of hate and destruction emanate from the human mind, not from god. with the power of faith, no force or tyrant can stop anyone from following their hearts. ~ the narrator of the documentary ‘the mystic iran’
hmm. maybe this wasn’t just a place holder, eh?
questions about ocw
I’m spending time surfing the open courseware sites tonight. I decided to spend this time because I’ve not had much of a chance over the semester to do so because I’ve been very focused on class work. Now that I’ve got a brief break its time to get back to the thing that drew me here to Utah State –> open content / open courseware / oer’s (jargony o words).
I thought I would spend the time tonight looking specifically at readability. It is readability that I’m looking at for my study in the spring with the Power of Positive Parenting. While that has definitely been an item of interest tonight, it hasn’t ended up being the sole focus of my web surfing. What has happened instead is that I am developing a list of questions.
like:
- Who is open content for? Okay, lets say its for all of us, but in looking at the content, the majority of it is for those of us who have access. In my opinion, we should be focusing on relevant content for those who need access.
- What about standards? What I mean is that I go to one open courseware site and see a really groovy course title, go into the course, and find myself terribly disappointed by the fact that there was just a list of topics covered in the face to face class, a list of readings that i have to go way out of my way to access, but nothing I could chew on. Whereas I go to another site, see a groovy course title, find complete lecture notes and readings linked directly from the site that end up being more than a meal. Do we need standards about what should be called open courseware? Or, if not standards, do we need to redefine what open courseware is? It seems as though the broad spectrum of what is available under that particular o word is too broad. Somehow, we need to make expectations of what is contained in each course at the forefront clear (color code it?), and give people the ability to search based on if they are just window shopping for content or are interested in a big meal.
- Along that same lines, reusability. I understand that an open courseware course is a collaboration of learning objects, and I’ve read that “to make learning objects maximally reusable, learning objects should contain as little context as possible.” I think we can still apply the reusability paradox to open courseware, but I think the curve is different. Rather than an inverse relationship between reusability and pedagogical effectiveness, I think that the paradox looks like a normal distribution. I posit if we don’t have enough context it can’t be reused and paradoxically if there is too much context, reusing becomes too cumbersome. So, if we want these valuable resources to be disseminated, what is the balance?
on open ed 2006
we just finished open ed 2006 here at utah state. it was a good 3 days for me, and i heard so much, and more importantly got to connect with a lot of really interesting people. unfortunately, because my brain is on such an overload from EVERYTHING that has to do with july 31st 2006 on, i don’t have anything eloquent to say about the 3 days, but i’ll do my best to write something of pertinance down here.
but first, let me share with you a picture:
yep. we took them on a hike. not too hard, i got to talk with a few very interesting people on the way up and back, and see a beaver dam, and see the sawmill that cut the wood for the logan mormon temple. good stuff.
so, back to the subject at hand. what did i garner from the experience?
- whoo hoo! we coslites aren’t the only freaks in the world saying ‘open it up, give it away!’ there’s actually a whole lot of us. i mean, i knew it, but it was nice to meet the people behind the blogs, wikis and ocws.
- we’re still very much at the beginning of this. i mean, i knew we were, but to listen to some of these presentations it became apparent how much we are still dealing with beginning of the movement issues. this what it must have been like at conferences about things like this whole ‘www’ thing, or later – online learning. still grappling. but thats okay, from my very new view, its just what the beginning of a movement looks like. though, it seems like we’re not at the very beginning, but more like nearing the end of the beginning stage. to see small colleges, non-profits, for-profits, for profit universities there means that this whole idea of mit and the rest of the ocw consortiuum is starting to have an affect.
- we need to start doing more research about all of this. we need data to back up our claims. we can’t simply rest on our laurels. as we move into the next stage of this movement detractors are going to want research data. what to research? well, for me its about localization. i think we also need to understand our different purposes and research our methods for moving forward with those goals.
- we need to remember the people, the users. it was nice to have that confirmed by rex allen from the church of the lds perpetual education fund. just like we need not forget all of us sitting behind blogs and wikis, we also need to remember our users who sit behind our ocws, wikis and blogs.
- what else? localization = good. but doing a detailed user analysis is something i need to do.
i think thats it that my addle-brain can come up with in this moment. to that end, what do i do next, what brilliant ideas did i come up with? oh goodness, good question. seriously.
- my project on localization is a good thing. its important and will lend something to our movement, and i’m excited about it.
- lets start creating a volunteer base here in the united states like they’ve got going, i think, at OOPS in china. i had someone tell me that they’d love to do outreach in connection with cosl, and they’d do it for free. when starting a grassroots movement, you’ve got to have volunteers. volunteers are some of the best advocates for what you are doing, because they love it so much they are willing to do this for free. they are passionate. wikipedia is a great example. lets here in the states follow in the footsteps of our chinese friends and start building that base.
- permaculture. i chatted with brian lamb briefly about his post on permaculture. my friends out at lost valley educational center are permaculture people. i’ve already thought about trying to ocw their ecovillage permaculture certificate program, and after taking a chance (seriously, i’m playing this ‘i’ve only been here for x weeks as long as possible, because i can still say stupid things and people will just put it to ’she’s just new, she’ll get smarter later.), and sharing with him my idea, i was very encouraged by his reaction (thanks brian!). i’ve already emailed my friend who runs the program about meeting with him when i’m in oregon next week for a week. i’m going to take a break, but i want to explore this idea while i’m there in person
thats it for now, but its my intention to listen to as much of the conference as possible on my ipod during my 26 hours going too and from oregon next week and the week after next. i hope i’ll come up with more ideas.
localization is really instructionally sound?
i’ve been thinking a lot about localization lately. its one of the things i hope to study in the spring. but for me its not exactly localization, its more regionalization. i’m not thinking about things like culture as in a completely different culture than the american one, or language. for me its about how to take a piece of open courseware to a specific audience. i guess its more of a reuse (ah, no ‘reuse’ category at the good dr. wiley’s weblog, i’ll find a link later) issue, reusing a piece of ocw. anyhow, my point. i was talking to someone in the department today about being stuck on this concept of regionalization — what does it mean? and i think i started to understand — part of regionalization (and localization?) is making it instructionaly sound for the audience. and what happens with oer’s is that regionalization / localization happens at the local level – with the instructor being the one to make it instructionaly relevant to the user.
so, this is a challenge. how to make oer’s instructionally relevant at the development level? and then i guess there’s this whole point of, each of us is different, and what is meaningful to one person is not necessarily meaningful to another person. its difficult enough to deal with that in a class of 10 students, much less one of 30 (imho one of the problems of public schooling, but another issue for another day), much less the to any possible person in the whole of the internet. but maybe.. oh, thats another post for another day. think the long tail – making a lot relevant to a few people, rather than relevant to lots of people.
so, what does this mean? i’m not really sure what it means. it means that i’m now looking at another piece of this whole open content world. it means that i’m now understanding why we need to understand this whole reuse issue.
this is like an onion. so many layers, and i just keep peeling it back, seeing a new layer, and then a new way to see it. its facinating, absolutely facinating.
I'm Brooke, a second year PhD student at Utah State University in Instructional Technology. My interests include digital resources, reuse and localization. Specifically I'm interested in the interplay between culture and reuse of oer's (open educational resources). How can we reuse instructional materials so that they are culturally relevant to users. What is culture? How do we define it in an educational setting? Is making something more culturally relevant more motivating and will that make it more instructionally effective? How can we quantify culture so that we can create processes to more easily adapt instructional resources for the complexities and depth of culture? It's a lifetime of work. 