This was the first time that I had come face-to-face with a topic about exploring openness as an educator. Thanks to a few MOOCs and podcasts that I had attended in recent years, I was very much on the receiving end of things, benefitting as a student from the openness of other educators. But I had never been at the giving end. Not that I didn’t want to be open but the main problem for me was I didn’t quite know how best to go about it.

So, for Topic 2 of ONL192, “Open Education – Sharing and Openness”, I started out with the question, Would open and networked learning be relevant to any of the courses that I happen to teach? (I teach a course on interdisciplinarity and another on practical ethics to graduate STEM students.) In the process of researching an answer to this question, I came across an article about an attempt to teach a research methods course in an openly-networked connected learning environment. Four social science research methods instructors, an instructional designer, and a research librarian collaborated to design and deliver an online social science research methods course (ISRM) for graduate students in sociology, education, social work, and public administration. The new ISRM course was characterized by 4 new components (absent from the discipline-specific courses previously taught): (1) a public-facing course site based on connected learning principles, (2) a structured blogging component, (3) an interdisciplinary approach, and (4) an information literacy component anchored in library science. The course website was built on a public-facing open website platform designed to facilitate student blogging and peer learning across disciplines, seamless integration of abundant multimedia content (podcasts, videos, text, data), and sharing of course content with interested university and community members. The authors recognized that technology had had a “prominent” and “pervasive” impact on educators, students, and academic support personnel, and so they had designed their virtual classroom to range from hybrid arrangements that blended in-person and online learning environments to fully online courses with synchronous and asynchronous participation. Citing several references, they suggested that the various forms of participation fostered by these technologies may be grounded in “constructivist” and “connectivist” pedagogies. The benefits of two of the new components – the interdisciplinary approach and the information literacy component – were clearly apparent, while the other two components – openly networked technology and the associated blogging activities – contributed less than the authors had anticipated. The authors highlighted their students’ insecurity about blogging in particular. As a conclusion, they recommended careful consideration of the fit between subject content, pedagogy, and the technological assumptions that drive new learning models.

After reading the above article, I looked for explanations of these pedagogies as well as key definitions and found a very useful book chapter that provided a detailed explanation about connectivism as an epistemological framework for learning. The chapter credits George Siemens with suggesting connectivism as the theory that underlies networked learning. In his original article, Siemens describes connectivism as follows:

“Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network and then continue to provide learning to the individual. This cycle of knowledge development (personal to network to organization) allows learners to remain current in their field through the connections they have formed.” (Siemens, 2005)

I also found a book chapter by Guglielmo Trentin titled “Technology-enhanced learning and networked collaborative learning” in the journal “Networked Collaborative Learning” (2010). He says that the term networked collaborative learning does “not merely indicate that the education process is supported by a computer network, but also (and more importantly) that the process is underpinned by, and conducted through, a network of interrelationships among all those participating in the process: learners, teachers, tutors, experts. These interrelationships are intrinsic to collaboration within a community pursuing a common learning goal. So the network should be seen primarily as a social network, and not merely as a computer network for distance communication between individuals”.

And so this brings me back to the conclusion of the first article, on the importance of achieving the right fit between content, technology, and pedagogy. To effectively share content openly, not only do we need the technology, but, more importantly it seems, we need the right pedagogy (for example, connectivism). For me this is my most important takeaway from Topic 2.

What do I need to know to be an open educator (Topic 2)?