Grantees Brainstorm #3: How do we build these key components and connect them?
Recent Comments
- Henry Williams on post Grantees Brainstorm #3: How do we build these key components and connect them?
- Henry Williams on post Open Access Success Stories
- Randy Fisher on post OpenCourseWare Consortium Meeting - Santander, Spain
- johndehlin on post OpenCourseWare Consortium Meeting - Santander, Spain
- Peter Kaufman on post Grantees Brainstorm #3: How do we build these key components and connect them?
- Update! And links. | paulhillsdon.com on post Grantees Brainstorm #1: What does transformed teaching and learning look like?
- Jan Goossenaerts on post A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement
- EisenBlog - Marc Eisenstadt's Home Page Blog at The Open University's Knowledge Media Institute » Blog Archive » Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) on post A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement
- Ray Corrigan on post Open Access Success Stories
- Andy Lane on post A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement
We should recognise a lot of the components exist and it is often a question of spotting good ways to use them rather than pausing to build new ones.
We have talked a lot about this - it is probably time to start putting it into action: let’s begin by making sure we understand the learners’ needs and wants.
Considering the learner’s
age
social structure
learning styles
SES
disposable income
emotional barriers
history with schooling
desired outcomes (and her society’s desires for outcomes)
and
the wealth of previously internalized “knowledge” and experiences that the learner brings to learning and can / wants to contribute to the process of change
How do we build these key components and connect them?
1) We lead by modeling and educating. For those of us in higher ed, participating in community source efforts and other learning communities is a good place to both model and experience this sort thing. Talking about these skills and providing opportunity for practice in k-12 is also important.
2) Educate and support our faculties regarding new models of teaching. For example, the UC Berkeley TLT Symposium in May: “Cultivating Communities in our Learning Landscape” (http://tltsymposium.chance.berkeley.edu/default.html), and the Mellon Library Fellowship for Undergraduate Research (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MellonInstitute/). Both partnerships between library, instructional technology, IT, and faculty development groups.
3) Work within open source or community source efforts to build interoperable architectures. A VERY important factor here is close partnership with the library in both their old and new roles within the academy. Integration between repositories of content and the learning environment (activities based) is extremely important.
4) Fund the development of new tools that scaffold the activities around content and allow for the layers of associated knowledge to be networked and accessible in a variety of ways. Do this as part of an active open source community to gain traction and share the costs of development and maintaining and avoid silos.
5) Continued funding and a passionate group of dedicated evangelists.
There are multiple ‘movements’/key components developing under the banner of OER … as was initially envisioned. They are all very young in thier development. As such each should be allowed to grow and mature with a federated connection through a neutral organization that is unaffiliated with any of the specific movements.
Put the tools in the hands of the students.
Don’t fund if they don’t spit out useful RSS
Create an “observatory” or “clearinghouse” that scours current OER work as well as potential OER content.
For ADA issues, NCAM at WGBH does a great deal of work on accesibility issues in digital environments.
See http://ncam.wgbh.org/
Human capacity building and networking; an inclusive approach to all things in education.
A key component will be to recognize that one size will NOT fit all. The OER community worldwide is diverse with nascent communities operating in a variety of ’systems’ and contexts each of which will have its own approach to the creation, organization, dissemination and utilization of OERs.
I received the following responses on my weblog:
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/037107.php
How do we build these key components and connect them?
Wayne Mackintosh Freedom plus the read-write web i.e. sustainable innovation using free software and the principles of mass collaboration.
Jim Groom We start by framing communities along different lines. Web-bases social networking applications like blogs, wikis (with some handy dandy rss) have already suggested what one possible model might look like (eduglu?!). But whatever the technology, ideas need to circulate freely and be readily aggregated for others to find, explore, interact with, and remixed into something else.
Stephen Downes We don’t.
If we absolutely must build something, we build tools that allow people to create and build and store and syndicate. Then we give these tools to the people, making them very portable, rather than trying to establish a (proprietary, branded) web presence.
When we are building other things (such as games or EPSS, etc) we create opportunities for student-directed learning to be placed within the activity environment.
We allow simple grass-roots standards (and tools and computer languages) rather than trying to engineer a perfect solution to foist on the masses.
We continue to lobby for free and open software and resources rather than trying to create something *called* ‘open’ which nonetheless requires payment (either directly, via fees or subscriptions, or indirectly, via membership fees or tuitions).
Brian 1 to what Todd said about RSS. Not just RSS updates alerting subscribers to updates, but RSS feeds with the OER content itself whenever possible. I would also step up efforts to identify (and perhaps support) open educational content and initiatives that is developing out in the wider world — and that we broaden our definitions of what constitutes educational content.
The OERderves blog is a welcome development, I would really try to kick out the jams with it — connect with bloggers and other online educators outside the Hewlett community (via shout-outs and constructive critiques) and not being afraid to have some fun and take a few risks.
After a period of building, I think the OER ‘movement’ now needs to prepare itself for success but decide whether, as well as being a social/cultural movement, it also needs to add more of a political dimension to its activities, including at an international level.
A key issue is connecting existing OER components to political decision-makers (ICT and educational policy makers in national and regional governments) and engaging with those who are actively opposed to the OER movement’s vision. Maybe this also means taking a more structured and professional approach to lobbying those who control public investment in content?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/news/press_releases/14_03_2007.html
Identify the enablers of each component – for assessments the place to start may be to seed the collaborative open creation of learner performance assessments for critical skills such as English language, basic computer skills and critical job skills. These already exist in proprietary, not open, form – creating a world-recognized open assessments including reliable, free or low-fee examination procedures would be the next step. Key here is building buy-in by significant entities (governments, businesses, institutions) of the open assessments. Then, facilitate availability of OER supporting the open assessments so you have a complete end-to-end system.
Hot off the blog wire — this strikes me as relevant not only as a compelling examination of higher ed transformation, but a groovy, extensible and interactive framework for discussion:
http://www.academiccommons.org/weblink/goto/120
“”We are faced today by a pressing question: How do institutions–social, civic, educational–transform in response to and in order to promote new kinds of learning in the information age?”
This provocative and difficult question–What does a peer-to-peer learning institution look like and how does it differ from what we understand our traditional learning institutions to be?–is only part of what makes this project exciting. It is also notable for its delivery platform, a terrific and soon-to-be-released WordPress blogging plugin (code name Comment Press) that the folks at the Institute for the Future of the Book have developed, and that allows for context-specific commenting at multiple levels. ”
http://www.futureofthebook.org/HASTAC/learningreport/about/
Looking to “non-traditional” learning spaces might get at this need to build a community that uses — and then hopefully re-uses — OER content. A few examples from Chicago.
The public library system, with major push from Mayor Daley, conducts a program called One Book, One Chicago which “encourages all Chicagoans to read and discuss the same book at the same time.” (http://www.chicagopubliclibraryfoundation.org/programs/) What if the OER community were to link up with a city, town, village, etc. and work with them to do the same around an open ed unit?
In Chicago (and I’m sure these types of programs can be found in many cities across the US) we have various nonprofits that deal exclusively in issue exploration for exploration sake. One, The Public Square (http://www.thepublicsquare.org/) holds regular discussions, lectures, tours, etc., that encourage and facilitate debate, exploration and learning. It would be very interesting to work with groups like this — which have already put the infrastructure in place to gather people — and have them facilitate group learning around an open ed unit.
Lastly, and this is a controversial one, pairing up with charter/small schools to incorporate open education could be very fruitful. These schools are mandated to “think outside” of the traditional concepts of learning/teaching and have more freedom around curriculum.
As my colleague Gabriela Fitz puts it, “Effective use of OER online might require building relationships in off-line environments.”
Just a few thoughts. And now a shameless plug! Many of the groups at the conference mentioned their research. Please consider sharing that research through IssueLab (http://www.issuelab.com). We’re all about nonprofit-produced research and building awareness about and making connections between social issues!
My answer turns on my own view of the “key components” of OER and their relationships. In brief, I believe the “key components” are not the characteristics of any particular OER intervention. They key components are rather the methodologies by which we develop, deploy, and continuously improve the diverse OER interventions. Just as “scientific methodologies” (not the scientific method) demarcate science as a special human activity, I think “OER methodologies” will define the movement more than any particular feature of any particular OER effort. I believe my view is consistent with a fundamental assumption in the report by Dan
Further consideration in the future of the analogs between a learning ecosystem and a natural ecosystem may be productive. Ecosystems are characterized by interdependency, diversity, complex composition, variation in granularity and scale…. (p. 35)
My views on building “key components” and “connecting the components” are influenced by taking their metaphor seriously. Education, especially education now influenced heavily and interconnected by ICT is indeed an “ecosystem,” with many local niches. It is not (and should not be) a centrally architected “infrastructure.” This has implications for how we understand it and manage it and how we intervene to make it better. It has implications for whether we should even be trying to identify “key” components for all OERs. Briefly, I believe that what is “key” in characteristics of particular OER interventions tend to is local. The characteristics that are “key” also tend to be relative to the goal of the particular OER intervention. It is a mistake to try to overly generalize to all of OER.
The components of OER, many of which are represented by the individuals and the efforts of the individuals who are attending this conference, are interventions in the educational ecosystem. They are part of the ecosystem, which is, after all a human construct. Ecosystems are characterized by their complexity in the sense of rich feedback connections among a large number of parts which amplifies the effects of interventions, making prediction of those effects uncertain. Evolution in ecosystems, although governed partially by general molecular and biochemical regularities is, largely a local phenomenon. There are unifying principles governing ecosystems but ecosystems are also essentially highly local, diverse, subject to processes and boundary conditions that apply in local environments but don’t apply globally. If we take the metaphor seriously, we should believe the same is true for the success of OER intervention in the educational ecosystem.
If education is an ecosystem, and OER is a set of interventions in that ecosystem, then trying to identify the essential components of OER and decide on a strategy for using these key components to help us create a unified global movement might just be a big mistake.
People are often asked to give summary remarks are be part of a panel that summarize the “major themes” of a conference like this: one filled with a diversity of ideas about how to improve many different aspects of the field, one attended by people with many different goals and motivations who operate in many different contexts. The task is something like trying to brilliantly pick out the essential commonality. Forgive me if I refuse and embrace the diversity. Take the ecosystem metaphor seriously. You can’t identify many essential commonalities across an ecosystem. We can identify a few general principles that operate across the whole, but mostly to understand any ecosystem (and more importantly to intervene in it successfully without catastrophe), you have to study the diverse niches and local forces that have shaped its complexity and created its difficult-to-understand connectedness.
OER is an intervention in and now part of an educational ecosystem. What can we learn from contemporary efforts to manage ecosystems that might inform us about the best strategies for moving forward? One cautionary note that we have heard in many of the comments from participants here is: one size does not fit all. Another I would add is that there are many different kinds of interventions (the many OER projects represented here and the many more not represented here) with different goals and different niches in which they are effective the ecosystem. Some will develop enabling connections, some will not.
Should we try to manage the development of OER in the educational ecosystem through investment by Hewlett and others? Some would argue that the beauty of ecosystems is they manage themselves. But, there is urgency. We want education to improve because we want to improve the lives of people now living - certainly of that half the world under 20 years old and their children. We intervene to make things better. It’s the right thing to do.
But how? Should we pick “key components” of OER to focus on and invest in? Should we encourage or force connections among the components in ways that our intuitions tell us will make things better? Some help comes from ecologists who guide intervention in natural ecosystems. Many are engaging in what they call “adaptive management” (I’ll call it “adaptive intervention”) – you will find the description surprisingly resonant with the activities in which all of you are currently engaged:
Adaptive management is a systematic approach for improving environmental management by learning from management outcomes. We believe that protected areas management can benefit greatly from this approach which allows management to proceed despite uncertainty, and reduces this uncertainty through a systematic process for learning. We describe this approach as a six-stage process: problem assessment, experimental design, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and management adjustment.…adaptive management is more than just a procedure; it also requires curiosity, innovation, courage to admit uncertainty, and a commitment to learning. (Murray and Marmorek, 2003, p.1) Ref #1.
And from other practitioners:
As a hybrid of scientific research and resource management, adaptive management blends methods of investigation and discovery with deliberate manipulations of managed systems. Through observation and evaluation of the ways that human interventions affect managed systems, new knowledge is gleaned about system interactions and productive capacities. This new knowledge is then applied to future decisions in a cycle of continuous improvement of policies and field practices. (Sit and Taylor, 1998, p.1) Ref. #2
I would argue that the experiments that the Hewlett Foundation have supported for a number of years can be characterized as “adaptive management” or “adaptive intervention” efforts in the educational ecosystem. At the very least, they have created to tools to engage in these adaptive interventions.
What would be a major mistake in adaptive intervention in a natural ecosystem? To assume the characteristics of a success in one *kind* of intervention (allowing natural forest fires to burn – the characteristic would be “let nature take its course”) should characterize all interventions. Equally it is a mistake to assume that interventions that work in one context (Siberian lakes) will work in all contexts (African lakes, South American lakes, etc.). That is, the danger is trying to find and enforce grand unifying principles from which you can deduce how to intervene successfully in all contexts. That might work in physics – but it does not work in ecosystems. In looking of “key components,” we shouldn’t be looking for grand unifying principles.
But, there is some degree of unification that we can suggest – it is a methodological commonality, at a high level of abstraction. The report on Hewlett’s OER effort identifies it:
The grand challenge here is how we might close the loop on the use of open educational material so that we can create virtuous learning loops that constantly improve the material through use (and through the numerous learnings from remixes, etc.). Although some good work in this area has begun, it has barely scratched the surface, and we need to architect the next generation platforms to close the loop and accelerate the improvement of the material through reflected use.
I would add to that that we should understand that how the kind of adaptive intervention advocated here is done will vary based on 1) the goals of the interventions and 2) the context in which they are done. This is a “next step” because it calls for strategy of better understanding of each OER intervention in use. It suggests concentrating on funding the “virtuous feedback loops” or, in other words, “adaptive interventions” that will give us information about what works, what doesn’t, how to evolve the interventions so that they work better. This shifts the focus to the virtuous loops in a diversity of contexts with a diversity of tools. It is to invest in *part* of the process (the feedback loops) just as the past investments have been in another *part* of the process - creating the content and tools to intervene.
1. Murray, Carol & Marmorek, David (2003) Adaptive Management: A Science-Based Approach to Managing Ecosystems in the Face of Uncertainty. The Fifth International Conference on Science and Management of Protected Areas: Making Ecosystem Based Management Work, Victoria, British Columbia, May 11- 16, 2003, 1-10.
2. Sit, Vera & Taylor, Brenda (Editors). (1998) Statistical Methods for Adaptive Management Studies. British Columbia: B.C. Ministry of Forests.
Nifty wikis:
http://www.mitvwiki.org/Main_Page
http://wiki.transmission.cc/index.php/Main_Page
Indeed, persuasive comments by like-minded individuals in this blog. This leaves me wondering about the entire educational infrastructure. This system is premised–rooted in–national/state content standards that follow a prescribed protocol. A protocol that can nonetheless be easily adapted to a tech-oriented curriculum/curricula. But for OER to permeate this infrastructure, say, within ten to twenty years, at creative levels for students to marvel over…?? I vividly recall a newspaper article some years ago that suggested the obsolescence of brick-n-mortar institutions in the wake of online learning. Imagine, all of the prestigious universities across the globe succombing to the power of OER, OCW, social networking, etc.? Philosophies that substantiate unions would be null and void. What would happen to vis-a-vis learning–the human factor–in this high-tech scramble?