GOGN Fellowship project: Co-creating an open picture book about open education

A few days ago I found out that my GOGN fellowship project was accepted. I am over the moon. Hard work is ahead. But also a lot of creativity and resourcefulness will be needed. I have no idea what we will co-create but that is the exciting part of it.

by Chrissi using Sketches

So, what is the plan? To co-author an open picture book about open education. Yes, a picture book, to raise awareness about the value of open education and what can be achieved through it using a story. A story that is cross-generational and can be told, red to non-readers, Young as well as experienced readers. When we talk about open education often we relate it to higher education but, isn’t this a bit late? Is there a need to start earlier? Isn’t there a need to see things more holistically?

Thank you to the GOGN team for seeing value in this unusual idea and supporting it. The project will be a collaborative one. I cherry picked the dream team from my GOGN family members from around the world. I met all of them, thanks to GOGN when I still was a PhD student or shortly after. GOGN was and still is a valuable peer support network and community for me!

Back to the fellowship project. I started getting organised really quickly. If you have worked with me before, you will know that I don’t like last minute things. I prefer to start working early on a project. Therefore planning and managing time available is really important. We are all busy. I would like us to make a strong start launch it on the 14th of October during the GOGN seminar and the project plan is ready and will be discussed and finalised soon with the core team.

An open communication channel has already been established via a group DM on Twitter for the core writing team. The Google doc folder is also ready and has been shared with the team. The idea I had to select story seeds from the wider global community is now ready. I decided to do this via a survey. These seeds will then be considered during the collaborative writing process.

It will be a picture book with animal characters, as animals in picture books can be more inclusive. But what animals will be in the story? And in how many languages will we be able to translate it?

The MA in Creative Writing I just finished, the picture book course I am doing this year at the Golden Egg Academy, but also my experience of the first two open collaborative picture books I created What will today bring and The Invisible King, and my experience of 10 years translating novels and pictures books, will help me with this new project as my approach has been informed by these experiences, courses and related activities.

Evie Hurst, one of the illustrators I worked with before on The Invisible King picture book, has said yes so she will do all the illustrations for this book. Evie is currently a first year undergraduate Student in Illustration and Animation. This time, I will stay away from providing directions or notes linked to possible scenes. Not something that will be easy for me, I have to admit, as when I write, I also visualise the images. But my last experience with Evie showed me that my approach wasn’t the most effective one and that the illustrator needs that creative freedom to interpret the story. I can see it clearer now and my readings also confirm that this is the most effective approach when the writer is not the illustrator. Ody Frank, a Six-Form College student in Animtion and Game Design and my youngest son, will design the book.

The story will be a collaborative writing output. While co-authoring is common in academic writing, creative writing in the context of picture books is usually a solo experience. Except perhaps when we look at how Bookdash in South Africa works. On the last picture book, I worked with multiple illustrators, but I have never co-authored a picture book story. It will be exciting to see how this will work and what story will emerge through this collaborative creative writing process. The whole dream team is shown below in the picture.

We have already started working together and thanks to everybody’s critical comments (exactly what was needed!!!), we have our survey ready to launch the picture book project and collect story seeds from the wider community. Please feel free to share as widely as possible. The survey will remain open only until the 31st of October 20.

I am really excited to see how this project will develop and where it will lead us. Thank you GOGN and all collaborators for embracing this project.

visualising GOGN memories

Opening-up and learning together, an UNESCO supported project coming to an end

image source

Over the past 6 months, from January to June 2018, I have been working with Naomi Wahls (@nwahls) mentoring together an UNESCO supported project, one of 17 globally, part of the programme Open Education for a Better World.

This project was led by Dr Alisher Abidjanov and had a focus on identifying opportunities to transform the current re-accreditation programme of foreign language teachers in higher education in Uzbekistan. UNESCO supported the project by providing two volunteer mentors. These were Naomi, lead mentor, and I. The UNESCO project page can be accessed here, where you will find more detailed information.

It has been a fascinating journey of collaboration and discovery with two individuals from two different countries and continents whom I didn’t know in advance of the project. Naomi is a doctoral student in open education and a member of GOGN, while Alisher is the Deputy Director of the National Center for Development of Innovative Teaching Methods at the Uzbek State University of World Language.

The early synchronous meetings we organised were really important to get to know each other a little bit and start scoping a plan based on the needs and requirements of our colleague and his university in Uzbekistan and seize some of the opportunities presented by open pedagogical approaches.

12 January 2018, our very first skype meeting

Naomi, Alisher and I have been working closely together and the result is a proposal we have put forward to colleagues in Uzbekistan. I have to say that I was impressed from very early on with Naomi’s project management and leadership skills. Her openness and collegiality made a real difference to how we worked together and what we achieved as a team. The proposal has pedagogical, curriculum and technological dimensions and brings our ideas forward based on a critical review of existing provision especially linked to English foreign language teaching supported by technology, related literature and emerging research and practices. We felt that it would be useful that the proposal would be reviewed by two experts before sharing with Alisher and we are grateful for the feedback provided by Dr  Christian Stracke, ICDE Chair and Associate Professor at the Open Universiteit, Netherlands and Dr Brent Wilson, Professor of Professional Development with Technology at the University of Colorado Denver, United States of America. Their feedbck helped us fine tune some of its features.

We have not only put the proposal together but also used this time to share our plans, progress and results with the wider academic community through local, national and international conferences in different countries. These activities helped us to stay focused and make further progress while also seeing them as valuable opportunities for open peer review. We worked most of the time remotely but I did have the opportunity to meet Naomi in person at one of the conferences in the Netherlands where we presented our work together.

Starting the day with Alisher Abidjinov from Uzbekistan and his mentors @chrissinerantzi and @nwahls talking about digital English Language Learning Collaborative strategies supporting global practices with Virtual Exchanges #oe4bw 🇺🇿 pic.twitter.com/EcecW50j3Q

— Jenni Hayman – open for questions. (@jennihayman) July 4, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

My mini remote contribution for the above conference is below

The project has now come to an end but I can see already that our collaboration will continue. Through this project, new ideas are emerging that will further deepen our understanding around the complexity of the professional development of foreign language teachers in Uzbekistan and how we can help to resolve some of the issues and create rich and motivating development opportunities for academics teaching foreign languages at university in Uzbekistan. There are opportunities for wider collaboration that are emerging that could involve our own institutions and colleagues.

My doctoral research and its outputs have been invaluable over the last six month as it has given us food-for-thought on if and how collaborative open learning and specifically the framework, I developed, could be adapted in the context of foreign language professional development and specifically in the context of the existing re-accreditation programme in Uzbekistan. We are exploring and proposing this possibility through our mentor proposal with Naomi and a co-authored paper we submitted recently and jointly with Alisher to a peer reviewed journal.

A really positive and fruitful collaboration. I learnt a lot and we achieved a lot in just six month. Thank you Naomi and Alisher.

packing… almost on my way to Delft #go_gn

Packing my suitcase for this year’s GOGN seminar in Delft. Penny Bentley who is there already said “pack light gear”. I will follow her advice. We had a long, cold, wet and blustery winter in the UK (it really felt like living in Siberia… or the North Pole… as my dad always says…), so any temperature above 1O degrees is very welcome.

Really looking forward to seeing everybody again from our GOGN family and also meeting new friends, open practitioners and researchers. The past two GOGN seminars in Poland and Cape Town have been invaluable for me and have helped me make more rapid progress than anticipated with my own studies. In the end I completed them in 4.5 years while in full-time work and with family commitments. I felt and feel part of a community of scholars distributed across the world. It is our distributed GO-GN family. It has been fascinating to follow and celebrate everybody’s milestones and achievements. They say internal motivation is a strong driver for learning and development, the most important driver, but perhaps external motivation generated through communities that create a sense of belonging and collectiveness (is there such a word?) are equally powerful and perhaps are key to boost our confidence and help us often to persevere and achieve our goals. In this case to complete a PhD successfully. GOGN is such a community.

This year I will be giving a little bit back to this wonderful community of scholars. Catherine Cronin and I have been invited to co-facilitate a workshop during the GOGN seminar to help colleagues doctoral students get unstuck from potential challenges they experience or may experience on their PhD journey in the future. To boost their confidence and empower them move on, that they will get there when adopting specific strategies that work for them. We plan to do this through a series of activities that will enable colleagues to share personal stories and experiences and learn from them… but more during the workshop. We don’t want to take away the surprise factor.

After completing my doctoral studies, I registered on a research supervision module at Manchester Met. This provided me with a plethora of opportunities to read about the related literature and reflect on my own experience as a PhD student and identify doctoral supervision strategies that could work for when I become a supervisor myself but also for others. Actually at the moment, I am working with Haleh Moravej, founder of our social enterprise MetMunch at Manchester Met, and Dean Brookes to develop an openly licensed flashcard set based on my assignment and research in that module that might be useful in doctoral supervisor training. The plan is to share this with our Graduate School when I see them next month about related LEGO(R) SERIOUS PLAY(R) workshops. Developing a related set for doctoral students with strategies they can consider to feel unstuck, is something I would like to explore with Catherine and the GOGN family. I suspect that our workshop during the GOGN seminar will provide food-for-thought for this. I am looking forward to discussing this idea with them and explore if/how we could take it forward. And I would love to link it to composing a song too. Yesterday, I might have met the colleague and his students who could help us make this happen…

I would like to thank GOGN for this kind and generous invitation to join the activities in Delft this year, including the OE Global conference and also for recognising my contribution to open education research practice. My warmest congratulations to Glenda and Aras and all their collaborators.

See you in Delft in a few days!

Looking forward to discovering this heart in Delft, image source

What are our big ideas about a #coopuni? 9 November 2017 in Manchester

#coopuni event, 9 Nov 2017, Manchester

I attended the inaugural event about a future Cooperative University as I was intrigued to find out more about it. Could a cooperative university present an attractive alternative higher education model? Thank you Ronnie for bringing this event to my attention.

A cooperative university, is a thought provoking idea. But what is the need for such a university? What would it achieve that other universities don’t and how? Is an alternative higher education needed and could such a university progressively transform existing institutions? Is this desirable? Are there opportunities within existing universities to have cooperative clusters, for example? How about open cooperatives?

I was looking forward to find out more about the cooperative university and meet Ronnie Macintyre my open practitioner buddy and others who have a vision to create alternative higher education opportunities through democratic participation. However, is this not what open education is also working towards? How does the idea for a cooperative university link to the ethos and values of open education?

Furthermore, I was interested in finding out how my practice and research in open education (Nerantzi, 2017) and particularly in open and cross-institutional academic development and collaborative open learning relates to cooperative ideas and the cooperative movement.

The aims of the day as communicated at the opening of the day were
> bring ideas together
> facilitate a mutually supportive environment
> establish a co-operative higher education forum (CHEF)

From the delegates list, I could see we were around 90 from a range of backgrounds. In the morning, after an introduction to the history of the cooperative college and related activities especially since 2010, a range of cooperative projects from across the UK were shared. After listening carefully, I think what is different in these educational initiatives is how they operate.

image source

This is what I noticed: I can see how they are (more) cooperative. Or are they actually collaborative? I don’t know much, or very little I should say about the governance dimension of cooperatives. This is something I would like to find out more to better understand what this is all about. But I suspect that the area of governance is what differentiates a cooperative from other initiatives and businesses. It seems to me that cooperatives have the community at the heart, the collective. They aim to empower individuals but also the cooperative as a whole. The cooperative as a community. I think also to create a sense of belonging. The example from Spain of the cooperative University of Mandragora illustrated this really well through its flat structures, autonomy of faculties and the lived and dynamic culture of innovation in learning, teaching and research. It was refreshing to hear about this model that was not just an idea but something that was implemented and working. I would have liked to ask questions especially around the challenges and how these are resolved but we watched a recording so this opportunity was not there. I will have a look online to find some more information about this university as well as related research.
In the earlier examples, learning for life and for learning’s sake where mentioned, often as an alternative model to a focus on employability which is often the case in universities. While I can see value in empowering individuals to love learning, often the people we would hope to reach, are the ones who might be disadvantaged and helping them get a job would be a great achievement. Otherwise, I think otherwise any cooperative university could become exclusive and elitist? Don’t know where these thoughts are taking me now but it is something that popped into my head and wanted to share.

I can see the potential links between the idea for a cooperative university and open education but I struggle to articulate them. Could the cooperative movement provide an attractive business model for open education? Could you have open cooperatives? Not sure if business model is the right term here… but is there an opportunity to marry the two?

As I was seeing the links between open and cooperatives, it was obvious to me. I was expecting to hear something around open education, open practices, open educational resources, open badges but none of the examples shared mentioned something related. The ecological university (Barnett, 2016) and learning ecologies (Jackson, 2016) also didn’t feature. And what about the Porous University (Lennon, 2010; Macintyre, 2016). These concepts don’t promise new higher education institutions but propose to transform the existing ones from within. At least this is my understanding.

Because none of the above were not mentioned during the day, does of course not mean that the links have not been made. I need to do some reading!!! The ethos and values of open education, however, were at the heart of the initiatives that were shared. I am wondering if there is an opportunity or even a need to closer link up cooperative and open learning? What about collaboration? It was hardly mentioned… Also, are the UNESCO and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals relevant to a cooperative university?

Themes that provided discussion foci in the afternoon workshops were the following:
> Democracy, members and governance
> Knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy
> Livelihood and finances
> Bureaucracy and accreditation

I joined the pedagogy group in the afternoon as I felt that my interests would fit best but wondering now if the workshop around Democracy, members and governance would have been useful too. Would this have given me a flavour of what this is all about? We all had questions. I had more questions at the end of the workshop than at the beginning which really made me think hard about what a cooperative university would be about. I am searching for an answer myself and with others in some of the discussions we had. I think more work needs to be done to articulate the purpose and vision for a cooperative university before embarking on defining a specific pedagogical model. I think the working group that has been set-up has this purpose. Something much more organic, flexible or even elastic and open, is needed that would give learners choice. Choice to pursue what they want. And while there were some discussions that the courses might not be accredited… I think accreditation is still very important, especially in cases where such an accreditation of learning through the cooperative university would be a lifeline and not a luxury some individuals can easily find or afford elsewhere. There were mixed views about the use of technology in a cooperative university and my thoughts are that for some the online engagement might be the only viable option, for others it might not work. If such a university is going to empower the ones in real need to engage in learning, they should also have access and be able to work towards accreditation, if they wish. In my mind, a cooperative university shouldn’t be a second or third class university. And I am thinking here of providing access to education to homeless citizens for example for whom such education would give new hope and a new positive purpose in life and help them return to become contributing members of our society.

During the day, I did a lot of listening. What hooked me was the idea of and for positive disruption and making big ideas happen. But what are these big ideas linked to the cooperative university? Have they been articulated? Are they still work-in-progress? I was searching for some of them myself and in discussions with others. What makes a good idea, a big idea that gives it importance, urgency and empowers us to act?

Thank you to all organisers for a thought provoking day. Ronnie also reflected on the day and you can read his thoughts here. An article about this event was also published in THE.

Maybe there is now an opportunity to come together to draw our cooperative university or make a model of it. Such playful and pan-participatory approaches have the potential to release our inner big ideas… share them with others so that we can link them, develop them into concepts and make them happen… together…

References

Barnett, R. (2011) The coming of the ecological university, Journal Oxford Review of Education, Volume 37, Issue 4, pp. 439-455, available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03054985.2011.595550

Jackson, N. (2016) Exploring learning ecologies, Chalk Mountain

Lennon, E. (2010) ‘The Porous University‘, New Perspectives: Arts and Humanities Enter a New Phase, London: Times Higher, Supplement on Trinity College London

Mackintyre, R. (2016) The Porous University, RoughBounds, 9 November 2016, available at https://roughbounds.wordpress.com/2016/11/09/the-porous-university/

Nerantzi, C (2017) Towards a framework for cross-boundary collaborative open learning for cross-institutional academic development, PhD thesis, Edinburgh Napier University: Edinburgh

My first babysteps into openness #101openstories

During #openeducationwk 2017 Penny (Australia), Vivianne (Brazil), Judith (Kenya), Jenni (Canada), Sujata (India) and I launched together the #101openstories project. We hope by the end of this year to collect and curate 101 such stories which show how individuals have become open learners, open practitioners or open researchers. The Open Education Working Group and especially Javiera, kindly offered to help us create an open book from #101openstories.

Stories have always fascinated me. As a passionate reader of novels, translator of novels and children’s stories, writer of children’s stories, but also teacher of modern foreign languages, teacher educator and academic developer. The Open Facilitator project with Carol Yeager (@couki1), whom I met in 2011 when I engaged passionately in the Creativity and Multicultural Communication (CMC11) MOOC she developed, and in collaboration with the Open Education Working Group and the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Manchester Metropolitan University, is a collection of stories and brought insights into the facilitation experience that were of value for all of us. We hope others will use the collection to carry out further research in this area. Maybe I should also consider this myself after I have completed my PhD studies.

Another story-related project, the storyboxHE with Ellie (@ehannan14) aims to collect practitioner stories around learning and teaching that can be used in academic development situations and help academics to engage with these and reflect on their own practice through dialogue and collaborative problem-finding and problem solving. I am also using stories in academic development courses and FDOL and FOS that followed based on this, are such an example. 

Stories are a powerful way to share experiences, ideas and create links between the story and our own life experiences and learn from each other. We hope that many individuals from around the world will contribute their story to the #101openstories collection.

Today, I would like to share my open story.

The key questions I asked myself are the following:

1. How did it all start?
2. Were did it lead me?

Mmm… it is difficult to pinpoint the exact start. I suspect that my personal life journey in three different countries helped me recognise from early on the importance of sharing and collaborating as well as valuing diversity to survive and thrive.

Sheila, in her open story talks about the usefulness of a timeline… her post reminded me of one I created a while ago as an Excel spreadsheet when I was making another set of timelines for my PhD research. I thought it would be useful and linked to my prologue in the thesis in which I make reference to my path towards openness but as it is part of my PhD I am not sure I can just copy and past it here… so I didn’t read it but started from scratch here…. Creating the timeline helped me visualise some of the connections and see my path into the world of open, all on one sheet, at least the digital dimension. I suspect another layer that captures the non-digital dimension would be equally useful as this was my actual starting point into openness and perhaps I need to add this dimension too after I finish writing this post.

Professionally, I think I could locate my first baby steps towards openness when I started creating learning resources while I was teaching German in Athens. That was before 1990 and I used WordPerfect and a PC that took up a lot of room and hard hardly any brain and used these things called floppy discs which were really floppy. Life as an undergraduate student was challenging… only phone calls, word processing and email or fax for remote communication. No VLE or social media. And I was working full-time in Athens while studying full-time on Corfu… I know, hard to believe. Later, after I had left the Navy (yes, I was in the Navy for 5 years) in 1996 I had the opportunity to stay for a whole academic year in Germersheim at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in Germany to carry out research into translating children’s literature where I also had the opportunity to teach in the department. I remember sitting in front of a computer screen there and was told that this was the internet… while I had been using emails for some years, also worked in a computer centre for five years, and was involved in localising cd-roms as a translator, the internet was alien to me… at that point in time… My expectations were that it would be something much more dynamic than the university site I was looking at. Believe it or not, I asked somebody for help to understand what this was all about… while still in Germersheim, I managed to find my mum’s best friend via the internet who she had lost many years ago… the rest is history. 

As a translator I often struggled to find specific terms and I remember in one case calling a casino on Syros island when I was translating Hermann Hesse’s book Der Kurgast for Kastaniotis publications. Would you consider this as open practice? There was no network and especially when the author was no longer alive, books, reference guides and encyclopaedias did not always have the answer, as answers often are within people and the conversations with them, this is what I have found. 

When I become familiar with navigating the web, and social media arrived, I found the freely available SEBRAN software and volunteered to translate this into Greek in 2005.  I was living in the UK by then and was teaching again languages. Also I had an interest in coding  I attended a 10-week html could thanks to which I was able to create my own website and activities for my students who were learning Greek. My prior work as a computer programmer in the Greek Navy did help a tiny bit. I was hooked and soon had created 300 Greek language learning activities and made them freely and openly available. I had used many different freely available software tools that I had found online. This activity all started in 2004. Often people contacted me, not just my own students but also others who found the site and used the activities.this site no longer exists as it was build on a free freeserve ftp space.  I still have all the activities offline and would love to find a place for them online to share again and use in combination with an open course perhaps. 

Many other open activities followed. From wikis for audio feedback in 2008 to collaborative learning and development spaces in the same year using Ning. It was free at the time and I created a whole a teacher development course into it and anybody could access and join us. Earlier when I was still teaching languages, I used the ning platform for language learning combined with cookery lessons. A wide range of projects followed also thanks to the MSc in Blended and Online Education I did at Edinburgh Napier University. I started using the creative commons licenses and integrated open educational resources in courses and materials I used and created. Furthermore, open licenses were also added to the courses I (co-)developed as I feel that this would encourage re-use and adaptation. PhD research in open academic development (I developed a cross-boundary collaborative open learning framework) followed and will hopefully be completed this year. Very quickly, the open projects became collaborative ones as I felt that while I can plant seeds, ideas only grow when they are shared and there is mutual and sustained commitment and trust among collaborators and the focus is above all on the collective interest…

curiosity didn’t kill the cat (image source here)

My curiosity has led me to explore possibilities to maximise learning and development through making, practice and research based on open sharing. Through these activities and the communities these have developed around them, I have had the privilege to get to know and work with diverse individuals from different parts of the world. These relationships continue to expand my horizons with perspectives and ideas I could never have imagined before. 

Thank you all.

The open journey continues…

Chrissi

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Share your open story with us all. How did it start for you?
Visit #101openstories!

Better late than never…

… how time flies…

I am buried in revising my draft thesis and the new academic year has started. There are ongoing open initiatives I support and new projects starting, internally and externally. All exciting stuff!

However, it is about time to write a little something here about what happened early in September. I did make a start on my tablet a while back… I think at least twice, but today I  decided to start fresh and finish the post in one go while sitting at my desk at home. Here we go…

Congratulations to all! Image source

In September this year, I was awarded runner up ALT Learning Technologist of the Year 2016. I feel humbled and honored to receive this award for my work in open education. Thank you Dr Cristina Costa for encouraging me.

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate everybody for their individual and team awards and all highly commended colleagues.

It was fascinating to read about their achievements and  successes.

I really enjoyed the one day at the conference at Warwick University (lovely campus!!! the ping pong table was such a great idea!) and meeting so many innovative colleagues. It was especially wonderful to see Daniel Scott (the big individual winner!!!) and Iain Griffin (Highly commended!!!) and have chats with them. We agreed to stay in touch, which we have, and collaborate on a little project to give something back to the ALT community. We are going to make this happen ;). 

As an academic developer, digital and open practitioner, with a passion for experimentation it has been a fascinating journey and a pure pleasure to work with many colleagues in my own institutions, nationally and internationally. I feel that I have learnt a lot and their support has given my imagination wings to come-up with ideas that have become reality and are helping us all to engage in new and exciting professional development activities. From my work you will see that I have shared my ideas openly with many others. I guess for me collaboration is not a strategy, it is more a way of being, a philosophy. I also know that ideas can only grow if we share them. My dear friend and colleague reminded me a few years ago of the following African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go on your own. If you want to go further, go with others”.

Below are some of the key projects I initiated. You might find some of these useful for your development or they might give you ideas to develop something new in your area.

The openly licensed course Flexible, Distance and Online Learning (FDOL), which is a postgraduate module that was opened-up and became a cross-institutional collaboration initially between the University of Salford and the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden (Lars Uhlin was my partner) and later Manchester Metropolitan University when I changed institutions.  FDOL an idea that originated from my MSc dissertation, was offered three times, with varying length up to 12 weeks. One of the iterations became a case for my PhD as it had collaborative open learning features using a problem-based learning approach.

FDOL provided the foundations for the openly licensed Bring Your Own Devices for Learning (BYOD4L) course. I was keen to experiment with something much shorter and enable different forms of collaborative learning that are community-based. Again it was inquiry-based and scenarios were used, this time in additional video format presenting student and academic staff perspectives  I shared the concept with Sue Beckingham and we became partners. BYOD4L was offered for the first time in 2014 and since 2016 the community itself organises it. I think this is an important move and a necessary one, if we want to sustain OEP and create capacity. The next iteration is in January 2017 and I am looking forward to supporting our three musketeers (Neil Withnell, Sheila MacNeill and Alex Spiers), in the background.

BYOD4L does have a daily tweetchat feature which was the highlight of the day and attracted large numbers of participants. This triggered a new idea in my mind for a weekly tweetchat that would be a regular CPD opportunity for all of us. While the idea was fresh in my mind, I shared the idea for the Learning and Teaching in HE chat (#LTHEchat) with Sue Beckingham, David Walker and Peter Reed and we decided to go ahead with it Since September 2014 the #LTHEchat has grown and the introduction of rotating organising teams as well as the collaboration with the #HEAchat has enabled it to grow further and become a popular weekly gathering of practitioners with rich and varied exchanges and debates around learning and teaching.

I had in mind to do something with FDOL, to take it into a new direction and this was materialised through using it and building the openly licensed course Flexible, Open and Social Learning or short FOS (Do you know that this means in Greek?). Again, I invited Sue Beckingham to work together on FOS. It was an opportunity for me to become more playful with the original formula, introduce a game-approach, create scenarios, with Ellie Hannan’s help, that were visual and engaging. As FDOL stretched over a series of weeks, again, I wanted to experiment with offering something like this over a week. We have offered this once so far.

Creativity for Learning is a postgraduate module I created at Manchester Met and opened-up. We call it #creativeHE and it has become more of a community and an ongoing collaboration among the Creative Academic network and many colleagues from different institutions nationally and internationally. One of the iterations (8 weeks) became my second case study for my PhD as it had collaborative open learning features in groups which were different from FDOL and it was a useful opportunity to explore how participants experienced it. It is a wonderful opportunity to become more playful and creative in our practices and the work we have done so far evidences that this is happening. This year we decided to launch the Creativity in HE project led by Prof. Norman Jackson with many happenings until the summer 2017 via #creativeHE. The  #greenhouse community at Manchester Met has lined up with the Creativity in HE project and I invited Ellie to lead the micro-project #101creativeideas. If you haven’t seen this yet, please have a look and contribute your ideas to this OER project.

Then there are the Teaching and Learning Conversations (TLC) webinars which start again this week. An initiative I brought to life when I was at Salford University, which has now grown into another cross-institutional collaboration with rotating organising teams. I guess the OER series Food for thought dates also back to that time and is something I would like to continue developing as well as find a way forward for my wheels idea.

The journey continues… image source

Yes, an exciting and full academic year is ahead of me. I plan to finish my PhD studies (must work hard on this until then!!!) and work with many colleagues on learning and teaching projects that open our minds to new possibilities and practices.

… and I also decided to reflect on my journey as a digital and open practitioner and submit my CMALT portfolio. It might all have started when my dad sent me to college to become a computer programmer and then working as a programmer in the Hellenic Navy for 5 years… then leaving the army to go to university as a mature student to study…  or when we moved from Germany to Greece… and then the UK… the story continues…

What will you do this year?

Chrissi
ps. A very special thank you to Neil Withnell.

“Openness is the absence of restrictions, so ultimately about freedom” Rob Farrow #OEGlobal #go_gn

The above phrase by Rob @philosopher1978 stayed with me… such simple words that mean so so much! This is why we need philosophers!!!

Is this what we are after?

… or do we prefer this and what does this mean in the context of OER and OEP?

It was the first time I experienced the Open Education Global conference and it was truly fascinating to find out about open ed projects that were happening in different parts of the world and most importantly connect with some of the people associated with these.

The conference started with the Open Ed scene in Poland while during the conference I had the pleasure to meet and chat with Dr Tomasz Boinski a lecturer in Computing from Poland. We started talking after our contributions and I could sense that he was keen to make a real difference in his institution through opening-up practices. We started talking about our open source app we are developing at the moment and he offered to help us with finding the right licence for this and forwarded extensive resources around these which will be extremely useful for our project. On the last day, Jaroslaw Lipszyc, a polish poet, emphasised that he sees open as free, and therefore he claimed, that we don’t need the word ‘open’. But open doesn’t come without a cost attached… there is the human cost, time and resources etc. Even if for the learner the “open education product or experience” is free or freely available, the process of making this happen can be costly and rarely calculated in especially when we talk about non-funded projects and funded projects usually have a funding time frame which doesn’t go on for ever… some might.

RESOURCES

I felt that there was still a strong focus on content at the conference and many seem to be working on the production of OER, including film format. We are creating more and more such resources, not just universities but also private providers. Are we reducing learning in the open with watching videos?

While we talk about active learning, many do watch videos for hours and I can see this with my own children. We often reach out to YouTube to learn a new skill or find a new recipe or activity. It is not just children… My youngest started video production and shares his films via YouTube with others. He shares Minecraft stuff. It is an interesting development and I haven’t asked him yet why he is doing it. Looking at it from my perspective it almost feels as if he wants to give something back, as if he wants to connect through his work with others, he loves it when others leave feedback on his clips. So I think it is more than just watching videos, it might be more about connecting with others in a very humane way and non personal at this stage as he is only 12 and he is using a pseudonym. So the social interaction he has are at a somehow removed level.

My eldest, 14, seems to have great fun watching science films and funny stuff on YouTube.He hasn’t got a channel and doesn’t leave digital traces behind. He doesn’t share the stuff he creates, except some clips we added to my YouTube channel a while back now.  I often hear him laughing loudly and there seems to be emotional engagement when he watches the clips, it is really fascinating. Sometimes the boys watch YouTube video on telly… My eldest also started coding and he can do this for hours,he is searching for help to develop what he wants without interacting with anybody online… As far as I can see. We haven’t got any firewall but both seem to have a maturity when navigating through the video jungle. Two very different behaviours which make me think about learners more widely and there is something there that reminds me of the digital residents and digital visitors model by Dave White and Alison LeCornu and other stuff that might indicate that change is happening. Both are autonomous and know where to look when they need help.

… I only have snippets of their digital behaviour and habits  and maybe this is problematic especially as they are still children. Do we trust them too much? Is this freedom good for them or not?

Back to my world… still thinking about resources… While I recognise the need for putting together course resources it would be useful to further explore opportunities using inquiry-based models of learning which would I think free us from racing to produce new content. We have done this in different open initiatives such as FDOL, BYOD4L and FOS as well as #creativeHE. Could we shift the purpose of creating resources for  teaching to capture the process of (co-)constructing learning? After all we learn so much more through experiencing and making stuff. Is this another reason why OER are not used that widely? As we want to create our own resources as educators since we recognise that the process of making helps us engage deeper with our subject that we will help others understand? Is it also about academic ownership? And what about context? De-contextualised resources with global reach… how valuable are these? I am now wondering if the real potential of resources is actually (c0-)creating these as part of the learning process? Could the resources actually be more valuable for the creator and what does this mean about sharing? Are resources more ephemeral than we think? If we talk about authentic learning, could we instead use open data as Dr Javiera Atenas invited us to keep learning and teaching fresh, fully contextualise and create the conditions for an inquiry-rich environment for learning through discovery?

PRACTICES

As an open practitioner with a focus on work that sits outside MOOCland, I was interested to hear at the conference how things have progressed within it. In some cases making available resources equated to course design in a MOOC context. This was very problematic for me… I was looking for a pedagogical rationale but couldn’t see it. Some called this platform pedagogy. Not sure what this is… There were some cases and I had read about them and included in my Literature review were MOOC organisers recognised the need for social learning including learning in groups and collaborated with other institutions or colleagues in other institutions to facilitate these. One of these projects was introduced by Alannah Fitzgerald and it was fascinating to hear their exploration into using facilitators in a MOOC as well as groups and the difficulties they experienced with both but also with the technology, the team tool from EdX. Alannah mentioned “platform education”. Is this similar to teaching from within a VLE or LMS? I shared with her some information about our work in this area outside the MOOC world and the Open Facilitator Project. I would have loved to find out more but in the end we didn’t manage to get together again. At scale the challenges are amplified, of course, require big investments in time and resources, but also a robust pedagogical scaffold, I would say. The support scaffold is vital but often missing.

The conference didn’t help me understand “massive”. I am still confused why we need and often start with massive. Somewhere I read “what we mean by massive, is the potential, the potential is massive”… But  does massive work? Businesses start small and in nature things grow from a seed… Does the education world know better? What is the rationale for massive and global? And what are the real expectations? What are we trying to achieve and what is happening in reality?

The more I think about it the more I see grey zones in open education. Maybe I see them more as red zones, zones that are alarming. We all have different motivations, of course, why we are in it, in open education. If only we could collect authentic and honest responses, I think that might be eye opening… Would there be any surprises? Philosopher Dr Rob Farrow, highlighted that some of us see Open Education as a moral mission. What about everybody else? The OER Hub invited us to think big… how big can we think? And how can we make our thoughts and ideas reality? And what would we change through these if we could make them happen?

My own research reveals that learning with others and being supported by facilitators makes a big difference, feeling part of a community that fosters online and offline interactions shape our engagement in open learning with others who are like us and very different from us. Like-minded people create a sense of belonging and other-minders people stretch us intellectually. Above all, we flourish when there is variety… Variety of people, variety of approaches and freedom to make our own choices.

Learning has always been personal. How can we think that technology would change this? We are still seeking personal connections. Technology actually can strengthen such opportunities and create new ones. I have used this example before… The party. And I have a question for all of us: when we go to a party, do we chat and dance with everybody? Does it depend on the size of the party? How many people are there? How confident we are etc. etc? But I am sure if there are loads and loads of people there, we wouldn’t even attempt to interact with all in a personal way. Or would we? But we would reach out to a few, or one other individual nearby perhaps? But then again, sometimes we go to the party with somebody and stick with this person throughout. Are there parallels? Something to think about…

COMMUNITIES

What really matters are the conversations, the collaborations and feeling and being part of what is happening around us, nearby and sometimes further away. We humans always had a need for belonging as social beings and social media can be useful tools that help us connect with others in the digital jungle. Open practitioners as I mentioned already use a variety of tools and platforms, including social media. Dr Leigh-Anne Perryman and Tony Coughlan shared some findngs from their Facebook project and it was lovely to hear that the emphasis was on community. Educators and learners are appropriating social media for learning, teaching, professional development and research and they have become valuable spaces to be to meet peers and keep up-to-date with what is happening in our area. I had a very interesting conversation during the conference with Tony Coughlan about social media and open practice. Are they compatible, we were asking ourselves with open practices? Dr Ronald Macintyre in his contribution about the “hidden tariffs” also talked about the fact that open educators might be exploited by others economically… I have felt uncomfortable about this for some time now, despite the fact that I am using social media regularly and the open projects I  have initiated are all built using these. There are open practitioners out there who stay away from social media, not because they don’t like to be with others and share but because of the commercial character of social media. The poet Jaroslaw Lipszyc mentioned that we can learn loads from the open source community.Tony Coughlan has written a post about the conference and included some thoughts around this too.

“In distance education the equivalent space is owned by network providers and proprietary platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, whose primary motivation is commercial rather than educational, so their environments are designed for commercial benefit.

The open education movement has some experience of this type of challenge, as open textbooks and journals have been challenging commercial publishers with similar priorities.” (Coughlan, 2016)

I am just wondering what we could do about this as an open community… some ideas are emerging…

Very pleased I went to the OER Hub action lab on the last day where we got some insights into the very first voices that come through the survey that was shared recently. All data will be open data and I am looking forward to reading some of this. With Viviene Vladimirschi, a PhD student buddy from Brazil, we actually would like to do a tiny bit of work on some of the data linked to the action lab we participated and hope this will be possible. One of the key outcomes for me from this action lab was that we need frameworks into open pedagogical practices. I am working on one of them for collaborative learning in open settings. So that was good to hear that my work might be of interest to others. Hopefully others will test it in practice and develop it further.

A big thank you to the GO-GN  and the OER HUB team, Prof. Martin Weller, Dr Bea  de los Arcos, Dr Rob Farrow, Dr Beck Pitt, Natalie Eggleston  for supporting this trip and enabling me to share the work we do within the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Manchester Metropolitan University with many colleagues from my own and other institutions in the area of open education and related PhD research. A big thank you also to all colleagues PhD students part of GO-GN who were present and others who engaged online as well as Prof. Robert Schuwer and Prof. Fred Mulder for their camaraderie.

Getting ready for #OEGlobal

In 2015 I was made aware of the Global OER Graduate Network by Dr Bea de los Arcos and decided to join. As a PhD student, I often feel lonely, I am sure others do too, so becoming part of a network that would help me feel more connected with other PhD students and their projects around open education can only be a big big bonus.

After a few months of joining the network, I received an email about the possibility to share my research at the Global Open Education Conference in Kraków in April 2016 as part of the Global OER Network. I applied for a funded place and after a few weeks I found out that it had been accepted. This was very exciting and a great opportunity to share my work and get some feedback on my research-in-progress.

I started my self-funded PhD in January 2013 at Edinburgh Napier University and am now in my 4th year. I went through ups and many downs, so far and am sure more will follow. Working full-time, being passionate about my job and leading a professional life with many open-ended projects and internal and external commitments, having a family and doing a part-time PhD at the same time is an explosive mix. Juggling priorities is hard. Now in my fourth year, I feel that I am finally making some progress. Draft Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4 have all been approved as such by my two supervisors, Dr Sandra Cairncross and Prof. Keith Smyth. I have also written a draft abstract, a prologue and my growing acknowledgements section. I have even made a tiny start with Chapter 7… the conclusions and am adding ideas for further research… If I look back, I can say, that I am today in a much better place than I was a year ago… there is however still a lot to do…

All fieldwork has been completed and I am currently in the data analysis stage. I thought writing Chapter 3: Methods and Data, was hard but actually applying it is even harder. Learning being a phenomenographer while actually doing it is extremely challenging. But who said this would be easy?

During the conference, I plan to share some details about my research, the context I am working in as well as some preliminary findings linked to one of the themes that is emerging through the data captured in 100,999 words of transcripts from 22 phenomenographic interviews. The theme I will share is Cross-Boundaries. In case you are wondering, the context of my research is open academic development, which is organised through informal cross institutional collaboration. I am looking at how open learning is experienced in two particular cases with a focus on collaborative learning.

I hope delegates will be able to relate to my project and ask questions. As there will be many other PhD students there, I can’t wait to find out more about their projects, their dilemmas and discoveries as some of them might also be relevant for my project. Going to a conference, I think,is less about our work, and more about how we can connect with others and their work that will trigger dialogue and debate and move our understanding forward and possibly into new directions. This is what excites me most!

Some of you might wonder what my research is about… and perhaps I should have started this post explaining… apologies. I have created a page, where I provide an overview of my research together with related dissemination activities so far. Also, occasionally I blog about different stages and my reflections can also be accessed through this blog, sometimes using doodles to visualise my thinking. I also keep a, currently private, reflective diary of the phenomenographic analysis I am working on at the moment, which I plan to include as an appendix to my thesis. My data is linked to two open cross-institutional courses FDOL132 and #creativeHE which followed my professional journey from the University of Salford to Manchester Metropolitan University. The thesis will be made available under a Creative Commons licence together with the collaborative learning framework for open cross-institutional academic development, I plan to develop.

image source here

In a few days, I will be packing my suitcase for Kraków. My contribution is sort of ready for the pre-conference event and the main conference. I am sure there will be a few more tweaks. I really look forward to the week ahead and am very excited about meeting other fellow PhD students and experienced open researchers and finding out about their projects and the innovative work that is done globally around open education.

I am grateful and thankful to the Global OER Graduate Network for funding this trip.

See you there 😉

@BYOD4L ing this week from the other side

Monday note…

“Inspired by a tweet by Emma Gillaspie @egillaspy on day 1 about a photo competition around the 5Cs (check this out at on Twitter using the hashtag #UoSBYOD4L) I plan to capture this BYOD4L week using images but also think about the 5Cs in a different light… ”

Saturday morning

yes… this was the plan at the start of the week but it didn’t come to fruition… unfortunately…

However, the competition made me think about the 5Cs (Nerantzi & Beckingham) in a new light and I started thinking about antonyms of the 5Cs and the 5Cs as a continuum. I am just adding my notes below at this stage and am exploring currently in what way a 5C continuum would be useful as a diagnostic tool perhaps for individuals and learning communities using social media but not exclusively. At work, we will be developing a mobile app which will be valuable for educators, students and many others as a self-development tool and I think one of the applications that I would like to try in the summer, when we hopefully have the first version of the app, is the 5C continuum. More about this at a later stage. Together with the 5C continuum I would also find a better way to represent the 5C at a specific moment in time and through time, if this makes sense. 

This week I experienced the BYOD4L course from the other side. As a little helper to our very first community-led January 2016 iteration with Neil Withnell, Sheila MacNeill and Alex Spiers. Sue Beckingham and I have been leading all three previous iterations with many passionate colleagues from the UK and further afield and while we did enjoy them enormously and helped us really get to know each other and find effective ways to collaborate, we also felt that a change was needed and a shift at the same time to empower the BYOD4L community, refresh the offer with new faces and ideas as well as help others develop new capacities and also share the load a bit as this is an initiative by the community for the community and now with the community. I feel it is not enough to talk and write about learning and working in partnership. Making it happen is the real value for all.

For me this week was fascinating, because it showed that we can re-use OER courses and we can work with other peoples course materials and we can make it a success. I guess it also depends on the materials, how flexible they are. Our approach has been inquiry-based and the course course can be fully personalised and contextualised. I think this might be an important enabling factor. Letting go and loosing control can be scary but also very liberating and I have experienced how empowering this can be when working with others who are committed practitioners. Committed to the course but also the team and the community. It definitely needs to be a team effort. Otherwise it won’t work. Together, we can grow ideas and take initiatives into new and exciting directions. I am very keen to continue exploring this way of working  with others in the open and am excited about what might happen in the future, or what we might create in the future.

Friday evening, our last BYOD4Lchat was an experience in itself and something we didn’t anticipate of happening. Twitter to crash? Alex said it is our fault… I know he is kidding but I am sure it is partly our fault as we were using it too… Experiencing something like this in the middle of a live event were you are not in the same room with others leaves you feeling hopeless. First, you think it is your connection, as I did and blaming my boys who were both on computers…, then you try different things to re-connect and nothing works… you feel stuck. You want to reach out and let everybody know but you can’t, at least you can’t through the same channel. Just imagine the whole internet would suddenly disappear under our feet…

I think we need a plan B for these things and plan C and this should perhaps be communicated at the outset of each event. So what could we have done? My first thoughts would be the following

Plan B: Move the conversation to another social media channel, in our case this could be the BYOD4L community in Google plus. If this fails?

Plan C: Re-arrange after connection has been re-established to minimise frustration. 

Really would love to hear your ideas about the above.

The organisers decided to use the DM feature in Twitter to co-ordinate activities during the BYOD4L week and I think this really made a difference to speed-up communication, troubleshoot in no time, support each other, often instantly, but also acknowledge each others’ contributions and really proof that this is a team effort where the collective comes before the individual. I saw all these things happening this week and it was wonderful and made me smile many times.

I hope everybody enjoyed BYOD4L this time as much as I did and found it useful too. It definitely helped me reflect, plan and act. The week and what happened during this week   seeded new ideas for me, so thank you all! Sheila has written an excellent summary of the week. Please access here.

BYOD4L will be back in the summer as a 24h experience.  The BYOD4L community is open all year round so just jump in to connect, communicate, curate, collaborate and create. The community is  here. For the BYOD4L day, all we need is people who would like to organise it with others. Get it touch if this could be you. We are looking for colleagues from different parts of the world.

 

 

 

 

handing over the baton to the community @BYOD4L @LTHEchat

We have heard, read and probably experienced that OERs are often under-used… does it have to be this way? And what about OER courses?

Orr et al. (2015) in a recent study recognise among others that OERs can bring educators together and trigger opportunities for collaboration especially in the area of professional development of educators.

I have been exploring various approaches and strategies to achieve this with many passionate colleagues and closely with Sue Beckingham over the last few years and (co-)created openly licensed courses and initiatives in the area of informal open cross-institutional collaboration in academic development since I did my MSc in Blended and Online Education with Prof. Keith Smyth which helped me discover opportunities in this area and I am since January 2013 a PhD student exploring open cross-institutional professional development.

Scalability is often mentioned as something we haven’t worked out yet… an answer could be cross-institutional offers perhaps? I have been interested in this with a focus on creating conditions for versatile and collaborative learning experiences within supportive communities.

Sustainability is perhaps something that needs more our attention as well? How often have we heard projects that have received seed funding disappearing after this dried out? And what about non-funded grass-roots open initiatives that solely rely on good will and sustained commitment? Do they have the potential to live longer? But how?

To sustain open courses and initiatives that are of value for others, make them truly democratic, inclusive and collaborative, I think one way of doing it could be through community engagement – community driven leadership that empowers and creates shared ownership. It requires the community to play an active role in shaping and reshaping the course or initiative and taking it into new and exciting directions. It might also be a way for open practitioners to give something back to the wider community while developing new capabilities?

Projects which grew out of seeds I planted, and are out there in the open are changing… What I just described has actually started happening and I am including specific examples here:

The Teaching and Learning Conversations (TLC) webinars: Since September 2015 we introduced a rotating organising team. I am extremely impressed with how well it has worked so far. Dr Rod Cullen, Prof. Ale Armellini and Calum Thomson are definitely taking the TLCs to the next level where one person couldn’t.

The Learning and Teaching in Higher Education tweetchat (#LTHEchat) had a mixed team last term but from this term we have 2 colleagues from the LTHEchat community, Dr Stephen Powell and Ian Tindall leading together with a colleague from the HEA, Kandy Woodfield, as the #HEAchat and the #LTHEchat have come together, which will be beneficial for the wider academic community. I am really looking forward to this new collaboration and the forthcoming #LTHEchats.

The open course Bring Your Own Devices for Learning (BYOD4L) is going to be offered for the 4th time next week (11-15 January 16). Colleagues who have participated and facilitated in previous iterations of the course, have kindly volunteered to become organisers. I am  extremely grateful to Neil Withnell, Sheila MacNeill and Alex Spiers for taking on this exciting opportunity forward. I would suggest to join BYOD4L from Monday for a week of development where students and educators are coming together to learn about how they can utilise their smart devices for learning and teaching. It has been a very popular course so far, creates a real buzz every time it is offered, has lead to rich learning and changes to practice and generated many opportunities for collaboration that stretched beyond the course. Jump into the BYOD4L community directy! No registration is required!!! Read Sheila MacNeill’s related post here.

The title of this post says… handing over the baton… it doesn’t mean that I will disappear. Relay only works with great team work and that means sustained commitment! In my new role, I will be there to support the teams as long as needed, more silently in the background 😉

 

Hands Passing Baton at Sporting Event, source here

I am looking forward to finding out where this new direction in my thinking and practice will lead us. Might this be a valuable path for more democratic, distributed and participatory leadership of open practices and help us sustain and grow practices further?

To an exciting year ahead!

Your comments and ideas are, as always, very welcome 😉

Chrissi

 

References

Orr, D., M. Rimini and D. van Damme (2015), Open Educational Resources: A Catalyst for Innovation, Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing, Paris.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264247543-en