At the beginning of this course, I knew the meaning of the letters in the acronym, but I didn’t understand the relevance or the importance of OER’s. In the first weeks, my eyes widened from seeing the importance of equal access to quality education. As educators, it’s important for us to share resources and as Dean Shareski points out, it’s a moral imperative. As information becomes more accessible, students will benefit from the openness of these resources and thereby improve their lives.
A critical part of this course was the knowledge that was shared amongst the members of the cohort. The variety and volume of materials that we were exposed to weekly was hard to digest in depth. I often relied on my colleagues’ blogs to investigate materials that I hadn’t the opportunity to digest. In doing so, I leant about the life and times of Aaron Swartz, the issues with manipulating images on Instagram in the name of art, dealing with workflow and curation and finally, internet coding. Had it not been for the contribution of my peers, I wouldn’t have the understanding of this material that I have now.
Other members of the cohort often contributed and commented on my blogs. In the first week, my blog on BC Open campus caught the eye of Mac Newton who was looking for resources for his college. Next, my blog on Copyleft helped define the term and clarify the difference between copyleft and copyright. In the final weeks of the course, after being intrigued by blogs and posts in G+ on curation, my Pintrest boards inspired other to try this Web tool or to seek out other more flexible curating tools. It was interesting to see what topics were of interest to others and how we could assist each other in our learning.
The Google+ Community was a platform where we could contribute resources and share ideas. In the G+ community, I shared a variety of different sources but found that my peers were mostly interested in the materials that I posted on social curation and open pedagogy. I took part in a variety of different discussions that ranged from open textbooks, web tools to support learning and the future of teaching mathematics. The discussions and sharing in a G+ community is something that our cohort has come accustomed to, however, for me, using Twitter was an entirely different situation.
As part of this course, we were asked to set up and maintain a Twitter account. At first, I was intimidated to use Twitter because I didn’t understand its purpose or how to correctly use it. As time ticked by, I lurked at what was going on in my Twitter feed and then I slowly started to contribute. At first, it felt a bit awkward, but gradually, my profile started to build and I started to look forward to checking my account. Although by no means astounding, I am currently following over 60 different individuals and I have over 30+ following me. I’ve overcome my resistance to use Twitter and I can now see its value as a way to gain access to resources that I would otherwise not have found on my own. I have also seen it as a way to solicit answers or information from a wide audience. I will continue to use Twitter beyond this course so as to stay connected to a wide community of learners.
This course had many different avenues to share information and the material presented was diverse. In the final weeks, I had an opportunity to start reflecting on what I had learnt. I used two different ways to summarize my experience. I first used Pintrest to curate the materials that I had used and the sites that I had visited over the course. As my final project, I collaborated with Robert Hills by creating a PowToon presentation. Working together, we summarized out final thoughts on OER’s and provided a take away message of our experience. For me, this course heightened my knowledge of copyright and creative commons. It also highlighted the importance of openness when creating resources and then the importance of sharing those resources with others. As the course concludes, I feel that I have a deeper understanding of OER’s and all of what that term encompasses.
Above is an image from the first side of my final project. If you click on the image, it will take you to the PowToon presentation or you can click here.