Sketching up new geographies: Open sourcing and curriculum development (original) (raw)
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Harnessing Open Technologies to Promote Open Educational Knowledge Sharing
The Knowledge Exchange Exhibit and Presentation (KEEP) Toolkit, a set of software tools designed to help educators provide focused, detailed investigations and demonstrations of effective teaching practice, was developed in 2001 by the Knowledge Media Laboratory (KML) of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a specialized in-house software resource. However, within five years this software steadily evolved into the hub of a distributed community of over 10,000 users, and in 2006 it was released as open source-thereby making it possible for individuals and institutions anywhere to participate in this community. Encouraged by the rapid usage growth but concerned about sustainability, we saw that the best bet for long-term viability in the software would come from inviting our user community to participate in the KEEP Toolkit's future development. In what follows we first provide an introduction to the key features of the KEEP Toolkit, illustrate its early application as a means of promoting shared inquiry into pedagogical practice, and address its role as a tool for documenting the pedagogical value of learning objects. We then discuss the factors that led us to pursue an open source approach to further software development, and we describe the stages that characterized our implementation of this approach. While potential users may find primary interest in our account of the software itself, we believe that developers, designers, and planners may find our account of the open source transition helpful as a roadmap for their own potential efforts in this direction. The KEEP Toolkit: Development and Functionality Over the last several years, the KML has been devising ways to take advantage of emerging technologies and new media to transform what teachers know and do. In 1998, the KML started working in collaboration with partners at the Carnegie Foundation to design Web-based portfolios that demonstrate how teaching practice and student learning can be documented with multimedia and then shared on the Internet. Inspired by the increasing interest of faculty, programs, and institutions to develop and use these portfolios for collective knowledge building, the KML subsequently set about creating a toolkit that instructors and students could use in order to make visible the experiences of teaching and learning that permeate instructional settings every day. The resulting KEEP Toolkit has become an economical and accessible means of achieving this goal, making it possible for users to take advantage of Web technology in order to share their work and reflections on their work. The primary functions of the KEEP Toolkit provide educators with the ability to create Snapshots, or succinct online overviews of teaching and learning experiences, along with reflections, supplements, and related resources. Creating Snapshots involves working through a set of Web-based forms that allow users to upload artifacts and evidence of teaching and learning (e.g., student work, their own reflections, sound files, pictures, videos), use either pre-established or personally-created templates that quickly organize those materials, and share the Snapshots with others in visually appealing and intellectually engaging formats. (Click here for an interactive demo illustrating the software.) Snapshots are delivered primarily online as Web sites, but they also can be distributed in printed form as handouts and posters. The underlying design philosophy of the KEEP Toolkit is that creating engaging Web representations of teaching and learning and sharing them effectively may always be intellectually challenging but need not be technically challenging.
New spaces, new tools, new roles: two case studies on the impact of Open Educational Resources
2009
The project has re-purposed several thousand hours of learning materials selected from the university's course provision into freely available units of study on a pair of twin sites, the LearningSpace (aimed primarily at learners) and the LabSpace (the experimental space aimed primarily at other educators). The case-studies form part of a broader investigation into engagement with communication and discussion tools provided by OpenLearn.
Challenges of 'Students as Producers' in web 2.0: A reflective account
In reaction to recent calls for Higher Education institutions to invite students to shape and manage their own educational experiences (McLoughlin & Lee, 2007, 2008), increasing numbers of initiatives are engaging students as partners and co-producers of curriculum content. Positioning students as co-producers has great potential to enable them to innovate, share and form communities of interest and networks (Boyd, 2007). Despite enthusiasm for the use of participatory pedagogies, there is little research to show that educational practice is undergoing transformational changes due to these emerging trends (Crook et al., 2008). This article draws on qualitative interviewing to explore the experiences of students involved in Pedagogy 2.0 at a UK university. This was in the form of students creating multimedia content to be shared with peers. Findings suggest that alongside the pedagogical and technological components to be considered, additional monitoring of student attitude and motivation to use Web 2.0 tools for educational purposes is required. The paper also provides suggestions that may help teachers who plan to use similar pedagogies in their classroom.
Pocketing the Difference: Joint Development of Open Educational Resources
2008
Web 2.0 tools and social software are changing the way in which formal and informal learners expect to work with learning resources. In response, educational providers may open up access to existing courses by providing them as free to use Open Educational Resources (OERs). The OpenLearn initiative of The Open University established a "LearningSpace" for learners to access OERs from the university and built up methods and processes for transforming material. OpenLearn also established a "LabSpace" to allow others to make changes to released content, or to provide new examples. A parallel project, POCKET, works with partner universities to transfer the model of production from OpenLearn and provide content from those universities for open use. In this paper we outline the issues that we have identified in our production process and the intended way to transfer this process to our partner institutions and then to others.
Journal of Technologies in Knowledge Sharing, 2015
The nature of academic freedom in the digital age now shifts and transforms as rapidly as the tools used to call it to question. This paper explores examples of U.S. institutions of higher education attempting to address the reach and implications of social media within the rights of academic expression, often with results antithetical to the notion of academic inquiry and rights held so dear in its production. We are entering a time when knowledge is increasingly socially and openly constructed. The creation of intellectual thought reaches (often resides) far outside the walls of the academy. If higher education is to continue serving as a respected creation center and collaborator in knowledge that serves society, one cannot discount the need to adapt to the tools and habits of shared and social knowledge. This paper explores the intersection of conflict for academic freedom and digital footprints. It puts forward a framework for the use of collaboration software in defining teaching and learning that is open, social and without walls.
2012
Increasingly social web technologies, such as blogging and micro-blogging, audio and video podcasting, photo/video, social bookmarking, social networking, wiki writing or virtual worlds are being used as forms of authoring or content creation to support students' learning in higher education. As Web 2.0 teaching practice is characterised by open access to information and collaborative networks there are both familiar and novel challenges for policy-makers in higher education institutions. The Government 2.0 Taskforce heralded legislative and practice changes necessary because of Web 2.0. We reflect on the qualitative feedback received from innovative higher education practitioners using Web 2.0 to assess student work. This indicates a need for information policy review to accommodate the cultural shift towards information exchange and communication across traditional institutional boundaries. Issues involved when implementing Web 2.0 assessments are identified to highlight requisite areas for policy improvement in higher education, in particular for academic integrity, copyright and privacy policies
Copyleft, Open Knowledge, and the Classroom
2019
Over the past two decades, there has been an unprecedented rate of technological advancement that has transformed production processes and eased the distribution of knowledge and media. Taking advantage of this shift, various individuals and groups have sought to promote a culture of sharing by using existing copyright regimes for the purpose of easing the production and reproduction of cultural products. Such 'copyleft' has facilitated the development of platforms that promote the free and open distribution and reproduction of knowledge. This offers an exciting new opportunity to teachers, as the availability of these platforms and their content enables them to create their own teaching materials without relying on proprietary resources, and enables them to guide students as they themselves become producers of knowledge. This paper provides a brief introduction to copyleft, open knowledge, and their use in the classroom, both at the secondary and tertiary level.
Utilizing open source tools for online teaching and learning - By Lee Chao
British Journal of Educational Technology, 2010
We apologise for a double error with our March 2010 (41(2)) review of Atkins, Liz (2009) Invisible students, impossible dreams Trentham. The correct ISBN is 978-1-85856-451-7 and the publisher's w-address for the book is http://www.trentham-books.co.uk/acatalog/Invisible\_Students\_\_ Impossible_Dreams.html. Thanks to Inge Martin for telling us about this.