This Messy Web

I've just finished reading an article by Postill and Pink titled Social Media Ethnography: The Digital Researcher in a Messy Web. It's appropriate that this happened immediately following the OEOFellows retreat in Toronto this past weekend since it brings new insights into "making connections between online and locality-based realities". With social media and real-life events intertwining in what I do in open contexts, not only my course work at the university, but also in a variety of digital communities, it's important for me to step back and look at the messy interconnections and weavings of these virtual and physical interactions. This environment, for my action research project, will need to consider the dispersed and changing localities (Postill & Pink, 2012) of the study. There will be a "constant sense of becoming through practice and practical knowledge" (Postill & Pink, p 127).

The everyday routines outlined by Postill & Pink are described as catching up, sharing, exploring, interacting and archiving. This is how I, as researcher in action, will produce knowledge and create elements of this ethnographic place (Postill & Pink p. 128). Media making is part of how I will create and maintain relationships. This is evident in the blog post I wrote the morning after the retreat where I capture the essence of the event, created a remixed video in Animoto of all the tweets I had captured from the day of the retreat, and shared the Twitter connections for those who are OERFellows as well as those with eCampus Ontario who will support the group.

Postill & Pink make reference to hashtag sociality to identify and group the conversation into an organized timeline where people can 'convey, relay and discover information' (p 131). This became apparent in our quest, as OER Fellows, to have a unique hashtag with which to identify ourselves. Since OER does not fully describe what we hope to accomplish in our roles as fellows, I selected and proposed (through the blog post and video production) that #OEOFellows (an extension of the OEORangers from last spring) and #GlisteningLearningFish (from our mad lib activity) be adopted to tag and collect our Twitter conversations. This becomes an example of the hybrid sociality Postill & Pink describe, where the participants in the group gain a mediated sense of contextual fellowship (p 132) through the hashtags that share their story.

This same struggle that I describe here within the OEOFellows group is similar to that in my digital teaching spaces, other physical and virtual communities in which I engage (AKGTCanada, Voiced Radio, Virtually Connecting, CLMOOC, Creative Commons and Lakehead Faculty of Education). It's important to find ways to build the connections into meaningful storylines in social media spaces. For my courses, I use a Twitter account with @ to share tweets but also use a hashtag to collect conversational threads.

It's the messiness of the interrelatedness, interconnectedness and inter-weavings that often leave me wondering about place and space, relationships and participation. It's not just a community of practice as described by Wenger & Lave when they state that "the idea that learning ‘is a process of participation in communities of practice, participation that is at first legitimately peripheral but that increases gradually in engagement and complexity’." Nor is this hybrid sociality similar to the engagement in community within affinity spaces as described by James Paul Gee.

It's more complicated and complex - in this messy web.

References

Gee, J. P. (2005). Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces: From the age of mythology to today's schools. In Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power and Social Context (Vol. 9780521836432, pp. 214-232). Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511610554.012

Postill, J. & Pink, S. (2012). Social media ethnography: The digital researcher in a messy web. Retrieved from http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/files/2013/04/Postill-Pink-socialmedia-ethnography.pdf

Smith, M. K. (2003, 2009) ‘Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger and communities of practice’, the encyclopedia of informal education, www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm.

Webinars... oh my!

So Jenni sent a reminder out today for our upcoming OER Fellows day long 'retreat' to meet. It'll be the first time we get together and learn together. She also reminded us that we should be prepared to share our research plan and a webinar idea we have.

So, after reading Tony Bate's blog post That Was 2017 in Online Learning, I'm re-framing my thinking. Tony writes that "There’s a long way to go with open educational resources". He identifies five key points about why OER is not as prevalent as it should be. The point that caught my attention speaks to my work as an OER Fellow:
"stop thinking of OER as something different from everything else on the Internet; all open content has value, whether it is specifically designed for educational purposes or not; this means coming up with course design models that exploit open content for the purpose of developing 21st century skills such as knowledge management, analysis of source reliability, etc."
The next point he makes is that "Instructor training in teaching remains a huge problem" with the following statement providing a HUGE aha moment for me:

"less than half the instructors based their innovation on a theory of learning or a change of teaching method to produce different outcomes, such as skills development. Without a grounding in pedagogy and a knowledge of the research into how people learn, it is impossible for most instructors to see the real potential of digital technology for improving their teaching"

I forget that what comes naturally to me, after a lifetime in the field of education, is the underlying, implicit and tacit knowledge I bring to my course design, delivery and teaching strategies. My mediation and decision making with digital teaching and learning is based on years of experience with educators of all ages and stages. This is my gift to give.

Further to this, I'm thinking there may be some ways to focus my particular skill set into the  webinars. Since eCampus Ontario managers are already doing a Bento Box series where new e-tech tools are shared, there really isn't a need for a WHAT style webinar. It's time to shift my thinking to the WHY webinar.

• Why would you integrate media into your course syllabus - the visual syllabus shared in the Catch is a model and one example.
• Why would you stop marking and grading in open learning? links to Jesse Stommel, Laura Gibbs and Dave Cormier's work comes to mind.
• Why would you post your course openly on a blog or web site? thinking beyond powerpoint presentations comes to mind; iterations of course content over time to suit learner needs
• Why should UDL matter in course design? linking in new frameworks for UDL from CAST
• Why SECTIONS should guide your decisions of tech integrations into course delivery.
• Why digital literacies should be integrated into EVERY course.

More info about the SECTIONS model is found in Tony's book Teaching in a Digital Age Chapter 8.

Wayfinding in Digital Spaces?
Media Making Matters?
PLN's and PLE's: Critical decision making in building your digital teaching persona?

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.