Pre-conference day
From iCommons wiki
Contents |
Propagating the Meme
This page has been updated with notes from the event.
Time and Location
Thursday, June 14 from 9:30-4:30. Venue is Lazareti 1.
Overarching goal for the day
To build collaborative knowledge around the creation of a participatory evaluative process that enables those in the educational open content space to learn from each other, to share with the larger open community, and to be accountable to those who support them.
- Story telling, knowledge capturing, knowledge sharing
- Figure out how we can weave our stories into the discussions over the next days
- Define how the educational track relates to the main event
- Maybe even come up with projects to tackle together
Desired outcomes
- Cross-project sharing to shed light on variations and successes in OER practices, and specifically on aspects of collaboration, peer production, and evaluation that can be supported through social networking and storytelling.
- The testing and refinement of exercises and activities that can help to make the iSummit experience both concrete and experimental.
- Inspiring the group to become action-oriented, and spurring participants to express themselves across the iSummit tracks and to create related media pieces post-event.
Structure
The day was a combination of cross-pollination discussions and collaborative activities with the purpose of encouraging information sharing about and between open education initiatives, as well as facilitating new learnings and knowledge that will funnel into the education session track (perhaps with emphasis on track #5). We tried to get at the following questions:
- What does it mean to tell your open content story, and to make the story useful for others?
- How can people who don't know each other be inspired to come together and edit/create content in education?
- How does/can online peer-production impact the roles of teachers and learners?
- What needs to be known about a resource to make it useful, learnable, and teachable?
- How do the contextualizer and the remixer bump up against each other? (We suspect that in education this might be a more important issue than in video, photography, etc.) For example, the contextualizer (one who rates, reviews, or tags) might inspire the remixer (one who makes derivative work.
Plan of activities
Introductions / open discussion
We kicked off the day with introductions (short and snazzy) and a brief discussion of what participants were interested in, what issues they have encountered in their projects, and how they'd like the day to progress.
Some of the issues that emerged during the initial open discussion:
- Relationship of education to creative commons (delia: education is one area that will largely drive the development of CC)
- Appropriateness / usefulness - translation and localisation (amy: what is the concept of localisation we want to use, beyong just translation, but making content appropriate to a local situation and environment) (steve: how can we participate in a way that produces content that is useful in different places, or enable modification)
- Licensing, what are the issues around the licenses we can use, and what are the implications (delia: interaction between creative commons and the collecting societies - in australia there are two compulsory schemes, how do i make sure that i am not paying for CC licensed stuff)
- We are creating a lot of content, but in isolation the second stop is to mix these efforts, and that's needed in education now
- Authoring tools
- Terminology
- How do you get people to share experiences, processes, content?
- Lack of awareness, what is open content?
- How to you get people to become co-creators of open content?
- Content production (amee: bringing in the role of the students, at a higher level - a level where they have not been able to participate before - really allowing any type of modification or adaption)
- Demand - there is a lot of content out there, but how do you get people to use it? (neeru: navigation is an issues, you are sitting with a pile of content, but there is little guidance on how to organise it, packaging materials to allow a learner to get form place a to place b might be really helpful) (neeru: accreditation, how can we come up with a different type of accreditation?)
iCommons iCurriculum
We moved along using the iCommons iCurriculum in-progress OER case study project being conducted by ISKME as a point of departure. The case study project is a means of developing a framework and tools to help OER projects assess their internal practices and processes, and share their learnings so that others can benefit. Read more about the project here:[1]
Participants had the chance to tell their own OER stories. Using an informal storytelling template, participants reflected on the following questions:
- What are the name and goal of your project (1 sentence answer)?
- What have been the 1 or 2 biggest obstacles?
- What are the lessons learned?
- What impact have you had / How are you measuring impact?
- What other lessons should be shared? If you were learning from other project, what questions would you ask from them?
Some of the answers to the last question:
- Packaging (formats) vs. production, knowledge is important, but how you package it is also important, what is the process you go through for packaging, to make it easier to find things, to re-use things, etc. what are formats, platforms, technical specs you are using?
- How do you do quality assurance?
- What is your relationship to accreditation / government?
- Integrate into existing workflows and incentives, also in terms of the institutional environment
- What were unintended consequences: the things you were not thinking about going in?
- Impact: cultural shift vs. quantifiable things, how did this project change the culture of how people want to use it, what cultural shifts are you facing
- How do we deal with IP?
- What is your volunteer strategy, do you have one?
- What licenses do you use, and why?
- Funding is hard, but why? what are the issues underlying that, and how to deal with them?
- Relationships and community: what do you need to make it work, what is important in terms of institutional issues? how do you get people to (1) share, but also (2) use the materials?
- Where do you get help, what networks are you a part of, what organisations are you participating in?
- How do you achieve your objectives, what is the methodology of your projct?
- What is your relationship with participants? what is your strategy to bring people into this process?
- Community of content makers, what is the governance structure? what are the rules?
A few of the AHA effects that emerged during the discussions:
- There is a life-cycle, so even after setting the project up, you still have to deal with keeping it running?
- People you should engage with, if working in formal education, it's important understand and engage the existing institutions, publishers, governments, etc.
- Copyright is not the only issue anymore, we are also looking at competition - commercial publishers are argueing that publicly funded materials are unfairly competing with private materials (** important **)
- Discussing the answers to these questions in a group, leads to a lot of knowledge sharing through conversation - people pick up on others' issues and offer advice, case-studies need to be a hub for sharing dynamic
- Translation could also be done through a community approach, similar to the production of the original content
Break-out groups / Focus on individual topics
The second part of the day was made up of a combination of hands-on, small-group activities that facilitate ways that the whole group can build on each other's thinking from the storytelling activity, especially around practices that can be used for assessing and course-correcting OER projects.
Each group tried to speak broadly around three questions:
- What would you like to see throughout the event
- Aha effect
- Any outcomes you woud like to see? Action items
We discussed issues around:
- Target and engage content creators Open Education Pre Day Break-Out Group 1
- Licensing issues, including the need (or not) for an educational CC license Open Education Pre Day Break-Out Group 2
- Building a new university (virtual university?)
Participants
- Lisa Petrides, ISKME, participatory case study framework
- Amee Godwin, ISKME, OER Commons Project Director
- Mark Surman, IDRC, Telecentre
- Joanne Boulle, FHSST - The collaborative creation and dissemination of curriculum specific educational resources
- Delia Browne, National Copyright Director, Ministerial Council on Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs
- Neeru Paharia
- Steve Cisler
- Philipp Schmidt, University of the Western Cape, South AFrica
- Ed Bice, Meadan.org, San Francisco
- Add your name here if you were there!
