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Academic Field Diversity Among the Roses: MOOCs and Great Books of the Western World

Diverse selection of blooming roses in a spring garden.

In one of the articles this week in our Open Scholarship class I read: “Essentially, the academy resides on the premise that diversity of opinion is important so that dialogue can take place and the best ideas can eventually rise to the surface” (Kimmons, 2019). [See reference #1 below.]

To cultivate this diversity, Kimmons goes on to state that academia has established measures to help prevent inbreeding of perspectives and beliefs, perpetuation of biases, personality cults attached to popular professors, rigid thinking, and limited academic interpretations and filters.

These preventative measures include the practice of universities to hire personnel outside of its graduates, thus insuring the formation of divisions in the field. This really only works, according to Kimmons, if the professor has limited students. When those students go out into the field, the impact of their learnings and associated biases (good or bad) “will meet with valuable interrogation.” This interrogation, in turn, maintains the needed diversity in each academic field.

Kimmons then infers that a professor who would want to remake a field in his “own image” may have the possibility to “transform the academic field….without controversy or interrogation” on a large-scale basis through a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) instead of through the traditional journal article or small classroom setting. It’s implied that this sweeping ability for change “without diversity of opinion” through MOOCs could be a worry for established academia.

Another academic worry besides the flattened diversity argument is that “MOOCs have dramatically changed the way the world learns.” According to MOOC.org: “MOOCs are free online courses available for anyone to enroll. MOOCs provide an affordable and flexible way to learn new skills, advance your career and deliver quality educational experiences at scale. Millions of people around the world use MOOCs to learn for a variety of reasons, including: career development, changing careers, college preparations, supplemental learning, lifelong learning, corporate eLearning and training, and more.” [See reference #2 below.]

And from its sister site edx.org: “As a mission-driven organization, we’re relentlessly pursuing our vision of a world where every learner can access education to unlock their potential, without the barriers of cost or location.” [See reference #3 below.]

But wait! This MOOC vision of open access of knowledge to larger audiences has been pursued before! Did previous attempts destroy the roots of academia? Let’s explore.

The idea behind the creation of the Great Books of the Western World was to make important works available and affordable to the common person. We have a couple of sets of the collection Great Books in our home, and one of my sons (who has moved out) has a set of his own. Ideas from the books included in the set of great conversation are intended to account for at least a some-what rounded Western liberal education with the 25 centuries of thought represented. [See reference #4 below.]

Robert Maynard Hutchins, editor in chief of the Great Books, stated that “Anything less than the effort to help everybody get the best education necessarily implies that some cannot achieve in their own measure our human ideal. The aim of education is wisdom and each must have the chance to become as wise as he can” (Hutchins, p. 82). [See reference #5 below.]

Years later, James Campbell countered Hutchins’ product in the New York Times: “But not even the distilled wisdom of the 54 volumes could have helped them predict that by the 1980s students on campuses throughout the United States would be forming groups and chanting, ‘Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Western culture’s got to go!’ sometimes with support of politicians. By then, the Great Books notion had fallen from its commercial and academic high point to being the focus of readings groups.” [See reference #6 below.]

As I think about the uprising of MOOCs and Kimmons implication that these MOOCs could denigrate the academic wishes for built-in diversity and interrogation, I am reminded of previous attempts to provide education to those who may not have access to information provided through the standard academic route, such as was with the intention of the Great Books. Although there was an increase in those individuals who had access to previously unavailable education, it didn’t “harm” the established institutions, but enhanced the education of those who partook in such offerings. I’m inclined to believe that this is and will continue to be the case with MOOCs.

And as I reflected on this week’s reading, I thought about the diversity inherent in roses and although there are thousands of varieties to enjoy, it doesn’t take away from the worth of some of the most established species.

For example, I think the Jackson & Perkins company can be analogous as a provider of “MOOCs” for roses. Their story on their website goes as follows: “But when the Rosa genus offers over 300 species and several thousand varieties created over the centuries, where do you begin? With so many different types of roses, how can you decide on a rose bush for your own backyard garden and landscaping?” The company helps gardeners and not-so-self-designated-but-wanna-be-gardeners choose roses that would be best for their budget and circumstances. [See reference #7 below.]

The company goes on to state: “Each rose variety features its own unique characteristics and features. Some roses offer gorgeous continuous blooms that keep a garden looking lovely from spring to fall, while others are incredibly straightforward to maintain and offer cane-like rambling stems. With all the rose classifications and countless hybrids defined by the American Rose Society, Jackson & Perkins offers this helpful guide to distinguish the different types of roses available to plant in your garden or surrounding landscape.” [See reference #7 below.]

Here is where the Rosa genus can be analogous to the general knowledge of what is known about roses. The American Rose Society can be analogous to an academic institution that provides a degree in roses. Jackson & Perkins can be analogous to a provider of MOOCs that individuals with interest in roses can find out what they need/want to know about roses without having to wait to be admitted to and pay for an institution for official knowledge about roses. The guides provided by Jackson & Perkins could be the MOOCs available.

Although the particular stance of Jackson & Perkins is distributed to its customers and may differ somewhat from the American Rose Society, I don’t think its information dilutes the knowledge in the field. The technical and official knowledge of roses still remains and is retained by the American Rose Society, but individuals can still continue and make progress because they are not inhibited by official jargon.

These analogies helped me process what Kimmons was trying to illustrate in his article. I know I still need to think these through these analogies in order to be more precise in my thinking. Yet, I think there is space for all types of learning.

References:

  1. Kimmons, R. (2019). MOOCs and Directing an Academic Field. In R. Kimmons, EdTech in the Wild: critical blog posts. EdTech Books. Retrieved from https://edtechbooks.org/wild/mooc_inbreeding
  2. https://www.mooc.org/
  3. https://www.edx.org/
  4. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
  5. Hutchins, M. H. (1980). I. The Great Conversation.
  6. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/books/review/Campbell-t.html
  7. https://www.jacksonandperkins.com/ultimate-guide-rose-types/a/types-of-roses/
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Definitions, Purposes and Possibilities for Inclusion of OEP in Faculty Promotion

Faculty may need to advocate for the OEP “work” they do in order to meet existing promotion and tenure guidelines at their institutions.

This past week’s reading of Open Education in Promotion, Tenure, & Faculty Development provided a good definition of OER:

“[T]eaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. Generally, this permission is granted by use of an open license (for example, Creative Commons licenses) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource—anytime, anywhere.”

The definition was provided to show that there are a myriad of instructional material that fit under the OER banner as well as many uses of that material. The authors posits that the work it takes to create and use OER products “might meet existing promotion and tenure guidelines at your institution, and how you can advocate for including OER explicitly in your institutional or departmental promotion & tenure guidelines.” 

Faculty who use OER as part of their curriculum and teaching efforts is defined as Open Educational Practices (OEP). The article lists ways in which faculty may “participate” in OEP. The rest of the article discusses how OER can be used, how it can fit existing tenure requirements, and how one could advocate for the recognition of participation in many aspects of OER “work.”

The section of the article that resonated with me was the discussion about the need to influence stakeholders and the different types of stakeholders that needed the “evidence” of the value of OER and OEP. The authors included a table with three columns with the stakeholder role (individual, group, or organization) in the left column, the list of “what they can do for you” in the middle column, and the last column suggested the best time to contact the stakeholder. 

This section was helpful to me because it broadened my mind’s perspectives as to the who (to contact) and what (to say) and when (to say it) and where (the advocacy should be applied). 

There is also a tip section to help one make a case for development of OER and adoption of OEP to count towards promotion and tenure. 

The rest of the article is an Appendix that is a compilation of common OEP done by faculty and staff—separated into research, teaching and tenure.

I recommend this article to those who are seeking to promote OER and OEP at their particular institutions.

Reference:
Elder, A., Gruber, A. M., Burnett, M., & Koch, T. (2022). Open Education in Promotion, Tenure, & Faculty Development. In R. Kimmons (Ed.), Becoming an Open Scholar. EdTech Books.

#openscholarship

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Networked Learning and Shared Knowledge

Rachel Arts, FCIPD, CMgr MCMI: Organizational development and learning strategist who helps companies succeed through effective digital learning strategies. Founder of the Learning & Development Book Club.

One of this past week’s reading was Planning to Share Versus Just Sharing by Scott Leslie. He posits that although he’s been asked to participate in many institutionally organized collaborations with the idea of sharing, most of these projects either require an inordinate amount of time invested in the decisions on how to share and what to share, or that the costs to share are not sustainable. Leslie spells out why the “institutional-driven/focused” sharing initiative fail.

He contrasted that with the success of his “thriving” personal learning networks where every day he shares and his colleagues share. He even states that he thinks he can’t do his job without these informal networks because they help him keep up with the latest developments in his field.

When I read Leslie’s words, I immediately thought of my sister-in-law Rachel Arts who is an organizational development and learning strategist. She resides in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. She is a Great Britain native, and moved to The Netherlands a couple of years ago when she married my brother-in-law. She is a great example to me of what Leslie describes as one of those individuals who puts themselves out there (as opposed to just “planning” to share), enjoys “surfing these waves” and who “glance[s] over to see other surfers right there beside [her].”

Here is how Rachel introduces herself on one of her platforms: “I’m Rachel, and welcome to the Learning & Development Hub, home of the L&D Book Club! I’m a firm believer in the power of a great learning network, and that’s what I’d like to create here – a safe place for professionals to share with and learn from each other.”

Rachel shares on her company social media platform, Facebook group, in her blog, YouTube videos, and on LinkedIn. Give her a look!

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Paradigmatic Shifts Required to Create the Future of Scholarly and Educational Systems

BELOW ARE COMMENTS ON OUR CLASS READING OF Veletsianos, G. & Kimmons, R. (2022). Assumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship. In R. Kimmons (Ed.), Becoming an Open Scholar.

Twice today I’ve been confronted with arguments for major changes to be made—and soon—in the ways we look at scholarship and systems in education. In the first instance, I clicked a headline on CNN.com that read “Teachers are leaving and few people want to join the field. Experts are sounding the alarm.”

The article suggests that the education profession is in crisis. Because of the pandemic, low wages, increased classroom demands, and high stress levels teachers are leaving their jobs in droves and the number of individuals applying for jobs in the education field are declining.

According to the article, “The problem, education leaders say, is not that a lack of people who could become teachers, but rather not enough people choosing it as a profession.”  Also, a linked article quoted Carole Basile from Arizona State University, who said: “The one-teacher-to-one-classroom model must change….we need to re-design the profession, the workplace, and how we prepare people for both.”

So, there are calls for an overhaul to take place within the profession. And these calls for overhaul reminded me of what was stated in the Veletsianos and Kimmons article we had to read for class.

The Veletsianos and Kimmons article focused on and explored possible definitions of open scholarship with the idea that there needs to be a redesign of curriculum to prepare future scholars for “the changing nature of scholarship.” They concluded that “open scholarship has the potential to enhance scholarly endeavors, but it requires paradigmatic shifts in the ways that we think about education, knowledge, learning, teaching, and research.”

As I read the articles, I thought that both camps somehow need to work together on a solution, and not run in parallel to solve a problem bigger than both.

#openscholarship

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Will the Real Yvette Please Step Forward!

I resonated with Bon Stewart’s Six Key Selves of Networked Publics. I liked the notion that I could have a way to define my online identities. She admitted that her list was “by no means exhaustive” but an introduction to and a starting place for “some of the ways in social media norms and affordances impact identity practices.” At the end of the article, Stewart asks the reader: “Recognize any of these? Do any resonate with your own practices?”

Here are my answers: 

  1. The Performative, Public Self
    I don’t share enough online at the moment to be considered a networked self. I did have the experience of the “flattening of hierarchies across space” when Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, retweeted and responded to one of my tweets. I’m appreciative of many scholars and business-savvy individuals who share in this performative, public-self way. My world is better because of their sharing in a public way. If I had something that I could teach or do that was worthy of following, I think this is the identity that would work for me.

  2. The Quantified—or Articulated—Self
    I don’t track clicks or follows on my social media accounts. According to Stewart, some individuals look to increase their personal metrics as they choose to follow someone or someone follows them. Stewart points to the “limitations of algorithms as stand-ins for identity.” I do frequent accounts of popular individuals that have followers in the millions, and I often hear reports of individuals who are listed as more popular than their peers because of the number of followers (not necessarily by what kind of person they may be).

  3. The Participatory Self
    I am not really a participatory self in the sense of Stewart’s definition. I do have a past colleague who is and who does this Participatory Self very well. She is on many social platforms and her constant posts and replies to her followers and those she follows are revealing in a good way, influence others to reach higher, and give others a good sense of her real self. She comes across as a person to whom you would want to have as a friend, a business consultant and a neighbor.

  4. The Asynchronous Self
    I think this is my category right now. I like to answer posts or make posts in an asynchronous way. I don’t like interrupting family and friends, even in “real” life when I’m associating in real time with them. This self-identity articulated by Stewart is the most comfortable for me, and incidentally, was for her.

  5. The PolySocial—or Augmented Reality—Self
    Somehow this identity doesn’t appeal to me. I know that for some, this is a prime identity to have, where “multi-faceted realities” come to play. I am reminded here of Elder David A. Bednar’s words in Things As They Really Are: “I raise an apostolic voice of warning about the potentially stifling, suffocating, suppressing, and constraining impact of some kinds of cyberspace interactions and experiences upon our souls.” Now I know that not all of these types of interactions are to be avoided, but he does make some great points about the value of fidelity and truth.

    BEDNAR: “An individual can create an avatar, or a cyberspace persona, that conforms to his or her own appearance and behavior. Or a person can concoct a counterfeit identity that does not correlate in any way to things as they really are. However closely the assumed new identity approximates the individual, such behavior is the essence of things as they really are not. Earlier I defined the fidelity of a simulation or model. I now emphasize the importance of personal fidelity—the correspondence between an actual person and an assumed, cyberspace identity….I am raising a warning voice that we should not squander and damage authentic relationships by obsessing over contrived ones.”

  6. The Neo-Liberal, Branded Self
    I’ve seen many of these types of identity online. I wonder how some individuals can escape these brands when they want to change who they are, or when they grow out of these identities. For me, these types of identities don’t allow individuals to be who they really are and they become a marketed, packaged persona.

    Of course, the question to be answered is, how has my digital identify shaped me? I think the most important thing that helped define me in the digital space is that I want to be more articulate in what I say (since it will be public), and make sure that I’m representing myself in the truest, best way. Of course, I’m not going to post pictures that show all my faults, and that surmises that others may think that I don’t have all of the faults I do possess.

    So, my digital identity still doesn’t reflect my most truest self at the moment, but it is the one with which I’m most comfortable! Maybe that is what Stewart is trying to get across. People migrate to where they feel most comfortably represented in the digital space.

#openscholarship

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A “Toast” to Systemic Changes in Education

The brilliant peeps. Photo by Nathalie Dallin.

Reflection for 515R IP&T Open Scholarship class on paper by Siemens, G. & Matheos, K. (2022). Systemic Changes in Higher Education. In R. Kimmons (Ed.), Becoming an Open Scholar. EdTech Books.

I used to think of our family (me, hubby, eight children) as a college bound and educated family. I am now standing witness to some systemic changes in higher education that have me thinking that some of us may not get the college education and degrees as anticipated. In our class reading titled Systemic Changes in Higher Education, I learned that there are several reasons why this may not occur for our family.

First, here’s the rundown on the family (all brilliant, of course): 

My husband ended up ABD and I earned my bachelor’s and master’s while producing children. Now that the youngest is almost 13, I’m back for a PhD. Our oldest daughter and her husband both sport master’s degrees. Our second daughter is well into her PhD. Our next in line, a son, graduated with his bachelor’s in computer engineering, so at the moment has a great job and sees no need to further education at the university level because the money stream is likely to continue. Fourth child, another son, just younger than this computer guy, took a couple of semesters of college and dropped out. 

This number four child, felt he knew more than the teachers teaching his subject (and in many cases he did because he has read so extensively on subjects he cares about) so he dropped out of college and saw no need to jump through hoops. However, he’s a successful sales person because he’s super intelligent and can quickly learn everything to be known about the wares he’s selling (everything from cars to shoes). Back when he was a salesman for Red Wing Shoes, he could tell you every product in the catalogue, how and when it was made, and the history of the company. If you were the customer lucky enough to get him as your sales guy, he’d fit you with the best shoe in your price range, along with inserts, a few pairs of socks, extra laces, boot cleaner and any other accessory you may not know you needed. 

The fifth child, a daughter, is working on her master’s degree in instructional design, still much in the university system with a desire to make a contribution to learning design.

The next two children graduated early from high school, one 3 months early, and the other two years early. Both smart young men, but lackadaisical in focus and in the importance of taking school seriously. I finally had to get them through school by taking them to an alternative high school. The six child did get a certificate in Aerospace Composites while in high school. The seventh son has worked off and on after a semester of college that he didn’t enjoy.

The youngest, number 8, has social angst and feels like she is wasting her time in her classes because some of her peers are goofing off. She’s very much a child of her generation, and even wonders why she just can’t start working now towards getting a degree and take college classes (because she thinks she can do it). I just pulled her out of middle school for homeschool on Friday.

Now, back to the article and my reasons. The university reflects the society, and right now the universities aren’t staying up with the society it should be reflecting. The information cycles are no longer in control of publishers, but in the control of individuals. The global pressures of climate change, financial upheavals, policy shifts and technological innovations are affecting our universities in ways that damage their established viability.

Universities are responding by moving toward open models of scholarship and education, intersecting with traditional educational models. According to the authors, “Future higher education models, while continuing to rely on government research and service to society, will likely develop in response to global, social and political, technological, and educational trends.” 

Looks like my vision is toast! My younger children are and will be affected by these shifts in higher education. My goals of college bound and college educated/graduated children may not happen with half of my children. But don’t let them know this yet. I’m still banking on higher ed as it stands now for the next few years.

#openscholarship

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Work, Caregivers, and Caring within Academia

I am enrolled in IP&T 515R, Open Scholarship, taught by Dr. Royce Kimmons. We are required to reflect on our readings for each week. I chose the reading The University Cannot Love You: Gendered Labour, Burnout and the Covid-19 Pivot to Digital by Brenna Clarke Grey because she addressed what to me is an important issue in academic scholarship, that of valuing the scholarship of women and other marginalized groups.

Brenna Clarke Grey ends her treatise on The University Cannot Love You: Gendered Labour, Burnout and the Covid-19 Pivot to Digital with these two sentences: “The university cannot love you. But it would be nice if it could see you.” With many academic institutions not having caregivers and care work valued at their center, nor the capacity to extend care or even reward, recognize or prioritize it within the pandemic scenarios—Grey feels that women, on the whole are left to make up the difference—affecting their professional and personal lives. And as some institutions continue to devalue care now when more is needed, the caregivers’ needs are minimized (at best) and ignored (at the worst).

Grey gets to the need for the institutional “see you” part by doing a fast walk through the cannot-love “larger ramifications” of care work that seems to fall more heavily on women scholars, and people grouped within what she termed the “racialized, queer, and disabled scholars.” When post-secondary education went online due to the pandemic, the burdens of care work women and marginalized communities had to bear were more emotionally and physically labor-intensive than what most members of the male populace absorbed. Women and marginalized others seemed to be left with care work that taxed their “sense of identity.”  

Grey points to some token institutional additions of wellness classes during the pandemic (to help relive stress on care givers) and celebrations of faculty who are “caring” individuals, but otherwise disdains institutional efforts. She puts out the need of institutions to rethink and restructure their outlook of care and care workers. First, she suggests a place needs to be made for caring and care work at the institutional level. Next, care work needs to be valued. Grey concludes that she would like the institutions to at least “see” that there are many who are “marginalized within our universities while using [their] emotional labour to sustain the institution.” She said that this needed valuing “begins with institutions accepting responsibility and acknowledging harm.” 

After reading this treatise, I remembered that the BYU Office of Belonging was created to address things such as Grey’s named issues for academic institutions to accept responsibility and acknowledge harm for not sooner seeing the importance of care giving or addressing the needs of marginalized groups who were inordinately burdened while still needing to maintain their jobs.

As I read further into the structure and mission of the BYU Office of Belonging, I discovered that this office works to not only “see” but to “love up” everyone as well, something that Grey thought was almost impossible in an academic setting. To prove that the “university can love you” or at least strive to do so, the BYU office was set up to help guarantee the “seeing” and the “loving” desired by Grey.

BYU Office of Belonging, in essence, states: “Our university loves you, and we’re trying to see you. That is why we set up this new entity.” The BYU Statement on Belonging lets the campus community and its extensions know that they “strive” to have the students, faculty and staff be in a community where “hearts are knit together in love.” 

I think that Grey asks for the care workers to be recognized in their marginalized groups, whereas BYU asks its constituents to recognize everyone in a bigger, single group as children of God. This is perhaps why BYU can set themselves up as an academic institution that can “love” and “see” because it now publicly decries marginalization.

I, for one, hope that this office at BYU succeeds. I recognize, as does Grey, that many who are academics and caregivers may carry extra burdens during the pandemic (and at other times) and may sometimes feel ostracized because they are not “seen.” It’s great to see that the professional work, care work and caring within academia that hasn’t been “seen” in the past is beginning to be addressed at the institutional level at BYU and other universities—and thanks to Grey, her inside experience points the way.

REFERENCE

Gray, B. C. (2022). The University Cannot Love You: Gendered Labour, Burnout and the Covid-19 Pivot to Digital. In R. Kimmons (Ed.), Becoming an Open Scholar. EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/open_scholar/university_cannot_love

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OER as Infrastructure: Possibilities to Build Upon

DISCLAIMER: These are from notes of the Zoom interactions in class, and have my biased built in, so I take responsibility for my interpretation that may not be totally reflective of what David and Nicole meant by what they shared.

Infrastructure has been the byword this past year as Congress and the Biden administration have negotiated on the larger and finer points of updating highways, bridges, rails, power grids, broadband internet and the creation of a myriad of programs and policies related to climate change, restoration of lakes, removal of lead pipes, provisions for clean drinking water, and reduction of vehicular collisions with wildlife. The case for these updates comes as infrastructure’s invisibility cloak has become thread-bare with the moth holes of indifference during the past few decades.

Just as in the case with the crumbling of the nation’s infrastructure and the tantamount need for modernizing, the nation’s higher education system needs a similar-in-scope overhaul. In last Thursday’s class, we listened (via Zoom) to two thought leaders in the area of Open Educational Resources (OER)—David Wiley and Nicole Allen—and they both proposed using OER as an educational infrastructure with the idea that there are a myriad of possibilities to build upon it.

“OER is about creating possibilities,” said Wiley. “When infrastructure is of reasonable quality and it’s available for everybody to use, then it becomes kind of an innovation platform that you can do all kind of stuff on top of.” He furthered explained that there is a “base layer on which all the interesting things we do depend” and that having that infrastructure in place “doesn’t mean that anything interesting is going to happen, but minimally it has to be present,” said Wiley. “It’s necessary, but not sufficient.”

Allen later commented, “I think the future of OER is going to require a shift in the way that higher education looks at course materials and I think it probably needs to be a part of that broader systemic shift and reckoning that higher education needs to go through in terms of like—Why are we actually here? Are we doing what we think we are we doing? Are students getting out of this what they think they [are getting]  at the beginning?”

Wiley stated that the “intellectual infrastructure of education” is based on outcomes, content, assessments and certification. He said that he thinks of all of those things as infrastructure, just like we would think about roads and power and water [in a city]. “Nobody really gets excited about roads but everybody gets mad when the infrastructure doesn’t work, like when the power goes out or a road is blocked; otherwise, this infrastructure is invisible until something goes wrong.” He added, “Imagine trying to do education without any learning goals, learning content, assessment of learning or any recognition.”

“How do we make the kind of investments to have that kind of infrastructure?” Allen posed. “OER is going to take investment in training, professional development, new staff….” she added. “The future of OER is thinking about OER as infrastructure, and as part of the core infrastructure of what institutions do” as indicated by Wiley’s hard nod to outcomes, content, assessments and certification.

I think the invisibility cloak has been pulled from the higher education infrastructure and the moth holes are showing. Making a shift to think of OER as educational infrastructure begins the possibilities for higher education to make beneficial changes.

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Reproducing Marginality in Online Open Spaces?

Graphic made in response to Bali, M. (2019). Reproducing Marginality?. In R. Kimmons, EdTech in the Wild: critical blog posts. EdTech Books. Retrieved from https://edtechbooks.org/wild/reproducing_marginality

In her blog Reproducing Marginality Maha Bali points out the importance of being “present” when online, especially when facilitating. This presence she describes is more than appearing to lead the discussion. She advocates that we must not give up, but use, our power as facilitators. Bali includes “it is insufficient to just open up an invitation” and “leave guests to their own devices”—that we need to construct inclusiveness. And, to make sure we do our part (and not forget) to make others feel part of the group, Bali said we need to surround ourselves “with people who can call us out on this gently and constructively.”

Bali lists some of the ways in we should avoid reproducing marginality in things we do. She provides definitions for each. She mentions Tokenizing, Assuming Difference, Assuming Similarity, Unintentional Forgetting, Not Listening to the Marginal, and Silencing the Marginal.

It is everyone’s responsibility to listen and care and support marginal voices. Whether or not they wish to speak. Whether or not they wish to be present. Whether or not they like what we do. It is everyone’s responsibility to recognize their own privilege and to use it with purpose.

Maha Bali

Her blog is a 7 minutes read. I reflected on her words and learned. I invite you to take a peek and see what you can find that will help your leadership and conversations.

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Stop the Brain Drain: Kill the “Disposable Assignments”

Light bulbs are being pulled by a magnet from a graphic head. Te title is STOP THE BRAIN DRAIN.
Idea taken from David Wiley’s blog post What is Open Pedagogy? published October 21, 2013.

I have sometimes felt an inordinate amount of my life has been spent doing school assignments that are ends with no means instead of being means to some important end. One could argue that graduation would be the end that would justify the mean, but I would argue that the plus benefits of having worked on “meaningful” assignments during the school process would be an enhancement to a degree AND the world.

So, imagine my delight when I read the article by David Wiley What is Open Pedagogy? and found that others share the same sentiment about the time spent on homework that doesn’t add value, both for the students doing the assignments and for the teacher doing the grading. He said:

If you’ve heard me speak in the last several months, you’ve probably heard me rail against “disposable assignments.” These are assignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They’re assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world. Talk about an incredible waste of time and brain power (an a potentially huge source of cognitive surplus)!

David Wiley

Wiley goes on to ask: “What if we changed these ‘disposable assignments’ into activities which actually added value to the world?” He then makes the case for OER and open pedagogy as a way to make this happen. He provides several effective practices to adopt with examples of open pedagogy. He then defines open pedagogy and makes the case that we can’t have open pedagogy without the permissions granted with open licensing.

Although this article was published in 2013, it provided insight into looking for ways to kill the disposable assignment, both in how I approach my assignments in the future, and in what I would require of students I would teach.

#intro2opened