by James Willis
We worked with Michael Amigot at IBL Studios in a previous project to launch the first instance of open badges in Open edX in Lorena Barba's Python MOOC at George Washington University. The code to issues badges is now available at GitHub as an open source tool for those interested in issuing their own Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI)-compliant badges. IBL designed this to be "[a] platform to award your own institution's badges. The badges you create and earn with this server are compatible with the specifications of the OpenBadges project."
Showing posts with label open source. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open source. Show all posts
Friday, June 19, 2015
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
The Void Between Colleges of Education and the University Teaching and Learning
In this post, I consider the tremendous advances in educational research I am seeing outside of colleges of education and ponder the relevance of mainstream educational research in light of the transformation of learning made possible by new digital social networks.
This weekend, the annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning took place at Indiana University. ISSOTL is the home of folks who are committed to studying and advancing teaching and learning in university settings. I saw several presentations that are directly relevant to what we care about here at Re-Mediating Assessment. These included a workshop on social pedagogies organized by Randy Bass, the Assistant Provost for Teaching and Learning at Georgetown, and several sessions on open education, including one by Randy and Toru Iiyoshi, who heads the Knowledge Media Lab at the Carnegie Foundation. Toru co-edited the groundbreaking volume Opening up Education, of which we here at RMA are huge fans. (I liked it so much I bought the book, but you can download all of the articles for free—ignore the line at the MIT press about sample chapters).
I presented at a session about e-Portfolios with John Gosney (Faculty Liaison for Learning Technologies at IUPUI) and Stacy Morrone (Associate Dean for Learning Technologies at IU). John talked about the e-Portfolio efforts within the Sakai open source collaboration and courseware platform; Stacy talked about e-Portfolio as it has been implemented in OnCourse, IU’s instantiation of the Sakai open source course collaboration platform. I presented about our efforts to advance participatory assessment in my classroom assessment course using newly available wikis and e-Portfolio tools in Oncourse (earlier deliberation on those efforts are here; more posted here soon). I was flattered that Maggie Ricci of IU’s Office of Instructional Consulting interviewed me about my post on positioning assessment for participation and promised to post the video this week (I will update here when I find out).
I am going to post about these presentations and how they intersect with participatory assessment as time permits over the next week or so. In the meantime, I want to stir up some overdue discussion over the void between the SOTL community and my colleagues in colleges of education at IU and elsewhere. In an unabashed effort to direct traffic to RMA and build interest in past and forthcoming posts, I am going to first write about this issue. I think it raises issues about the relevance of colleges of education and suggests a need for more interdisciplinary approaches to education research.
I should point out that I am new to the SOTL community. I have focused on technology-supported K-12 education for most of my career (most recently within the Quest Atlantis videogaming environment). I have only recently begun studying my own teaching in the context of developing new core courses for the doctoral program in Learning Sciences and in trying to develop online courses that take full advantage of new digital social networking practices (initial deliberations over my classroom assessment course are here). I feel sheepish about my late arrival because I am embarrassed about the tremendous innovations I found in the SOTL community that have mostly been ignored by educational researchers. My departmental colleagues Tom Duffy, who has long been active in SOTL here at IU, and Melissa Gresalfi have recently gotten seriously involved as well. The conference was awash with IU faculty, but I only saw a few colleagues from the School of Education. One notable exception was Melissa’s involvement on a panel on IU’s Interdisciplinary Teagle Colloquium on Inquiry in Action. I could not go because it conflicted with my own session, but this panel described just the sort of cross-campus collaboration I am aiming to promote here. I also ran into Luise McCarty from the Educational Policy program who heads the school’s Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate for the school.
My search of the program for other folks from colleges of education revealed another session that was scheduled against mine and that focused on the issue I am raising in this post. Karen Swanson of Mercer University and Mary Kayler of George Mason reported on the findings of their meta-analysis of the literature on the tensions between colleges of education and SOTL. The fact that there is enough literature on this topic to meta-analyze points out that this issue has been around for a while (and suggests that I should probably read up before doing anything more than blogging about this issue.) From the abstract, it looks like they focused on the issue of tenure, which I presume refers to a core issue in the broader SOTL community: that SOTL researchers outside of schools of education risk being treated as interlopers by educational researchers, while treated as dilettantes by their own disciplinary communities. This same issue was mentioned in other sessions I attended as well. But significantly from my perspective, it looks like Swanson and Kayler looked at this issue from the perspective of Education faculty, which is what I want to focus on here. I have tenure, but I certainly wonder how my increased foray into the SOTL community will be viewed when I try to get promoted to full professor.
I will start by exploring my own observations about educational researchers who study their own university teaching practices. I am not in teacher education, but I know of a lot of respected education faculty who seem to be conducting high quality, published research about their teacher education practices. However, there is clearly a good deal of pretty mediocre self-study taking place as well. I review for a number of educational research journals and conferences. When I am asked to review manuscripts or proposals for educational research carried out in classrooms in the college of education, I am quite suspect. Because I have expertise in motivation and in formative assessment, I get stacks of submissions of studies of college of education teaching that seem utterly pointless to me. For example, folks love to study whether self______ is correlated with some other education relevant variables. The answer is always yes, (unless their measures are unreliable), and then there is some post hoc explanation of the relationships with some tenuous suggestions for practice. Likewise, I review lots of submissions that examine whether students who get feedback on learning to solve some class of problems learn to solve those problems better than students whose feedback is withheld. Here the answer should be yes, since this is essentially a test of educational malpractice. But the studies often ignore the assessment maxim that feedback must be useful and used, and instead focus on complex random assignment so that their study can be more “scientific.” I understand the appeal, because they are so easy to conduct and there are enough examples of them actually getting published to provide some inspiration (while dragging down the over effect size of feedback in meta-analytic studies). While it is sometimes hard to tell, these “convenience” studies usually appear to be conducted in the author’s own course or academic program. So, yes, I admit that when that looks to be the case, I do not expect to be impressed. I wonder if other folks feel the same way or if perhaps I am being overly harsh.
Much of my interest in SOTL follows from my efforts to help my college take better advantage of new online instructional tools and to help take advantage of social networking tools in my K-12 research. While my colleagues in IU Bloomington and IUPUI are making progress, I am afraid that we are well behind the curve. While I managed to attend a few SOTL sessions, I saw tremendous evidence of success that I will write about in subsequent posts. Randy Bass and Heidi Elmendorf (also of Georgetown) showed evidence of deep engagement on live discussion forums that simply can’t be faked; here at IU, Phillip Quirk showed some very convincing self-report data about student engagement in our new interdisciplinary Human Biology Program, which looks like a great model of practice for team-teaching courses. These initial observations reminded me of the opinion of James Paul Gee, who leads the MacArthur Foundation’s 21st Century Assessment Project (which partly sponsors my work as well). He has stated on several occasions that “the best educational research is no longer being conducted in colleges of education.” That is a pretty bold statement, and my education colleagues and I initially took offense to it. Obviously, it depends on your perspective; but in terms of taking advantage of new digital social networking tools and the movement towards open education and open-source curriculum, it seems like it may already be true.
One concern I had with SOTL was the sense that the excesses of “evidence-based practice” that has infected educational research was occurring in SOTL. But I did not see many of the randomized experimental studies that set out to “prove” that new instructional technology “works.” I have some very strong opinions about this that I will elaborate on in future posts; for now I will just say that I worry that SOTL researchers might get are too caught up in doing controlled comparison studies of conventional and online courses that they completely miss the point that online courses offer an entirely new realm of possibilities for teaching and learning. The “objective” measures of learning normally used in such studies are often biased in favor of traditional lecture/text/practice models that train students to memorize numerous specific associations; as long as enough of those associations appear on a targeted multiple-choice exam, scores will go up. The problem is that such designs can’t capture the important aspects of individual learning and any aspects of the social learning that is possible in these new educational contexts. Educational researchers seem unwilling to seriously begin looking at the potential of these new environments that they have “proven” to work. So, networked computers and online courses end up being used for very expensive test preparation…and that is a shame.
Here at RMA, we are exploring how participatory assessment models can foster and document all of the tremendous new opportunities for teaching and learning made possible by new digital social networks, while also producing convincing evidence on these “scientific” measures. I will close this post with a comment that Heidi Elmendorf made in the social pedagogies workshop. I asked her why she and the other presenters were embracing the distinction between “process” and “product.” In my opinion, this distinction is based on outdated individual models of learning; it dismisses the relevance of substantive communal engagement in powerful forms of learning, while privileging individual tests as the only “scientific” evidence of learning. I don’t recall Heidi’s exact response, but she immediately pointed out that her disciplinary colleagues in Biology leave her no choice. I was struck by the vigorous nods of agreement from her colleagues and the audience. Her response really brought be me back down to earth and reminded me how much work we have to do in this regard. In my subsequent posts, I will try to illustrate how participatory assessment can address precisely the issue that Heidi raised.
This weekend, the annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning took place at Indiana University. ISSOTL is the home of folks who are committed to studying and advancing teaching and learning in university settings. I saw several presentations that are directly relevant to what we care about here at Re-Mediating Assessment. These included a workshop on social pedagogies organized by Randy Bass, the Assistant Provost for Teaching and Learning at Georgetown, and several sessions on open education, including one by Randy and Toru Iiyoshi, who heads the Knowledge Media Lab at the Carnegie Foundation. Toru co-edited the groundbreaking volume Opening up Education, of which we here at RMA are huge fans. (I liked it so much I bought the book, but you can download all of the articles for free—ignore the line at the MIT press about sample chapters).
I presented at a session about e-Portfolios with John Gosney (Faculty Liaison for Learning Technologies at IUPUI) and Stacy Morrone (Associate Dean for Learning Technologies at IU). John talked about the e-Portfolio efforts within the Sakai open source collaboration and courseware platform; Stacy talked about e-Portfolio as it has been implemented in OnCourse, IU’s instantiation of the Sakai open source course collaboration platform. I presented about our efforts to advance participatory assessment in my classroom assessment course using newly available wikis and e-Portfolio tools in Oncourse (earlier deliberation on those efforts are here; more posted here soon). I was flattered that Maggie Ricci of IU’s Office of Instructional Consulting interviewed me about my post on positioning assessment for participation and promised to post the video this week (I will update here when I find out).
I am going to post about these presentations and how they intersect with participatory assessment as time permits over the next week or so. In the meantime, I want to stir up some overdue discussion over the void between the SOTL community and my colleagues in colleges of education at IU and elsewhere. In an unabashed effort to direct traffic to RMA and build interest in past and forthcoming posts, I am going to first write about this issue. I think it raises issues about the relevance of colleges of education and suggests a need for more interdisciplinary approaches to education research.
I should point out that I am new to the SOTL community. I have focused on technology-supported K-12 education for most of my career (most recently within the Quest Atlantis videogaming environment). I have only recently begun studying my own teaching in the context of developing new core courses for the doctoral program in Learning Sciences and in trying to develop online courses that take full advantage of new digital social networking practices (initial deliberations over my classroom assessment course are here). I feel sheepish about my late arrival because I am embarrassed about the tremendous innovations I found in the SOTL community that have mostly been ignored by educational researchers. My departmental colleagues Tom Duffy, who has long been active in SOTL here at IU, and Melissa Gresalfi have recently gotten seriously involved as well. The conference was awash with IU faculty, but I only saw a few colleagues from the School of Education. One notable exception was Melissa’s involvement on a panel on IU’s Interdisciplinary Teagle Colloquium on Inquiry in Action. I could not go because it conflicted with my own session, but this panel described just the sort of cross-campus collaboration I am aiming to promote here. I also ran into Luise McCarty from the Educational Policy program who heads the school’s Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate for the school.
My search of the program for other folks from colleges of education revealed another session that was scheduled against mine and that focused on the issue I am raising in this post. Karen Swanson of Mercer University and Mary Kayler of George Mason reported on the findings of their meta-analysis of the literature on the tensions between colleges of education and SOTL. The fact that there is enough literature on this topic to meta-analyze points out that this issue has been around for a while (and suggests that I should probably read up before doing anything more than blogging about this issue.) From the abstract, it looks like they focused on the issue of tenure, which I presume refers to a core issue in the broader SOTL community: that SOTL researchers outside of schools of education risk being treated as interlopers by educational researchers, while treated as dilettantes by their own disciplinary communities. This same issue was mentioned in other sessions I attended as well. But significantly from my perspective, it looks like Swanson and Kayler looked at this issue from the perspective of Education faculty, which is what I want to focus on here. I have tenure, but I certainly wonder how my increased foray into the SOTL community will be viewed when I try to get promoted to full professor.
I will start by exploring my own observations about educational researchers who study their own university teaching practices. I am not in teacher education, but I know of a lot of respected education faculty who seem to be conducting high quality, published research about their teacher education practices. However, there is clearly a good deal of pretty mediocre self-study taking place as well. I review for a number of educational research journals and conferences. When I am asked to review manuscripts or proposals for educational research carried out in classrooms in the college of education, I am quite suspect. Because I have expertise in motivation and in formative assessment, I get stacks of submissions of studies of college of education teaching that seem utterly pointless to me. For example, folks love to study whether self______ is correlated with some other education relevant variables. The answer is always yes, (unless their measures are unreliable), and then there is some post hoc explanation of the relationships with some tenuous suggestions for practice. Likewise, I review lots of submissions that examine whether students who get feedback on learning to solve some class of problems learn to solve those problems better than students whose feedback is withheld. Here the answer should be yes, since this is essentially a test of educational malpractice. But the studies often ignore the assessment maxim that feedback must be useful and used, and instead focus on complex random assignment so that their study can be more “scientific.” I understand the appeal, because they are so easy to conduct and there are enough examples of them actually getting published to provide some inspiration (while dragging down the over effect size of feedback in meta-analytic studies). While it is sometimes hard to tell, these “convenience” studies usually appear to be conducted in the author’s own course or academic program. So, yes, I admit that when that looks to be the case, I do not expect to be impressed. I wonder if other folks feel the same way or if perhaps I am being overly harsh.
Much of my interest in SOTL follows from my efforts to help my college take better advantage of new online instructional tools and to help take advantage of social networking tools in my K-12 research. While my colleagues in IU Bloomington and IUPUI are making progress, I am afraid that we are well behind the curve. While I managed to attend a few SOTL sessions, I saw tremendous evidence of success that I will write about in subsequent posts. Randy Bass and Heidi Elmendorf (also of Georgetown) showed evidence of deep engagement on live discussion forums that simply can’t be faked; here at IU, Phillip Quirk showed some very convincing self-report data about student engagement in our new interdisciplinary Human Biology Program, which looks like a great model of practice for team-teaching courses. These initial observations reminded me of the opinion of James Paul Gee, who leads the MacArthur Foundation’s 21st Century Assessment Project (which partly sponsors my work as well). He has stated on several occasions that “the best educational research is no longer being conducted in colleges of education.” That is a pretty bold statement, and my education colleagues and I initially took offense to it. Obviously, it depends on your perspective; but in terms of taking advantage of new digital social networking tools and the movement towards open education and open-source curriculum, it seems like it may already be true.
One concern I had with SOTL was the sense that the excesses of “evidence-based practice” that has infected educational research was occurring in SOTL. But I did not see many of the randomized experimental studies that set out to “prove” that new instructional technology “works.” I have some very strong opinions about this that I will elaborate on in future posts; for now I will just say that I worry that SOTL researchers might get are too caught up in doing controlled comparison studies of conventional and online courses that they completely miss the point that online courses offer an entirely new realm of possibilities for teaching and learning. The “objective” measures of learning normally used in such studies are often biased in favor of traditional lecture/text/practice models that train students to memorize numerous specific associations; as long as enough of those associations appear on a targeted multiple-choice exam, scores will go up. The problem is that such designs can’t capture the important aspects of individual learning and any aspects of the social learning that is possible in these new educational contexts. Educational researchers seem unwilling to seriously begin looking at the potential of these new environments that they have “proven” to work. So, networked computers and online courses end up being used for very expensive test preparation…and that is a shame.
Here at RMA, we are exploring how participatory assessment models can foster and document all of the tremendous new opportunities for teaching and learning made possible by new digital social networks, while also producing convincing evidence on these “scientific” measures. I will close this post with a comment that Heidi Elmendorf made in the social pedagogies workshop. I asked her why she and the other presenters were embracing the distinction between “process” and “product.” In my opinion, this distinction is based on outdated individual models of learning; it dismisses the relevance of substantive communal engagement in powerful forms of learning, while privileging individual tests as the only “scientific” evidence of learning. I don’t recall Heidi’s exact response, but she immediately pointed out that her disciplinary colleagues in Biology leave her no choice. I was struck by the vigorous nods of agreement from her colleagues and the audience. Her response really brought be me back down to earth and reminded me how much work we have to do in this regard. In my subsequent posts, I will try to illustrate how participatory assessment can address precisely the issue that Heidi raised.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
putting the "our" in "open source"
In case you haven't seen it yet, I wanted to link you to Kirrily Robert's keynote at this year's O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Robert's keynote, "Standing Out in the Crowd," focused on the dearth of female developers in the open source movement. She offers this image from the 2008 Linux Kernel Summit:
Robert writes:
This is a normal sort of open source project. I’ll give you a minute to spot the women in the picture. Sorry, make that woman. She’s on the right. Can you see her?
While women are a minority in most tech communities, Robert explains, the gender disparity in open source development is more pronounced than in other technology disciplines. While women make up between 10-30% of the tech community in general, they comprise about 5% of Perl developers, about 10% of Drupal developers, and (according to an EU-funded survey of open source usage and development, called FLOSSPOLS) about 1.5% of open source contributors in general.
Robert surveyed female developers to find out why women seem to be so reluctant to contribute to open source projects; the most common reason was some variation of "I didn't feel welcome." She points to a pair of innovative projects whose members have actively worked to recruit women. One is the Organization for Transformative Works' (OTW) Archive of Our Own (or AO3); the other is Dreamwidth, a blogging and community platform forked from the LiveJournal codebase. Both projects focused on recruiting women, not to be inclusive but because they felt it was essential for the success of the projects.
The entire talk is worth a read-through or a listen, but I want to highlight one key point from the set of strategies she offers for recruiting diverse candidates: Find potential users of the application and teach them programming, instead of recruiting good programmers and teaching them about the value of the application. She says:If you’re working on a desktop app, recruit desktop users. If you’re writing a music sharing toolkit, recruit music lovers. Don’t worry about their programming skills. You can teach programming; you can’t teach passion or diversity.
I've been thinking about this very aspect of the open education movement since the Sakai 2009 Conference I attended last month. Sakai offers an open source collaborative learning environment for secondary and higher education institutions, emphasizing openness of knowledge, content, and technology. This embrace of openness was evident in every aspect of the conference, except for one: The notable lack of educators in the panels and audience.
If you want a good open education resource, you need to start by recruiting open source-friendly educators. Otherwise, you run the risk of developing a highly robust, highly functional tool that's limited only in its ability to offer the features educators actually want.
Monday, July 13, 2009
on the community-source model for open educational software design
For all my fascination with all things open-source, I'm finding that the notion of open source software (OSS) is one that's used far too broadly, to cover more categories than it can rightfully manage. Specifically, the use of this term to describe collaborative open education resource (OER) projects seems problematic. The notion of OSS points to a series of characteristics and truths that do not apply, for better or worse, to the features of collaborative learning environments developed for opening up education.While in general, open educational resources are developed to adhere to the letter of the OSS movement, what they miss is what we might call the spirit of OSS, which for my money encompasses the following:
- A reliance on people's willingness to donate labor--for love, and not for money.
- An embrace of the "failure for free" model identified by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody.
- A loose collaboration across fields, disciplines, and interest levels.
Open educational resources are not, in general, developed by volunteers; they are more often the product of extensive funding mechanisms that include paying participants for their labor.
There are good reasons for this. As Christopher J. Mackie points out in Opening Up Education, while the OSS movement has produced some "runaway successes" (Perl, Linux, and Firefox), the moveent has less success at tackling certain types of projects, including development of products designed for widespread institutional use (instead of adoption by individuals). There are good reasons for this, he argues; and his explanation points to both the weaknesses and the strengths of the open education movement:
This limitation may trace to any of several facotrs: the number of programmers having the special expertise required to deliver an enterprise information system may be too small to sustain a community; the software may be inherently too unglamorous or uninteresting to attract volunteers; the benefits of the software may be too diffuse to encourage beneficiaries to collaborate to produce it; the software may be too complex for its development to be coordinated on a purely volunteer basis; the software may require the active, committed participation of specific firms or institutions having strong disincentives to participate in OSS; and so on.
Perhaps the two most significant weak spots Mackie points to are the unglamorous nature of developing OERs and the strong disincentives against institutional participation in developing and circulating these resources. OERs require sustained, consistent dedication at all levels, from programmers all the way up to administrators and funders; and this type of dedication is difficult to attain for the following reasons:
- While OSS is primarily affiliated with the movement itself, OERs are by their nature affiliated first with an institution or funder; as project affiliates change institutions or roles, their commitment to developing the OER can shift or disappear.
- OERs require institutional buy-in, and the notion of openness, on its surface at least, appears at odds with institutional goals. (Universities survive by offering something unique, something you can only get by paying your money and walking through the gates.)
Mackie suggests an alternate term for OERs designed in keeping with the open source ideals: community source software (CSS). He identifies the following characteristics as key to the CSS movement:
- Multiple institutions band together to design software that meets their collective needs, with the ultimate goal of releasing the software as open source eventually;
- Development of the software is conducted virtually, with employees from each institution collaborating;
- The collaboration aligns with a corporate, even sometimes hierarchical, structure, with project leaders, paid staff, and experts in a range of design and development categories;
- Everybody is compensated for their expertise, and this supports a systematic, targeted approach to software development that is often lacking in OSS projects.
Embracing the notion of community source software instead of open source is more than a semantic choice, in my view. It opens up new avenues for participation and the possibility for new affiliation structures across institutions of higher education. Just as higher education institutions have historically affiliated around various community markers (cf. The Associated Writers and Writing Programs, HASTAC member institutions, the Doctoral Consortium in Rhetoric and Composition), colleges and universities--and their affiliates--might unite around the notion of opening up education by opening up technologies, access, and information.After all, let's take our heads out of the clouds for a second and think about what sorts of factors might motivate a university to align with the open educational movement. Asking institutions to relinquish their monopoly on whatever they think makes them unique (cf. the college ranking system at U.S. News and World Report) requires that we offer them something in exchange. "For the good of humankind" is a sweet notion, but you can't take it to the bank.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Participatory Assessment for Bridging the Void between Content and Participation.
Here at Re-Mediating Assessment, we share our ideas about educational practices, mostly as they relate to innovative assessment practices and mostly then as they relate to new media and technology. In this post, I respond to an email from a colleague about developing on-line versions of required courses in graduate-level teacher education courses.
My colleague and I are discussing how we ensure coverage of “content” in proposed courses that focuses more directly on “participation” in the actual educational practices. This void between participation (in meaningful practices) and content (as represented in textbooks, standards, and exams) is a central motivation behind Re-Mediating Assessment. So it seems worthwhile to expand my explanation of how participatory assessment can bridge this void and post it here.
To give a bit of context, note that the course requirements of teacher education programs are constantly debated and adjusted. From my perspective it is reasonable to assume that someone with a Master’s degree in Ed should have taken a course on educational assessment. But it also seems reasonable to have also had a course on, say, Child Development. But it simply may not be possible to require students to take both classes. Because both undergraduate and graduate teacher educator majors have numerous required content area courses (i.e., math, English, etc.), there are few slots left for other courses that most agree they need. So the departments that offer these other required courses have an obvious obligation to maintain accountability over the courses that they offer.
I have resisted teaching online because previous courseware tools were not designed to foster participation in the meaningful discourse that is what I think is so important to a good course. Without a classroom context for discourse (even conversations around a traditional lecture), students have few cues for what matters. Without those cues, assessment practices become paramount in communicating the instructor values. And this is a lot to ask of an assessment.
This is why, in my observation, online instruction heretofore has mostly consisted of two equally problematic alternatives. The first is the familiar on-line tools for pushing content out to students: “Here is the text, here are some resources, and here is a forum where you can post questions, and here is the exam schedule.” The instructors log on to the forums regularly and answer any questions, students take exams, and that is it. Sometimes these courses are augmented with papers and projects and perhaps with collaborative projects; hopefully students get feedback, and they might even use that feedback to learn more. But many many on-line course are essentially fancy test prep. My perceptions are certainly biased by my experiences back in the 90s in the early days of on-line instruction. The Econ faculty where I was working could not figure out why the students who took the online version of Econ 101 always got higher exam scores than the face-to-face (FTF) students, but almost always did far worse in the FTF Econ 201. This illustrates the problem with instruction that directly preparing students to pass formal exams. Formal exams are just proxies for prior learning, and framing course content entirely around tests (especially multiple choice ones) is just a terrible idea. Guessing which of four associations is least wrong is still an efficient way of reliably comparing what people know about a curriculum or a topic. But re-mediating course content to fit into this format makes it nearly useful for teaching.
The other extreme of on-line instruction is “project based” classes that focus almost entirely on developing a portfolio of course-related projects. These approaches seem particularly popular in teacher education programs. The problem with on-line portfolios is that the lack of FTF contact requires the specifications for the portfolios to be excruciatingly detailed. Much of the learning that occurs tends to be figuring out what the instructor wants in order to get a good grade. The most salient discourse in these classes often surrounds the question “Is this what you want?” These classes are usually extremely time-consuming to teach because the accountability associated with the artifacts leads students to demand, and instructors to provide, tons of detailed feedback on each iteration of the artifacts. So much so that the most qualified faculty can’t really afford to teach many of these courses. As such, these courses are often taught by graduate students and part-time faculty who may not be ideal for communicating the “Relevant Big Ideas” (RBIs, or what a learning scientist might call “formalisms") behind the assignments, and instead just focus on helping students create the highest quality artifacts. This creates a very real risk that students in these classes may or may not actually learn the underlying concepts, or may learn them in a way that they are so bound to the project that they can’t be used in other contexts. In my observation, such classes seldom feature formal examinations. Without careful attention, lots of really good feedback, and student use of feedback, students may come away from the class with a lovely portfolio and little else. Given the massive investment in e-Portfolios in e-learning platforms like Sakai, this issue demand careful attention. (I will ask my friend Larry Mikulecky in Indiana’s Department of Culture, Communication, and Language Education who I understand has been teaching non-exam online courses for years and has reportedly develops considerable evidence of student’s enduring understanding.)
A Practical Alternative
I am teaching on-line for the first time this summer. The course is P540, Cognition and Learning, a required course for many M. Ed programs. I am working like crazy to take full advantage of the new on-line resources for social networking that are now available in OnCourse, IU’s version of Sakai (an open-source collaborative learning environment designed for higher education). In doing so I am working hard to put into place an on-line alternative that balances participation and content. I also plan to use some of the lessons I am learning in my Educational Assessment course this Fall—which is partly what prompted that aforementioned conversation with my colleague. I want to put some of my ideas as they are unfolding in that class out there and seek input and feedback, including from my current students who are (so far) patiently hanging with me as I refine these practices as I go.
In particular I am working hard to incorporate the ideas about participatory culture that I have gained from working with Henry Jenkins and his team at Project New Media Literacies over the last year. Participatory assessment assumes that you can teach more "content" and gather more evidence that students “understand” that content by focusing more directly on participation and less directly on content. Theoretically, these ideas are framed by situative theories of cognition that say participation in social discourse is the most important thing to think about, and that individual cognition and individual behavior are “secondary” phenomena. These ideas come to me from three Jims: Greeno (whose theorizing has long shaped my work) Gee (who also deeply influences my thinking about cognition and assessment and whose MacArthur grant funded the aforementioned collaboration and indirectly supports this blog) and Pellegrino (with whom I did my doctoral studies of assessment, transfer, and validity with but who maintains an individual differences approach to cognition).
Per the curriculum committee that mandated a cognition and learning course for most masters degrees for teachers, my students are just completing ten tough chapters on memory, cognition, motivation, etc. I use Roger Bruning’s text because he make is quite clear and puts 5-7 “implications for teaching” at the end of each chapter. But it is a LOT of content for these students to learn, especially if I just have them read the chapters.
I break students up into domain groups (math science, etc.) and in those groups they go through the 5-7 implications for teaching. Each group must use the forum to generate a specific example of that implication, and then rank order the implications in terms of relevance and warrant those rankings and post them to the OnCourse wiki. The level of discourse in the student-generated forums around the content is tremendous. Then the lead group each week synthesizes the postings of all five groups to come up with a single list. I also have now asked them to do the same with “things worth being familiar with” in the chapter (essentially the bolded items and any highlighted research studies). What I particularly like about the discussions is the way that the discourse around agreeing that an implication or topic is less relevant actually leads to a pretty deep understanding of that implication or idea. This builds on ideas I have learned from my colleague Melissa Gresalfi about “consequential engagement.” By struggling to conclude that the implication is least likely to impact practice makes it more likely that they will remember that implication if they find themselves is a situation that makes it more relevant.
This participatory approach to content is complemented by four other aspects of my class. Illustrating my commitment to content, I include three formal exams that are timed and use traditional MC and short answer items. But I prioritize the content that the class has deemed most important, and don't even include the content they deem least important.
The second complement is the e-Portfolios each student has to post each week in OnCourse. Students have to select the one implication they think is most relevant, warrant the selection, exemplify and critique it, and then seek feedback on that post from their classmates. Again following Melissa’s lead, the e-Portfolio asks students for increasingly sophisticated engagement with the implication relative to their own teaching practice: procedural engagement (Basically explain the implication in your own words), conceptual engagement (give an example that illustrates what this implication means), consequential engagement (what are the consequence of this implication for your teaching practice, what should you do differently now that you understand this aspect of cognition?) and critical engagement (why might someone disagree with you and what would happen if you took this implication too far?). I require them to request feedback from their classmates. While this aspect of the new on-Course e-Portfolio tools is still quite buggy, I am persevering because the mere act of knowing that a peer audience is going to read it pushes them to engage more deeply. Going back to my earlier point, it is hard for me to find time to review and provide detailed feedback on 220 indivdiual submissions across the semester. When I do review them (students submit them for formal review after five submissions), I can just look at the feedback from other students and the students' own reflection on what they have learned for pretty clear evidence of consequential and critical engagement.
The third complement is the e-Portfolio that each student completes during the last five weeks of class. While each of the groups leads the class in the chapter associated with their domain (literacy, comprehension, writing, science and math), students will be building an e-portfolio in which they critique and refine at least two web-based instructional resources (educational videogames, webquests, the kind of stuff teachers increasingly are searching out and using in their classes). They select two or more of the implications from that chapter to critique the activities and provide suggestions for how it should be used (or if it should be avoided), along with one of the implications from the chapter on instructional technology, and one of the implications from the other chapters on memory and learning. If I have done my job right, I don’t need to prompt them to the consequential and critical engagement at this stage. This is because they should have developed what Melissa calls a “disposition” towards these important forms of engagement. All I have to do is include the requirement that they justify why each implication was selected, the feedback from their classmates, and their reflection on what they learned from feedback. It turns out the consequential and critical engagement is remarkably easy to recognize in discourse. That seems partly because it is so much more interesting and worthwhile to read than the more typical class discourse that is limited to procedural and conceptual engagement. Ultimately, that is the point.
My colleague and I are discussing how we ensure coverage of “content” in proposed courses that focuses more directly on “participation” in the actual educational practices. This void between participation (in meaningful practices) and content (as represented in textbooks, standards, and exams) is a central motivation behind Re-Mediating Assessment. So it seems worthwhile to expand my explanation of how participatory assessment can bridge this void and post it here.
To give a bit of context, note that the course requirements of teacher education programs are constantly debated and adjusted. From my perspective it is reasonable to assume that someone with a Master’s degree in Ed should have taken a course on educational assessment. But it also seems reasonable to have also had a course on, say, Child Development. But it simply may not be possible to require students to take both classes. Because both undergraduate and graduate teacher educator majors have numerous required content area courses (i.e., math, English, etc.), there are few slots left for other courses that most agree they need. So the departments that offer these other required courses have an obvious obligation to maintain accountability over the courses that they offer.
I have resisted teaching online because previous courseware tools were not designed to foster participation in the meaningful discourse that is what I think is so important to a good course. Without a classroom context for discourse (even conversations around a traditional lecture), students have few cues for what matters. Without those cues, assessment practices become paramount in communicating the instructor values. And this is a lot to ask of an assessment.
This is why, in my observation, online instruction heretofore has mostly consisted of two equally problematic alternatives. The first is the familiar on-line tools for pushing content out to students: “Here is the text, here are some resources, and here is a forum where you can post questions, and here is the exam schedule.” The instructors log on to the forums regularly and answer any questions, students take exams, and that is it. Sometimes these courses are augmented with papers and projects and perhaps with collaborative projects; hopefully students get feedback, and they might even use that feedback to learn more. But many many on-line course are essentially fancy test prep. My perceptions are certainly biased by my experiences back in the 90s in the early days of on-line instruction. The Econ faculty where I was working could not figure out why the students who took the online version of Econ 101 always got higher exam scores than the face-to-face (FTF) students, but almost always did far worse in the FTF Econ 201. This illustrates the problem with instruction that directly preparing students to pass formal exams. Formal exams are just proxies for prior learning, and framing course content entirely around tests (especially multiple choice ones) is just a terrible idea. Guessing which of four associations is least wrong is still an efficient way of reliably comparing what people know about a curriculum or a topic. But re-mediating course content to fit into this format makes it nearly useful for teaching.
The other extreme of on-line instruction is “project based” classes that focus almost entirely on developing a portfolio of course-related projects. These approaches seem particularly popular in teacher education programs. The problem with on-line portfolios is that the lack of FTF contact requires the specifications for the portfolios to be excruciatingly detailed. Much of the learning that occurs tends to be figuring out what the instructor wants in order to get a good grade. The most salient discourse in these classes often surrounds the question “Is this what you want?” These classes are usually extremely time-consuming to teach because the accountability associated with the artifacts leads students to demand, and instructors to provide, tons of detailed feedback on each iteration of the artifacts. So much so that the most qualified faculty can’t really afford to teach many of these courses. As such, these courses are often taught by graduate students and part-time faculty who may not be ideal for communicating the “Relevant Big Ideas” (RBIs, or what a learning scientist might call “formalisms") behind the assignments, and instead just focus on helping students create the highest quality artifacts. This creates a very real risk that students in these classes may or may not actually learn the underlying concepts, or may learn them in a way that they are so bound to the project that they can’t be used in other contexts. In my observation, such classes seldom feature formal examinations. Without careful attention, lots of really good feedback, and student use of feedback, students may come away from the class with a lovely portfolio and little else. Given the massive investment in e-Portfolios in e-learning platforms like Sakai, this issue demand careful attention. (I will ask my friend Larry Mikulecky in Indiana’s Department of Culture, Communication, and Language Education who I understand has been teaching non-exam online courses for years and has reportedly develops considerable evidence of student’s enduring understanding.)
A Practical Alternative
I am teaching on-line for the first time this summer. The course is P540, Cognition and Learning, a required course for many M. Ed programs. I am working like crazy to take full advantage of the new on-line resources for social networking that are now available in OnCourse, IU’s version of Sakai (an open-source collaborative learning environment designed for higher education). In doing so I am working hard to put into place an on-line alternative that balances participation and content. I also plan to use some of the lessons I am learning in my Educational Assessment course this Fall—which is partly what prompted that aforementioned conversation with my colleague. I want to put some of my ideas as they are unfolding in that class out there and seek input and feedback, including from my current students who are (so far) patiently hanging with me as I refine these practices as I go.
In particular I am working hard to incorporate the ideas about participatory culture that I have gained from working with Henry Jenkins and his team at Project New Media Literacies over the last year. Participatory assessment assumes that you can teach more "content" and gather more evidence that students “understand” that content by focusing more directly on participation and less directly on content. Theoretically, these ideas are framed by situative theories of cognition that say participation in social discourse is the most important thing to think about, and that individual cognition and individual behavior are “secondary” phenomena. These ideas come to me from three Jims: Greeno (whose theorizing has long shaped my work) Gee (who also deeply influences my thinking about cognition and assessment and whose MacArthur grant funded the aforementioned collaboration and indirectly supports this blog) and Pellegrino (with whom I did my doctoral studies of assessment, transfer, and validity with but who maintains an individual differences approach to cognition).
Per the curriculum committee that mandated a cognition and learning course for most masters degrees for teachers, my students are just completing ten tough chapters on memory, cognition, motivation, etc. I use Roger Bruning’s text because he make is quite clear and puts 5-7 “implications for teaching” at the end of each chapter. But it is a LOT of content for these students to learn, especially if I just have them read the chapters.
I break students up into domain groups (math science, etc.) and in those groups they go through the 5-7 implications for teaching. Each group must use the forum to generate a specific example of that implication, and then rank order the implications in terms of relevance and warrant those rankings and post them to the OnCourse wiki. The level of discourse in the student-generated forums around the content is tremendous. Then the lead group each week synthesizes the postings of all five groups to come up with a single list. I also have now asked them to do the same with “things worth being familiar with” in the chapter (essentially the bolded items and any highlighted research studies). What I particularly like about the discussions is the way that the discourse around agreeing that an implication or topic is less relevant actually leads to a pretty deep understanding of that implication or idea. This builds on ideas I have learned from my colleague Melissa Gresalfi about “consequential engagement.” By struggling to conclude that the implication is least likely to impact practice makes it more likely that they will remember that implication if they find themselves is a situation that makes it more relevant.
This participatory approach to content is complemented by four other aspects of my class. Illustrating my commitment to content, I include three formal exams that are timed and use traditional MC and short answer items. But I prioritize the content that the class has deemed most important, and don't even include the content they deem least important.
The second complement is the e-Portfolios each student has to post each week in OnCourse. Students have to select the one implication they think is most relevant, warrant the selection, exemplify and critique it, and then seek feedback on that post from their classmates. Again following Melissa’s lead, the e-Portfolio asks students for increasingly sophisticated engagement with the implication relative to their own teaching practice: procedural engagement (Basically explain the implication in your own words), conceptual engagement (give an example that illustrates what this implication means), consequential engagement (what are the consequence of this implication for your teaching practice, what should you do differently now that you understand this aspect of cognition?) and critical engagement (why might someone disagree with you and what would happen if you took this implication too far?). I require them to request feedback from their classmates. While this aspect of the new on-Course e-Portfolio tools is still quite buggy, I am persevering because the mere act of knowing that a peer audience is going to read it pushes them to engage more deeply. Going back to my earlier point, it is hard for me to find time to review and provide detailed feedback on 220 indivdiual submissions across the semester. When I do review them (students submit them for formal review after five submissions), I can just look at the feedback from other students and the students' own reflection on what they have learned for pretty clear evidence of consequential and critical engagement.
The third complement is the e-Portfolio that each student completes during the last five weeks of class. While each of the groups leads the class in the chapter associated with their domain (literacy, comprehension, writing, science and math), students will be building an e-portfolio in which they critique and refine at least two web-based instructional resources (educational videogames, webquests, the kind of stuff teachers increasingly are searching out and using in their classes). They select two or more of the implications from that chapter to critique the activities and provide suggestions for how it should be used (or if it should be avoided), along with one of the implications from the chapter on instructional technology, and one of the implications from the other chapters on memory and learning. If I have done my job right, I don’t need to prompt them to the consequential and critical engagement at this stage. This is because they should have developed what Melissa calls a “disposition” towards these important forms of engagement. All I have to do is include the requirement that they justify why each implication was selected, the feedback from their classmates, and their reflection on what they learned from feedback. It turns out the consequential and critical engagement is remarkably easy to recognize in discourse. That seems partly because it is so much more interesting and worthwhile to read than the more typical class discourse that is limited to procedural and conceptual engagement. Ultimately, that is the point.
Monday, June 22, 2009
position paper abstract: embracing open education, open source, open technologies
This post is intended as an abstract / scaffold for a longer position paper on the role of open education, the Free / Libre / Open source software (FLOSS) movement, open access and open technologies in re-mediating assessment. In this post, I identify some key principles of what, for the sake of brevity, I'll label the "open resource(s) movement" (ORM). In general, while FLOSS, open educational resources, and open access movements focus on different aspects of culture, they are linked theoretically to one key tenet: Making materials available to all benefits everybody.
Abstract: Relevant Big Ideas of the open resource(s) movement
We embrace the ethos of the open education movement. The ethos of open education also helps us to approach all three of the concerns identified in NML’s white paper: The participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics issue. The key tenet, that education can be improved by making educational assets visible and accessible and by harnessing the collective wisdom of a community of practice and reflection. The work of integrating participatory practices and accompanying assessment approaches into the formal classroom is an effort to address the three key concerns, and opening up access and assets to all learners and teachers can help in this regard.
We embrace the design approach inherent in the open education movement. As Casserly and Smith point out, open access is the most obvious but not the sole key feature of open educational resources:
In designing a social network that presents a participatory, spreadable, and open approach to learning, knowing, and teaching, we intend to leverage the affordances of open educational resources to support innovative design and circulation of innovative teaching practices.
We embrace an undergirding principle of the F/OSS Movement that Clay Shirky identifies in Here Comes Everybody: That the F/OSS movement is so powerful because it relies on a “failure for free” model. As I explain "what open source can teach us about failure",
Working from a “failure for free” approach to designing and spreading “successful” teaching practices offers a useful place to consider the role of high-stakes testing and other accountability measures alongside of the issue of how best to prepare learners for the new valued mindsets and skillsets afforded and supported by participatory media.
We need to consider how the notion of spreadability as described by Jenkins et al. aligns and conflicts with the ideals of the F/OSS ethos. In some significant ways, the notion of “spreadability” as described by Jenkins et al. seems at odds with at least some of the tenets and ideals of the F/OSS and open education movements. (Again, I’ve written some about this in a recent blogpost, "what open source can teach us about spreadability". Specifically, Jenkins et al. describe a tension between a “commodity culture” and a “gift economy.” Briefly, the a gift economy is the phenomenon of building social structures and social capital around the giving and receiving of gifts, whereas commodity culture considers the cash value of all goods and services.
As Jenkins et al. point out, in a culture where commodity culture and the gift economy collide (they give the example of the language of "file sharing" vs. "software piracy"),
In general, despite the relatively obvious conflicting interests of these two value systems, both define themselves in terms of “success”: A successful gift is one the giver values, and it therefore “buys” you cultural capital. A successful commodity is one the buyer wants, and is therefore willing to spend money on. The notion of "spreadability" relies on an assumption that content spreads when it is of value to a community--that is, when a person thinks other people like her will enjoy a certain link, commercial, song, product, and so on. Producers of content are hard at work analyzing that inscrutable kernel of a thing that makes it valuable.
This is a fantastic way of thinking through the issues tied to sticky and spreadable media, but not quite so applicable to the open source ethos where you get "failure for free." Indeed, OSS is premised on the foundational need for failure in order to arrive at success.
Additionally, in the F/OSS movement spreadability matters very little or not at all, because--and this is essential--there is no money to be made, and therefore no conflict between producers and consumers. In fact, as Shirky explains, the most successful OSS product of all time, Linux, succeeded precisely because its key developer, Linus Torvalds, made it clear from the beginning that he did not intend to make money off of the result.
We embrace the notion of a “teaching commons” and the struggles inherent in developing and circulating the knowledge offered therein. As Huber and Hutchings describe this in “What’s Next for Open Knowledge?”, a teaching commons is “’an emergent conceptual space for exchange and community among faculty, students, administrators, and all others committed to learning as an essential activity of life in contemporary democratic society’ (Huber and Hutchings, 2005, p. 1). In this commons, one can find a growing set of resources for and about teaching and learning, produced not only by pedagogical specialists, but by teachers and learners of all kinds.”
A key concern for the future of the teaching commons, as Huber and Hutchings explain, is the issue of “open knowledge in an era of accountability.” The authors are concerned about
The authors here are focused on accountability in higher education, and we would argue that the problem is even more acute at the secondary education level, where high-stakes testing and NCLB can leave innovative teachers feeling hamstrung by the need to meet accountability demands. Our work on re-mediating assessment practices to align with the new valued literacy practices supported by participatory media is an effort to provide teachers with the support they need to integrate participatory practices into their classroom and meet the real needs of the formal classroom.
We embrace the ethos of the open education movement. The ethos of open education also helps us to approach all three of the concerns identified in NML’s white paper: The participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics issue. The key tenet, that education can be improved by making educational assets visible and accessible and by harnessing the collective wisdom of a community of practice and reflection. The work of integrating participatory practices and accompanying assessment approaches into the formal classroom is an effort to address the three key concerns, and opening up access and assets to all learners and teachers can help in this regard.
We embrace the design approach inherent in the open education movement. As Casserly and Smith point out, open access is the most obvious but not the sole key feature of open educational resources:
Fully open educational resources provide a license that grants permission to users not only to read the material but also to download, modify, and post it for reuse. Users are empowered to change the materials to meet their own needs. They can mix and remix. The capacity and right to reuse materials is an important step in providing users all over the world the opportunity to actively participate…. Reuse also makes possible continuous cycles of improvement of educational materials as users quickly provide critical reactions and evaluations to developers of the quality and effectiveness of the materials. These fast feedback loops of users and developers create an environment for the improvement of content similar to the environment of open source software.
In designing a social network that presents a participatory, spreadable, and open approach to learning, knowing, and teaching, we intend to leverage the affordances of open educational resources to support innovative design and circulation of innovative teaching practices.
We embrace an undergirding principle of the F/OSS Movement that Clay Shirky identifies in Here Comes Everybody: That the F/OSS movement is so powerful because it relies on a “failure for free” model. As I explain "what open source can teach us about failure",
It's not, after all, that most open source projects present a legitimate threat to the corporate status quo; that's not what scares companies like Microsoft. What scares Microsoft is the fact that OSS can afford a thousand GNOME Bulgarias on the way to its Linux. Microsoft certainly can't afford that rate of failure, but the OSS movement can, because, as Shirky explains, “open systems lower the cost of failure, they do not create biases in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea.”
Anyone who's worked for a company of reasonable size understands the push to keep the risk of failure low. "More people," Shirky writes, "will remember you saying yes to a failure than saying no to a radical but promising idea." The higher up the organizational chart you go, the harder the push will be for safe choices. Innovation, it seems, is both a product of and oppositional to the social contract.
Working from a “failure for free” approach to designing and spreading “successful” teaching practices offers a useful place to consider the role of high-stakes testing and other accountability measures alongside of the issue of how best to prepare learners for the new valued mindsets and skillsets afforded and supported by participatory media.
We need to consider how the notion of spreadability as described by Jenkins et al. aligns and conflicts with the ideals of the F/OSS ethos. In some significant ways, the notion of “spreadability” as described by Jenkins et al. seems at odds with at least some of the tenets and ideals of the F/OSS and open education movements. (Again, I’ve written some about this in a recent blogpost, "what open source can teach us about spreadability". Specifically, Jenkins et al. describe a tension between a “commodity culture” and a “gift economy.” Briefly, the a gift economy is the phenomenon of building social structures and social capital around the giving and receiving of gifts, whereas commodity culture considers the cash value of all goods and services.
As Jenkins et al. point out, in a culture where commodity culture and the gift economy collide (they give the example of the language of "file sharing" vs. "software piracy"),
[f]ocusing on...spreadability may thus offer us some tentative first steps towards renegotiating the social contract between media producers and consumers in a way which may be seen as legitimate and mutually rewarding to all involved.
In general, despite the relatively obvious conflicting interests of these two value systems, both define themselves in terms of “success”: A successful gift is one the giver values, and it therefore “buys” you cultural capital. A successful commodity is one the buyer wants, and is therefore willing to spend money on. The notion of "spreadability" relies on an assumption that content spreads when it is of value to a community--that is, when a person thinks other people like her will enjoy a certain link, commercial, song, product, and so on. Producers of content are hard at work analyzing that inscrutable kernel of a thing that makes it valuable.
This is a fantastic way of thinking through the issues tied to sticky and spreadable media, but not quite so applicable to the open source ethos where you get "failure for free." Indeed, OSS is premised on the foundational need for failure in order to arrive at success.
Additionally, in the F/OSS movement spreadability matters very little or not at all, because--and this is essential--there is no money to be made, and therefore no conflict between producers and consumers. In fact, as Shirky explains, the most successful OSS product of all time, Linux, succeeded precisely because its key developer, Linus Torvalds, made it clear from the beginning that he did not intend to make money off of the result.
We embrace the notion of a “teaching commons” and the struggles inherent in developing and circulating the knowledge offered therein. As Huber and Hutchings describe this in “What’s Next for Open Knowledge?”, a teaching commons is “’an emergent conceptual space for exchange and community among faculty, students, administrators, and all others committed to learning as an essential activity of life in contemporary democratic society’ (Huber and Hutchings, 2005, p. 1). In this commons, one can find a growing set of resources for and about teaching and learning, produced not only by pedagogical specialists, but by teachers and learners of all kinds.”
A key concern for the future of the teaching commons, as Huber and Hutchings explain, is the issue of “open knowledge in an era of accountability.” The authors are concerned about
how to maintain a space for educational experimentation and exchange in a period that seems headed for increasingly bottom-line forms of accountability, with its concomitant calls for institutions to make evidence of student learning outcomes available to the public….
At one level, the value of evidence is something that any responsible educator would share. Faculty care about their students, and they want to know that the resources they find in the teaching commons will serve those students well. The danger comes when high stakes constrict people’s ability or willingness to explore new pedagogical ideas (Shulman, 2007).
The authors here are focused on accountability in higher education, and we would argue that the problem is even more acute at the secondary education level, where high-stakes testing and NCLB can leave innovative teachers feeling hamstrung by the need to meet accountability demands. Our work on re-mediating assessment practices to align with the new valued literacy practices supported by participatory media is an effort to provide teachers with the support they need to integrate participatory practices into their classroom and meet the real needs of the formal classroom.
Friday, June 19, 2009
open education, open source, open access: some definitions
Pretty soon, you'll be seeing a position paper on the open education movement on this blog. The paper is in the works, but I wanted to toss up a glossary of some key terms that will inform that paper. This is my Friday present to you.
Open Source: Open source is an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software, offering practical accessibility to a software's source code. Some consider open source as one of various possible design approaches, while others consider it a critical strategic element of their operations. Before open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; the term open source gained popularity with the rise of the Internet, which provided access to diverse production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source)
Open Source Software (OSS): computer software for which the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that meets the Open Source Definition or that is in the public domain. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified forms. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open source software is the most prominent example of open source development and often compared to user-generated content. The term open source software originated as part of a marketing campaign for free software.
Free Software (vs. Open Source Software): The term “free software” was coined by Richard Stallman, who explains that
Briefly, the difference in the terms highlights different ethical approaches to software development. In general, the OSS movement emphasizes the collective engagement with source code in order to develop, and sometimes to market, powerful and efficient software. The free software movement identifies as a social movement. Stallman explains:
Many adherents to these movements, to avoid this issue, simply refer to the Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) Movement.
Community Source Software (CSS): Community Source Software differs from OSS in that institutions devote paid employees to the project, with the intention of collaboratively developing a product that embraces the open source ethos. From the Wikipedia article on Community source,
Examples of CSS include: the Sakai Project, Kuali Foundation, and Open Source Portfolio.
Open Access (OA): From http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm, “open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The goal of adopting OA policies is to remove barriers to information. Many higher education institutions have adopted an open access policy, as for example the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which explains that it adopted an OA policy because “The Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.”
Open Education Movement and Open Educational Resources (OERs): From Opening Up Education, a key tenet of this movement is that education can be improved by making educational assets visible and accessible and by harnessing the collective wisdom of a community of practice and reflection. The open education movement embraces a shift away from a scarcity-based model of higher education, which bases its value on limiting access. As
Batson, Paharia, and Kumar explain (in chapter 6, “A Harvest Too Large? A Framework for Educational Abundance”), open education works within a “knowledge ecology characterized by unfettered access to educational resources, choice, and change in the context and clientele of higher education.” In the open, “abundance-based” learning framework, we see the following shifts, with the “trend indicators” column showing features of higher education that point to the shift.
Recursive Publics: This term was coined by Christopher Kelty, who describes it at length in Two Bits (available for download, online browsing, and modulation for free online):
More to the point, a recursive public is a group of people who exist outside of traditional institutions (governments, churches, schools, corporations) and, when necessary, use this outsider status to hold these entities in check. The engagement of these publics goes far beyond simply protesting decisions or stating their opinions. Kelty, writing about geek culture as a recursive public, explains it thus:
Open Source: Open source is an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software, offering practical accessibility to a software's source code. Some consider open source as one of various possible design approaches, while others consider it a critical strategic element of their operations. Before open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; the term open source gained popularity with the rise of the Internet, which provided access to diverse production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source)
Open Source Software (OSS): computer software for which the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that meets the Open Source Definition or that is in the public domain. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified forms. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open source software is the most prominent example of open source development and often compared to user-generated content. The term open source software originated as part of a marketing campaign for free software.
Free Software (vs. Open Source Software): The term “free software” was coined by Richard Stallman, who explains that
When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.” (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html)
Briefly, the difference in the terms highlights different ethical approaches to software development. In general, the OSS movement emphasizes the collective engagement with source code in order to develop, and sometimes to market, powerful and efficient software. The free software movement identifies as a social movement. Stallman explains:
Nearly all open source software is free software; the two terms describe almost the same category of software. But they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the free software movement, however, non-free software is a social problem, and moving to free software is the solution.
Many adherents to these movements, to avoid this issue, simply refer to the Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) Movement.
Community Source Software (CSS): Community Source Software differs from OSS in that institutions devote paid employees to the project, with the intention of collaboratively developing a product that embraces the open source ethos. From the Wikipedia article on Community source,
An important distinctive characteristic of community source as opposed to plain open source is that the community includes some organizations or institutions that are committing their resources to the community, in the form of human resources or other financial elements. In this way, the open source project will have both more solid support, rather than purely volunteer efforts as found in other open source communities, and will possibly be shaped by the strategic requirements of the institution committing the resource.
Examples of CSS include: the Sakai Project, Kuali Foundation, and Open Source Portfolio.
Open Access (OA): From http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm, “open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The goal of adopting OA policies is to remove barriers to information. Many higher education institutions have adopted an open access policy, as for example the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which explains that it adopted an OA policy because “The Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.”
Open Education Movement and Open Educational Resources (OERs): From Opening Up Education, a key tenet of this movement is that education can be improved by making educational assets visible and accessible and by harnessing the collective wisdom of a community of practice and reflection. The open education movement embraces a shift away from a scarcity-based model of higher education, which bases its value on limiting access. As
Batson, Paharia, and Kumar explain (in chapter 6, “A Harvest Too Large? A Framework for Educational Abundance”), open education works within a “knowledge ecology characterized by unfettered access to educational resources, choice, and change in the context and clientele of higher education.” In the open, “abundance-based” learning framework, we see the following shifts, with the “trend indicators” column showing features of higher education that point to the shift.Recursive Publics: This term was coined by Christopher Kelty, who describes it at length in Two Bits (available for download, online browsing, and modulation for free online):
A recursive public is a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives.
More to the point, a recursive public is a group of people who exist outside of traditional institutions (governments, churches, schools, corporations) and, when necessary, use this outsider status to hold these entities in check. The engagement of these publics goes far beyond simply protesting decisions or stating their opinions. Kelty, writing about geek culture as a recursive public, explains it thus:
Recursive publics seek to create what might be understood, enigmatically, as a constantly “self-leveling” level playing field. And it is in the attempt to make the playing field self-leveling that they confront and resist forms of power and control that seek to level it to the advantage of one or another large constituency: state, government, corporation, profession. It is important to understand that geeks do not simply want to level the playing field to their advantage—they have no affinity or identity as such. Instead, they wish to devise ways to give the playing field a certain kind of agency, effected through the agency of many different humans, but checked by its technical and legal structure and openness. Geeks do not wish to compete qua capitalists or entrepreneurs unless they can assure themselves that (qua public actors) that they can compete fairly. It is an ethic of justice shot through with an aesthetic of technical elegance and legal cleverness.
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