Building Open Educational Resources From the Bottom-Up: How Enthusiastic Students Can Overcome Indifferent Institutions

Dr Tama Leaver,Communication Studies,The University of Western Australia

23 September 2008

Outline

• How did my students end up making Open Educational Resources (OER)? (It wasn’t intentional to start with!)

• Examples of student created OER (videos & podcasts).

• How do students-created OERs push broader implementation and creation of OERs?

[1] How did my students end up making Open Educational Resources (OER)? (It wasn’t intentional to start with!)

We Asked: “Beyond the traditional ones, what new ‘literacies’ are most important for learners today?”

Network Literacy

We need to work out how we can teach …in a distributed, collaborative environment, because this is the environment our students are going to live in. Network literacy means linking to what other people have written and inviting comments from others, it means understanding a kind of writing that is a social, collaborative process rather than an act of an individual in solitary. It means learning how to write with an awareness that anyone may read it: your mother, a future employer or the person whose work you’re writing about.

– Jill Walker, ‘Weblogs: Learning in Public’, On the Horizon, 13, 2 (2005): 112-118, reproduced at http://jilltxt.net/txt/Weblogs-learninginpublic.pdf,

Creative Literacies

Creative literacies: The ability to experiment with technology in order to create and manipulate content that serves social goals rather than merely retrieving and absorbing information.

- Jean Burgess, ‘Blogging to Learn, Learning to Blog’ in Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs, eds, Uses of Blogs, New York: Peter Lang (2006): 107.

Where is copyright in these literacies?

• Meaningful knowledge of copyright a huge challenge because most young people don’t see copyright as something (a) in touch with their world; (b) something they should respect and (c) enforceable.

• How do we make this spectrum…

… relevant?

Critical Awareness of Copyright = ‘Participatory Pedagogies’

• Make it personal. (Copyright on my work.)

• Active learning (ie learn about copyright by having to engage with material and licensing both as a user and as a creator).

• Best pedagogical practice: the best way to learn something is to have to know enough to teach it to someone else: participatory pedagogies.

• (What Ahrash Bissell of CCLearn refers to as ‘Open Education 2.0’ – the sharing and remixing of content via social learning networks [Bissell, Stanford talk, May 2008].)

The culmination of this approach meant students were creating digital media in various forms, publishing it online under open-content licenses (mainly Creative Commons) and their work was designed to teach others something meaningful: thus in following this idea of participatory pedagogies, by definition, these students were creating Open Educational Resources.

[2] Examples of student created OER (videos & podcasts).

iGeneration

• Honours course (2005+) on ‘digital communication and participatory culture’.

• Collaborative curriculum.

• All assessment items freely shared (critical review of blogs; curriculum; participatory culture podcasts; blog discussions).

• In 2005, at end of course, blog (and all content) explicitly left as an open educational resource for others.

• 2005: http://i-generation.blogspot.com; 2008: http://igeneration.edublogs.org

• (2008 podcasts include an an examination of Chinese community newspapers, a look at being a musician in the Web 2.0 era, and a critical exploration of the Second Life art installation ‘Babelswarm’.

Digital Media (Comm2203)• Core communications unit for 2nd year undergraduates about building

a practical and critical awareness of the digital media landscape.

• Students had no budgets and must create projects legally redistributable outside of educational frameworks (‘real world’ projects).

• Three-minute video projects, posted online with a particular audience in mind, which critically and creatively explains or engages with an emerging aspect of the digital media landscape.

• CC licensing of projects: informed on choices, but optional.

• Video-sharing platform chosen by students (mainly YouTube, some Blip.TV).

• Ranged from documentary style piece on transmedia storytelling to education documentary remixes and stop-motion animation feature toys, dialogue and wrestling (both with ideas and in the men in silly tights sense).

Digital Media Project Example…

Something Old, Something New:http://comstudies.blip.tv/file/999105/

•Mixes 1940s vocational education film about journalism with and contemporary footage to explore the role of citizen jouralism today.

•Creative Team: Anika Staffa, Courtney Fowler, Jue-Ying Liang, Margrete Helgeby and Sarah Oldfield

•CC BY NC SA

[3] How do students-created OERs push broader implementation and creation of OERs?

Participatory Pedagogies Are About Students Building and Participating in the Cultural Capital of Tomorrow…

Student-Created OERs Are Catalyst …

1. Showcases students’ work, skills and talent.

2. Is more fulfilling work as students potentially educate others, giving ‘real work’ meaning to assignments.

3. Outstanding open-license work tends to be shared widely.

4. Successful student work also promotes the university.

5. Good publicity = a strong argument for institutional adoption of OER across a broader range of activities, recourses and curriculum.

Media Included in this Presentation …

• ‘Wake Up!’ by Eddi 07, CC BY (IMAGE) http://www.flickr.com/photos/14516894@N08/2327260343

• ‘Cultural Capital’ by Tama Leaver, CC BY (IMAGE) http://www.flickr.com/photos/tamaleaver/2046561465/

• ‘Something Old, Something New’, by Anika Staffa, Courtney Fowler, Jue-Ying Liang, Margrete Helgeby and Sarah Oldfield, CC BY NC SA (VIDEO) http://comstudies.blip.tv/file/999105/

• iGeneration: http://igeneration.edublogs.org

• Digital Media Projects: http://comstudies.blip.tv/

• Tama Leaver: http://www.tamaleaver.net oremail me tama.leaver@uwa.edu.au

• Comments, Questions and Criticism are welcome by email or posted to my blog or the blog or the iGeneration honours students.