So.... I'm OPEN

Today, Jenni Hayman sent out a message in the ECHO group with a link to the WikiEducator Research/Open Educators Factory site. This describes a project about open education and lead me onto a web tool to self assess & rate your individual openness.

The graphic results are provided immediately, along with some recommendations for readings and viewing to extend your learning. So, I guess I'm not really surprised, but it turns out... I'm an open designer, OER user, open teacher AND and open evaluator.

Open Educator is defined as:

An Open Educator choses to use open approaches, when possible and appropriate, with the aim to remove all unnecessary barriers to learning. She works through an open online identity and relies on online social networking to enrich and implement her work, understanding that collaboration bears a responsibility towards the work of others.

An Open Educator implements openness along four main activities. She:

1. Implements Open Learning Design, by openly sharing ideas and plans about her teaching activities with experts and with past and potential students, incorporating inputs and transparently leaving a trace of the development process.

2. Uses open educational content, by releasing her teaching resources through open licenses, by facilitating sharing of her resources through OER repositories and other means, and by adapting, assembling and using OERs produced by others in her teaching.

3. Adopts Open Pedagogies, fostering co-creation of knowledge by students through online and offline collaboration, allowing learners to contribute to public knowledge resources such as Wikipedia.

4. Implements open assessment practices such as peer and collaborative evaluation, open badges and e-portfolios, engaging students as well as external stakeholders in learning assessment.

Despite that result based on a handful of questions, I'm still not sure about my 'status' as an open educator. As I've been exploring the 'dial it up' model, there are steps and mechanisms to shift my teaching and learning further into the open, but those will need to considered carefully and negotiated. My open means that my students, colleagues and institution are also 'dialing it up' with me. Where do ethics and privacy come into this equation and how can open be balanced with safer internet practices?

Interviews - talking about myself in the OPEN

I've had four interviews now, one video, two audio and one text. I have to admit my favourite was the text one, but it took the longest. I wrote and rewrote my responses to Doug Peterson's questions to make sure it read the way I'd want it said. I was thinking out loud without really talking out loud. Here are the links to these four interviews:

• 101 Open Stories with Jenni Hayman
• Getting Air with Terry Greene
• Que Sera Sarah? with Sarah Lalonde
• An Interview with ... by Doug Peterson

I blogged [What's Your Story?] before I did the interview with Jenni. As I was talking with Jenni, I was referencing the blog post to make sure I'd mention those key points I'd written about. So, in a fashion, I was writing this interview as well as doing the video recording. Writing and thinking go hand in hand for me. Drawing and thinking also works to tease out what's really being said.

Now, I'm returning to the audio and video interviews and getting a transcribed version, as part of my ethnographic study into my open educational practices - how I teach, what I teach and why I teach they way I do. Some insights will occur, I'm sure.

After reading Ethnography in the Digital Internet Era: From fields to flows, descriptions to interventions by Annette N. Markham, there will be some deeper inner dialogues about this work I'm doing. The frameworks described are already tinkling through my brain:

• internet as tool, medium, or network of connectivity; ethnographies of networked sociality
• internet as place or world; ethnographies of immersive environments
• internet as a way of being; ethnographies of the contemporary social world in a digital age

Concepts like 'boundary marking' and 'iterative oscillation' are bringing forward some issues I need to consider in this particular circumstance. More to come.

In Conversation

I truly enjoy learning in conversation with others. Sharing ideas, actions, insights all add to my own thinking, actions and curated resources. So, the first conversations I had this week with the OER Fellows, with some of the OEORangers, and with Jenni Hayman, all added to my knowledge construction.

The opportunity to meet for the first time with the OER Fellows, in Zoom, was great. We are a diverse set of open advocates with varying skills, fluencies and contexts. The plan is to next meet in person to do a deeper dive into our collective understanding of what it means to be an open educator in Ontario. We'll explore how we can support the open movement (OEM) to adopt and adapt open resources (OER) as we shift teaching and learning into open pedagogies and practices (OEP).

The conversation with others in the OEORangers group is a means to breaking out of institutional silos where work is often done in isolation with no ripples outward to other organizations of higher education. This conversation creates ripples across the college/university divide and builds connections between individuals (faculty, staff) who are openly advocating for access and adoption of OER.

In chatting with Jenni Hayman, I was able to dip deeper into my own work as an OER Fellow and try to understand my position in the 'grand scheme of things'. We shared ideas, contacts, interesting details and common interests. Planning for a series of webinars over the coming year fits into what I hope to accomplish and we tentatively looked at early July as faculty begin course design and syllabus production. Other bits of the conversation included:

• Bento Box series - 12 apps of Christmas as mentioned in the Catch
• Becoming an open educator - UK Open Education site; OEPScotland; Lorna Campbell
• Christina Peters - #GoOpen Fellow in the US; 20 states using OER?; zero professional learning about OER or OEP
• BCCampus OER toolkit (need to take a look for this)
• CCGlobal summit - she's working on session to develop mini-modules on OER and SDGs as learning outcomes, tied to UNESCO work; connected to Rory McGreal and Pedro ? from Peru as mentors
• EdX course on Media Literacy - Dan Gillmore on YouTube doing interviews with media experts such as Mimi Ito
• Roger's diffusion of innovation being applied to her research work on Open is an Invitation: Sense Making and OER. 
• REB (research ethics board) approval process takes 4 times longer than you think; each institution has their own process; 
• she's working with approval and distribution through teacher/learning centers to recruit participants in her study with pre-questions, workshops, webinar, post questions - has letter sent out already but awaiting REB from four institutions she's working with.