Module 05: The Wide World of "Open"

I can honestly say I didn’t understand the importance or pervasiveness of open educational resources until this module. The idea of opening the world to educational material makes sense. But, until these last few decades opening education has not been as practical. This module has been truly eye opening to me--with no pun intended.

After the “open” photo activity I’ve been considering the idea what it means to be “open” in the context of my own classwork. Opening course materials to the world requires at least some parties involved to share. As a parent I have come to understand sharing in new ways these past few years. Teaching my sons how to share has caused me to reflect on my own act of sharing in my current roles a teacher, student and even as a friend/family member. Just as it can be hard for a child to share a toy that belongs to him or her, I find I can also have a hard time sharing my work with others. Sharing work requires certain degree of vulnerability and humility from the person doing the sharing, not to mention the time and effort it takes. Yet, it should come so easy to share when I think of sharing my work in the context of sharing toys. Just as my son didn’t actually buy the toys he plays with, I need to understand that pretty much every thought and educational idea I ever had is not new and has in some way been shared with me. This should motivate me to share as much and often as I can when it comes to educational resources.

In addition to the photo assignment, the activities we did this week were helpful to my growth as a teacher. The act of uploading my work on OER Commons was a valuable experience. It gave me a good feeling to open my work up to whomever might find it useful. I felt a responsibly for that work to be a certain quality standard since it is being shared with (potentially) a large group of people and not just my professor. I also had a chance to browse both the OER Commons and Connexions databases. I plan to use these in the future when I am creating instruction.

The presentation assignment was helpful to understanding OERs in a broader scope. I especially benefited from reading about OERs in Asia. It is interesting to see the way other countries are using OERs. In China it appears the government wants to open courses by offering money to professors. I am not sure if this is for more for accountability or to benefit those who may not have the same access to a university education. If knowledge is the key to a better life, I can see good things happening for those less fortunate who are able to access this free courseware in China.

This module has made me more attuned to the amount of helpful resources that are being shared and available online. In designing a new unit this week on “the design process and inventions” for my sixth grade science class, I decided to go to the web for resources. I found a whole educational community based around a PBS show called The Design Squad. The website for this teen reality show gave me a large amount of tools I could use to help me design a unit that would best fit my student’s needs. Just yesterday Edutopia connected me to High Tech High which features a large amount of project based learning ideas, examples, and lessons.

I wanted to share one incidental thing I learned and applied in my classes this week from our assigned material. After watching the Downes/Siemens lectures in our assigned material for this week, I was interested in how people were using Twitter to interact with the lecturers while they were speaking. My students all have Google accounts so I decided to try to use Google’s Buzz social networking tool during a short lecture I was giving on the design process. I experimented on my first class and set ground rules that gave them the freedom to post a question or relevant comment about what I was saying. It may have been the novelty of a new activity, but it went off much better than I anticipated. Using this tool seemed to allow for more active involvement in something so inactive as listening to a teacher. I also noticed a few students asking questions who do not normally do so. While I am far from saying I am comfortable integrating this tool in everyday class, I am really happy I gave it a chance and will look for opportunities to use it in the future.

After all I learned this week I can truly say that a more open classroom is a better classroom.