Module 4 Twitter Discussion

I chose to participate in the twitter chat because I wanted to get the chance to engage with my peers in the class that were outside of my discussion group and engage with others in a connectivist manner. Another driving force for me to select this was mentioned in the reading by Koseoglu, a quote from bell hooks: “Throughout my academic career I have sought the spaces of openness, fixing my attention less on the ways colleagues are closed and more and searching for the place of possibility” [for positive change]. I thought that those participating in the twitter chat may be students that are looking not only to learn about open education but to practice it as well, and that is something that I wanted to explore as bell hooks recommends. A transcript of my exchanges follows: 

Q1: What does ‘Open Education’ mean to you?

A1: To me, Open Education means that the educational experience in question is one that can be experienced to the fullest extent by anyone who wants to, regardless of their class, location, NT/ND, culture, body, etc, although that experience may be different for everyone

Q2: Expanding on Q1, if you had to characterised #OpenEd with just 1 word, what word would you use?

A2: “Welcoming.” I was torn between ‘inclusive’ and ‘accessible,’ but I think that welcoming covers what I find important about both of those. My interpretation is more about the spirit of OpenEd than its execution in EdTech, which can be less “welcoming”

Q3: What common misconceptions exist about open education?

A3: In my conversations with friends, they seem to believe that OpenEd is inherently slipshod, and necessarily of a lower quality than a more rigid educational pedagogy, even though they have made use of “open” resources, like MIT’s OCW and found it very well done.

Q3b: Why do you think that they think that? Is there something about OpenEd that makes people question the quality?

A3b: From our conversations, the digital/online/distance learning aspects that are often part of OpenEd learning design reminded them of poorly planned and executed courses during the pandemic when everything went online, and their gut reaction was that it was ALL like that. However, after some discussion, and I had pointed out that they were often making use of open resources to some degree(khan academy, youtube writing tutorials, MIT’s OCW as mentioned), they came around. I do think that the pandemic may have given digital/OpEd a bit of a bad rep.

Q3c: Hmm very interesting. I think like anything new, people are skeptical to change and adapt to it. Humans are creature of habit and when something new is introduced we often reject it. I think open education is definitely one of those things where people are still not sure about.

A3c: I also think that OpenEd suffers from that more as a result of its volatility, ie every few years there seems to be a new DEFINITIVE solution/system of EdTech for open ed curricula to work with, only for it to be forgotten or supplanted by something new a few years later.

Q4: How are the roles of the students and the instructor(s) (and the content!) impacted by #openEd?

A4: Something that I like about most open ed design I have seen is that it flattens the hierarchy of the classroom somewhat, allowing students and instructors to interact more as equals than in traditional pedagogy. It’s less restrictive and leads to more fun learning!

Q5: As a learner, would you like to see more openness in your courses?

A5: I certainly would. As a CS student I would love the opportunity to work/code collaboratively more often. Working on collaborative projects in my free time is fun, & makes me a better coder. Explaining my logic to others or synthesizing a solution to something together.

Q6: What one piece of advice would you give to an instructor wanting to implement more open educational practices in their teaching?

A6: In a word, collaboration is not your enemy. There is valuable learning to be done when people work together to solve something, even if it so happens that one person solves 90% of the issue and the other 10%. For everyone involved, there is something being learned.

I had a good time with the twitter chat, and felt that the format was able to help me craft more streamlined or insightful answers to the questions, but I feel like I could have used some extra characters to relate my answers more directly to course readings. I also would have liked to have more peer to peer interactions during the discussion. I was worried that I may come off as combative or found that I was bumping up against the character limit too much for my reply or question to say exactly what I’m trying to ask them. I was also somewhat anxious to have the possibility of interacting with others in the open education space that would likely know more than me, and I was worried about maybe using language that would be harmful or accidentally expose myself as an ignorant student that had failed to truly understand the material I was speaking about. Another thing that I was considering was the privacy aspect. I think that I have a personal twitter account that I have followed some musicians I like and friends I know, but I was worried about having this educational experience permanently tied to my personal account, as well as providing even more data, specifically about my academics, to a tech conglomerate like twitter. This brought me to create a new account, still in my real name so that I could maintain a genuine and good faith engagement with the topic, but so that I had at least some small degree of separation between this and my personal life. To relate this to the reading by Cronin, I was attempting to strike a balance on the VIsitor/Resident spectrum, so that I could meaningfully engage with the material, but still maintain at least some anonymity and “vistitorship” on the whole.

References: 

Koseoglu, S. (2020) “Open Pedagogy: A Response to David Wiley” in Bali, B., Cronin, C., Czerniewicz, L., DeRosa, R. & Jhangiani, R. (2020) Open at the Margins. Rebus Community Pressbooks. https://press.rebus.community/openatthemargins/chapter/open-pedagogy-a-response-to-david-wiley/ 

Cronin. C. (2019). Open education: Walking a critical path. In D. Conrad, & P. Prinsloo (Eds.), Open(ing) Education: Theory and Practice. Leiden: Brill. Open Access Version – http://eprints.teachingandlearning.ie/4345/