navigating the marvellous: openness in education - #altc 2014
DESCRIPTION
Keynote presentation for #ALTC 2014. A fuller link to video & a summary of the keynote is here: http://catherinecronin.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/navigating-marvellous/ Abstract: Inspired by a Seamus Heaney poem (Lightenings viii), I’ll explore “navigating the marvellous”, the challenge of embracing open practices, of being open, in higher education, from the perspective of educators and students, citizens and policy makers. To be in higher education is to learn in two worlds: the open world of informal learning and networked connections, and the predominantly closed world of the institution. As higher education moves slowly, warily, and unevenly towards openness, students deal daily with the dissonance between these two worlds; navigating their own paths between them, and developing different skills, practices, and identities in the various learning spaces which they visit and inhabit. Educators also make daily choices about the extent to which they teach, share their work, and interact, with students and others, in bounded and open spaces. How might we construct and navigate Third Spaces of learning, not formal or informal but combined spaces where connections are made between students and educators (across all sectors), scholars, thinkers, and citizens — and where a range of identities and literacy practices are welcomed? And if, as Joi Ito has said, openness is a survival trait for the future, how do we facilitate this process of “opening education”? The task is one not just of changing practices but of culture change; we can learn much from other movements for justice, equality and social change.TRANSCRIPT
Navigating the Marvellous:Openness in Education
Catherine Cronin @catherinecronin #altc 2nd Sept 2014 Imag
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divide spacesopen identity
divide spacesopen identity
Education is inherently
an ethical and political
act.
Michael Apple
Public domain: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Collection ppmsca.04295
CC BY Burns Library, Boston College (Flickr)
At its best openness is an ethos not a license. It's an approach to teaching and learning that builds a community of learners online and off.
Jim Groom@jimgroom
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Image: CC BY-SA 2.0 cogdog
Openness:
hubris or
humility?
“I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process [of] establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.”
– Joi Ito @joi
Slide: CC-BY-SA catherinecronin Image: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 yobink
Social Networks
InternetMobile
Networked Individualism
2005 2013
Source: Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 2005-2013
divide spacesopen identity
There is a divide between formal and informal learning.
Students navigate the dissonance between these – with or without our support.
…furtive thinking and behaviour around open-web resources such as Wikipedia masks the level of use of non-traditional resources and also masks the methods learners use to increase their understanding of subjects, creating what we have called The Learning Black Market. The point at which learning takes place is often not being discussed because either explicitly or implicitly learners are being told by their educational intuitions or perceive that the educational institutions view that their information-seeking practices are not legitimate.
David White, Lynn S. Connaway, Donna Lanclos, Erin M. Hood & Carrie Vass
Evaluating digital services: a Visitors and Residents approach, JISC InfoNet
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Seamus Heaney Lightenings viii - video by Eoghan Kidney
vimeo.com/4831035
divide spacesopen identity
Image: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Alec Couros
Networked Teacher
NetworkedEducators
NetworkedStudents
Physical Spaces
Bounded Online Spaces
Open Online Spaces
CC images: cdessums, infidelic, sholeh!
NetworkedEducators
NetworkedStudents
Physical Spaces
Bounded Online Spaces
Open Online Spaces
NetworkedEducators
NetworkedStudents
Physical Spaces
Bounded Online Spaces
Open Online Spaces
divide spacesopen identity
Strange putting a face to the voice of my first year maths lecturer!
Khan Academy is possibly one of the most useful sources for students studying maths. The idea is simple, If you don't understand the first time you watch it... watch it again.
Khan Academy...
#studentvoice
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@CT231 #ct231
We’re now looking at the ‘tag-team model’ of education: the projects never end, as there is always a cohort to carry on, and lead into the next group, and when they overlap that’s great – that’s where the genuine collaboration happens. Traditionally, we deliver modules/courses, neatly chunked into 12 weeks, with units of assessment, leading to grades etc. and that’s the way things are (generally) done. I’m not saying scrap all of that, but I do think that modules are best served as springboards to other things.
Increasingly, students are connecting across levels and cohorts through Twitter and now we have ex-students getting together with current students, undergrads coming to postgrad classes (and vice versa) as they’ve connected online and have a genuine interest in getting involved in other groups/further curricula outside of their taught modules.”
#icollab
Helen Keegan (2012)@heloukee
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#icollab TAGSExplorerthanks to @mhawksey
Individuals, students and educators, can be nodes in a network.
Groups and learning communities also can be nodes, e.g. via #hashtags.
https://storify.com/catherinecronin/msokeeffesclass-visit-to-nuig
HE – primary school collaboration@msokeeffesclass
Youth Media Team @YMTfm
Coder Dojo @coderdojo
storify.com/catherinecronin/icollab-student-staff-twitter-chat
#studentvoice
I learned a lot more about writing to the public. Before this I would have been less likely to express my views to a group of people online whereas now I would not have a problem in doing so.
By posting publicly it opened up our world to other academics or people who are just interested in the topic... I don’t think anyone would have thought that the author of one of the works we were researching would get involved.
#studentvoice
Openness...
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Before studying it, I used Facebook and Twitter mainly just for keeping in contact with people, but since have discovered they both have much more to offer.
They are places to discover new information and boost your knowledge. That both education and socialising can be rolled into one.
#studentvoice
Social networks...
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Open practices give us and our students opportunities to cross boundaries of geography, culture, institution, term, education sector, community, and/or power level…
divide spacesopen identity
Image: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Frederic Poirot
digital identity
DigiLit Leicester
Working to improve learner outcomes and raise standards in secondary level schools across Leicester
through design & implementation of a digital literacy framework for secondary school staff.
Josie Fraser, Richard Hall & Lucy Atkins
http://www.digilitleic.com
As studies become more contextualised it seems that the real lesson of online identity is not that it transforms identity but that it makes us more aware that offline identity was already more multiple, culturally contingent and contextual than we had appreciated.
Danny Miller (2013) @dannyanth
Photo by George Miller (used with permission)
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A learning space
not
THE space
We proposed the idea of a Third Space where teacher and student scripts – the formal and informal, the official and unofficial spaces of the learning environment – intersect, creating the potential for authentic interaction and a shift in the social organization of learning and what counts as knowledge.
University of Colorado, Boulder
Kris Gutiérrez (2008)
“
People live their lives and learn across multiple settings, and this holds true not only across the span of our lives but also across and within the institutions and communities they inhabit...
I take an approach that urges me to consider the significant overlap across these boundaries as people, tools, and practices travel through different and even contradictory contexts and activities .
Gutiérrez (2008)
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NetworkedEducators
NetworkedStudents
Physical Spaces
Bounded Online Spaces
Open Online Spaces
If institutions of learning are going to help learners with the real challenges they face... [they] will have to shift their focus from imparting curriculum to supporting thenegotiation of productive identities through landscapes of practices.
CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 choconancy1
Etienne Wenger (2010)
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Manifesto for teaching onlineMSc in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh
By redefining connection, we find we can make eye contact online.
Place is differently, not less, important online.
Community and contact drive good online learning.
…
onlineteachingmanifesto.wordpress.com
There’s a risk that online education systems get tooled to “the norm” – a roaming autodidact a self-motivated, able learner that is simultan-eously embedded in technocratic futures and disembedded from place, culture, history, and markets.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (2014)
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tressiemc.com/2014/07/30/round-up-of-berkman-center-notes-and-reflections
Learners need to practice and experiment with different ways of enacting their identities, and adopt subject positions through different social technologies and media.
These opportunities can only be supported by academic staff who are themselves engaged in digital practices and questioning their own relationship with knowledge.
- Keri Facer & Neil Selwyn (2010)
divide spacesopen identity
navigating the marvellous…
#YesAllWomen
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Gardner Campbell – Ecologies of Yearning
youtube.com/watch?v=kIzA4ItynYw
Openness [is] process, not product after all. It’s not so much the what we learn but the how and the who with and the why we do so… it’s not so much about “open” as an adjective to describe education; rather it’s “opening” as a verb to describe what we must do. What we want students, learners, all of us, to do.
Audrey Watters (2012)
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Image: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Tim Haynes
“We have to build our half of the bridge…” Colum McCann
Thank you!
Catherine Cronin@catherinecronin
about.me/catherinecronin
slideshare.net/cicronin
Image: CC BY 2.0 visualpanic
ReferencesApple, Michael (1990). Foreword. In S.G. O’Malley, R.C. Rosen & L. Vogt (Eds.) Politics of Education: Essays from Radical Teacher. State University of New York Press.
Atkins, L., Fraser, J. and Hall, R. (2014) DigiLit Leicester: Project Activities Report, Leicester: Leicester City Council (CC BY-NC 3.0).
Cottom, Tressie McMillan (2014). Roundup of Berkman Center Notes & Reflections. tressiemc.com
Cronin, Catherine (2014). Networked learning and identity development in open online spaces. 9th international Networked Learning Conference, Edinburgh.
Facer, Keri & Selwyn, Neil (2010). Social networking: Key messages from the research. In R. Sharpe, H. Beetham & S. de Freitas (Eds.) Rethinking Learning For A Digital Age. Routledge.
Gutiérrez, Kris D. (2008). Developing a sociocritical literacy in the Third Space. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(2), 148-164.
Heaney, Seamus (1991) Lightenings viii, Seeing Things. Faber and Faber.
Ito, Joi (2011, December 5). In an open-source society, innovating by the seat of our pants. The New York Times.
Keegan, Helen (2012). A new academic year: global, connected, creative – and not (quite) a MOOC.
Miller, Danny (2013). Future Identities report. Foresight Project, DR2.
Pew Research Internet Project (2013). Social Media Update 2013.
Rainie, Lee & Wellman, Barry (2012). Networked: The new social operating system. MIT Press.
Watters, Audrey (2012). Gardner Campbell, J. Alfred Prufock, and the Ecologies of Yearning. hackeducation
Wenger, Etienne (2010). Knowledgeability in Landscapes of Practice SRHE Conference 2010. In deFreitas & Jameson, Eds. (2012) The e-Learning Reader.
Additional Resources
Reclaim Open Learning “Showcases innovation that brings together the
best of truly open, online and networked learning in the wilds of the Internet, with the expertise
represented by institutions of higher education.”
http://open.media.mit.edu/
http://open.media.mit.edu/
Reclaim Open Learning Challenge 2013
Open Mercia @OpenMercia
Collaboration by developers, data analysts and policy advisors – from the public sector, voluntary sector, academia and technology SMEs;
Interested in encouraging openness by default and with specific reference to data, encouraging the release and use of open data for social, economic and environmental benefit.