Instead of writing a lengthy post this week, I decided to create a short video presentation of some of my learning for OLTD 505. The Powtoon video I created is more of an overview than an exhaustive summary of everything I read, heard, and watched throughout this course. I was thinking that this project would take me no time at all, but in actual fact, I spent the entire day (and then some) working on it—playing, fine tuning, re-tuning—in point of fact, I probably would have completed my written blog in a shorter time period. Well, I did have fun trying out a new tool (thank you Kim for sharing this tool). By the way, I did not add sound to the video.
“Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.” Needless to say, when it comes to sharing online, I am cautious—I don’t like being vulnerable; subjected to the lingering fear of being judged by my peers, and leaving me in a state of ‘posting’ remorse. In the educational netosphere, my trepidation is in the form of personal writing and reflections. I must clarify that I have been posting teaching strategies and lessons for a few years (here is the link to my school site), but I am slightly more comfortable sharing this than blogging about my personal experiences in teaching. On the other hand, I do recognize the benefits of ‘putting yourself out there,’ and to the credit of the OLTD program (Online Learning and Teaching), I am obliged to share on a regular basis. Truth be told, the more I post, the less panic I experience. I suppose this is akin to an actor experiencing fewer episodes of stage fright the more times he/she stands in front of an audience; only my audience is possibly much larger than that of a theater audience (perhaps it is less—you just don’t know).
As a teacher, I am a hypocrite. I expect my students to write insightful blog posts about novels, poems, videos, presentations, readings, etc., and to continually share these ideas, yet before OLTD, I did not even attempt to share my thoughts online. This obviously contradiction—do as I say (not as I do)—speaks to my teaching practice that I must change. I’ve come to appreciate that we need to move beyond “educational voyeurism” (Shareski, 2010); where sneaking peeks at others’ writing, and taking the ideas, resources, lessons, etc. that are interesting will no longer suffice—I must begin to give back, not only to my students, but to other educators. Dean Shareski (2010) ardently maintains that sharing is an educator’s “moral imperative.” If it is our moral imperative to share, then perhaps we are obliged to model this behaviour to our students, as well as our colleagues, as it [sharing] is the “entire premise of what education is built,” and it will be of “benefit to all” (Shareski, 2010). Dean Shareski (2010) declared that he is “a giant derivative,” a statement that is true of most educators. Many of us embark on a daily struggle to find and create interesting and valuable lessons for our students; we scrounge around the bookshelves, ask our colleagues (who are also busy), and search the vast Internet for ideas that will work. On many occasions I have paid a lot of money for packaged resources that occasionally help in this endless endeavor. Thanks to the social renaissance known as the Internet, we benefit from the shared knowledge and creative wealth of other educators and experts in specific fields; we get many of our best ideas from others. Originality, it seems, comes from your spin on the resource—or where you chose to take it, and it is our responsibility to open-up our resources and knowledge for the benefit of others. What does openness look like for educators? I think that we need to be transparent about our educational practice. One means of doing this is by sharing our experiences in blogs, (see my colleague, Shelley Beleznay’s blog) those that reveal what we are doing in our classroom, both the trials and tribulations and the moments that we relished. As I am a consumer of other’s ideas, I believe educators must share resources and allow others to take and remix theirs, as “every little bit that everyone contributes can be changed and made into something new” (Kooner, 2013). Lastly, we need to embrace this culture of openness and share it with our students—they need to learn that their “insights are worth sharing” (Shareski, 2010), and they need not fear it. Perhaps I am making a judgment call, but most educators are practical by nature. We want workable solutions for our classroom, but also solutions that help to engage and inspire students. Many of the practical issues that educators are faced with include lack of time and resources for curriculum creation. Many schools provide little time (if any) for colleague collaboration on designing functional curriculum, or sharing materials, and it seems with all the educational cutbacks, there is even less available time for collaboration. In my district, we have witnessed a reduction in our time for collaboration during PLC (professional learning committees) and during exam week. What happens when teachers are faced with such roadblocks? They begin looking for creative and practical solutions. An educational shift has emerged in the form of open curriculum repositories that are available on the Internet. As Alec Curous (2006) asserts in his PhD dissertation, “Open source culture, nebulous in its boundaries, has begun to slowly penetrate mainstream education.” Educational repositories provide educators with the ability to share, distribute and remix curriculum to suit their curricular needs. The value in uploading and creating educational material is it allows educators more time to spend on teaching, rather than re-inventing new material (or the wheel). That being said, “the real value of OERs will be to shift instructors away from the creation and delivery of content to focusing on how best learning can be developed and facilitated for, in and by our students” (Contact North, 2013). Over the past week, I spent some time perusing the abundant collections/ repositories of open educational resources available on the web. Specifically, I've been on the hunt for psychology resources, as there is a significant deficit of high school resources in this field—unless I am willing to pay for them. To my surprise, I found an adequate amount of open resources to inspire more than a peek at what they had to offer. I focused on psychology resources from the K-12 educational repository, Curriki. The psychology resources were limited to eight, but one provided quite a few lessons on various psychology related subjects, and another provided scores of excellent podcasts (The Psych Files) on a multitude of topics. I now consider the open source community as a valuable resource to educators, as these freely shared resources from Curriki will save me innumerable hours of searching for videos and lesson plans. Ideally, I would put my own spin on any educational material I source out, and this is part of the advantage of OERs, as they allow teachers to adapt and remix material to fit their pedagogical needs. According to the website, Curriki’s objective is to “provide free, high-quality curricula and education resources to teachers, students and parents around the world.” As Curriki is an American based repository, its standards are aligned with various states and its content has a distinctively American flavour. Curriki does offer a variety of curriculum options for K-12, from lesson plans to full courses which are vetted by peers, and educators are also able to nominate resources for Curriki Review Team-- experts in the field. Curriki offers other resources, too, including textbooks, media, and opportunities for collaborative groups. Educators are welcome to contribute to Curriki content, and have the option to select a couple of licensing options: including Creative Commons licensing. Open educational repositories like Curriki, offer practical options for finding material that is current, adaptable and fulfills the requirements of copyright/left licensing. With educational resources in the public domain, educators are able to build on and share materials online—the “participatory culture” (Jenkins, 2006), comes to fruition, and in turn educators share with students. The open source educational resources “revolves around what is considered good teaching and learning” by allowing educators to “customize learning for the specific needs of the individual learners” (Contact North, 2013). Open source resources signal a move in a positive direction; one that implies a culture of openness, collaboration and generosity, and one that will benefit not only the students in our classroom, but will also contribute to learning of students beyond the school environment. Are ideas intellectual property? The criminals of the 21st century are all around us—neighbours, family, friends, students, elected officials…as Larry Lessig aptly stated, if taking someone’s ‘original’ idea is a crime, “then we have a whole generation [and then some] of criminals.” Brett Gaylor’s (2008) captivating film, RIP! A Remix Manifesto, explores the controversial issues of copyright in terms of intellectual property and its connection to the public domain, and he ponders the idea that if the free exchange of ideas were part of the public domain, what could we [humanity] accomplish? Could universal access to knowledge help us eradicate cancer, aids, and create a society in which everyone (not just those who can afford) benefits from free access to academia, the arts?
In the copyleft universe, copyright is seen as out of control. When millions people are deemed copyright criminals, and ordinary citizens are being sued for copyright infringement for peer sharing and downloading of music and videos, it is clear that “the copyright policy is a form of extremism” (Gaylor, 2008 ). Big business suffers from intolerance for openness, as it infringes on their ability to make money off the consumer, or as Gaylor (2008) asserts, “The primary goal [of corporations] is to continue with the business model that had made them rich.” The “balance between the rights of new technology to innovate while maintaining the right of authors to get paid” is an ongoing issue that will persist until policy-makers see how ludicrous many features of copyright policy are in modern times. On a personal level, both my brother in-law and a close friend have been given cease and desists orders for sharing and downloading video—but, this has not stopped these cynical criminals from continuing to file share. According to the Creative Commons website, copyleft allows you to “share you creative wealth” while still protecting your copyright privileges. The creative commons license is less restrictive than copyright; allowing you to “refine” aspects of copyright, so that you chose how others are able to freely share and use your “creative wealth.” The copyleft movement recognizes the truism that drives creative culture, that “no one creates in a vacuum; everything comes from something else, it is a chain reaction” (Gilberto Gil, Minister of Culture, Brazil). Educators have long realized that there is no reason to reinvent the wheel—education is “inherently a relationship of sharing and of generosity” (Wiley, 2012). Where does copyright/left leave educators in B.C? With the new fair-use policy in Bill C-11’s educational provisions, there will be special exemptions given to broaden usage of publicly available resources and material that is used for educational purposes. With fair-use policies, educators will be able to use limited amounts of copyrighted material to help articulate the educational learning objectives. Unfortunately, fair-use policy is up to interpretation and subject to conditions set out by the educational institution. (Morrison, 2012). In terms of educational content creation, public domain resources with Creative Commons licensing are a viable option for educators. By exploring creative solutions and policies to address some of the challenges and barriers of use, technological accessibility may become less of an issue in our modern (technology enhanced) educational environment.
For educators, some obvious benefits to OER include access to resources and fresh, innovative ideas from around the web. The writers for Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know about Open Educational Resources (2010), foresee OER as a means to enhance educational pedagogy by “introducing new alternatives for effective teaching” and potentially bringing about “new styles of teaching and learning.” In order for OER to be successful, the traditional face-to-face model will not suffice—teaching and learning must be revolutionized. Perhaps the new role for students becomes one in which they are in the driver’s seat, “direct[ing] and drive[ing] his or her learning” (Morrison, 2013).
Some concerned educators see this influx of OER as decline in the quality of education and teaching, arguing that OER content and educational resources can be “uneven and depend largely on their sources” (Educause, 2011), or are ineffective at providing content in a constructive manner. Tony Bates (2011) argues that “the weakness with open content is that by its nature, at its purest, it is stripped of [these] developmental, contextual and ‘environmental’ components that are essential for effective learning.” As Tony sees it, the flaw with OER is the apparent deficiency of the “transactional processes” that occur when the learner is actively constructing new knowledge. Research has also shown that individuals learn differently, and as we are not a homogeneous group, it would be safe to say that many students would benefit from OER. Open Educational Resources, MOOCs, etc, are not the panacea for educational reform, and OER may not transform education (or will it?); it does make education more accessible and convenient, less static, and it creates a “disruptive” force that compels educators to take notice of the changes that are coming down the pike. |
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