Navigating the Marvellous: considering opennessCatherine Cronin @catherinecronin NUI Galway Oct/Nov 2014

WORKSHOP FOR ACADEMIC STAFF - #CEL263 & GMIT

“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

Image: CC BY 2.0 dlofink

I use & adapt OERs in my teaching.

I create & share OERsusing Creative Commons (CC) licenses.

My students create & share OERs, using Creative Commons (CC) licenses.

I support my students in connecting & networking with others beyond our class.

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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Social Networks

InternetMobile

Networked Individualism

2005 2013

Source: Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 2005-2013

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

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

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)

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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…

@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.

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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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)

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

References

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.

Pew Research Internet Project (2013). Social Media Update 2013.

Rainie, Lee & Wellman, Barry (2012). Networked: The new social operating system. MIT Press.