What I Really, Really Want (Part I): Literacy, Period.
Although my professional experience and education revolve around both teaching and the preservation of and access to the original records of history (and, strictly speaking, how users absorb and interact with information and the technologies that deliver that information), I still have much to learn about the concept of literacy. By definition alone, “literacy” encompasses the ability to read and right or an individual demonstrating competency or skill in a certain area. Although “digital” perhaps adds a lens with which to examine or focus the definition or stands as a subset of the greater concept, as someone who hopes to encourage students to engage with primary sources using inquiry, discernment, etc., I am interested in the concept of literacy period. I want to know how context, experience, and changes in our modern construct drive our understanding of the concept. Particularly considering the fact that, while primary sources will be delivered digitally, many of the originals are anything but!
As far as questions I have around this concept, there are many, including:
- How do we teach students to think beyond what they read or see?
- How do we teach students to analyze and source what they read and see? How do we teach them to doggedly seek until they find the original or primary source?
- How do we teach students the concept of bias and agenda? How do we teach them to identify these?
- How do we teach students to read a variety of sources with discernment and skepticism, seeking a saturation of data, before forming an opinion?
- Does literacy mean only the ability to read and write or does it connote a set of skills and mindsets we expect to see them demonstrate?
- Given that our students are digital natives, when do we start this process?
- How do we reconcile literacy within the lenses of digital, information, media, etc.?
What I Really, Really Want (Part II): Open Education, OER, and Creative Commons Licensing
As part of our work in copyright, I’m really interested in focusing on the concept of Open Education and related topics such as Open Education Resources (OER) and Creative Commons licensing for these materials. To be fully transparent, once I obtain my PhD, I really want to tackle how we deliver primary source materials to students focusing on the use of digital, curated collections to change how we educate students about our past. Further, I want the work I do, whether my research or the plans I have for my post-doctoral work, to be free and open to all. Given that you could spend an entire year with any of these topics, I want to break down my interest a bit.
Why open?
If you’re not familiar with the concept of Open Education, check out this video:
If you’re not one for videos, I prefer the definition of Open Education provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, “Open Education is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge.” In line with this, I believe that education (and the knowledge which it encompasses) must be free, open, and accessible for all.
As such, I’m incredibly interested in the creation of Open Education Resources (OER) as a means to democratize knowledge. See the video below for further explanation:
As explained in the video, OER may either reside in the public domain where they may be freely and openly accessed or be tied to the restrictions put in place by their Creative Commons licensing. All OER are free to use, however, based on the license selected by the creator(s), users may need to provide author/creator attribution, permissions for others to share the materials they create, etc. For more information on Creative Commons licensing, visit their About the Licenses page. Several years ago I worked on a project, the Freedom Matters! Curriculum, that opted to use Creative Commons licensing over traditional copyright. To see the terms of the license click on the “CC” icon in the bottom right corner (or click here).
You’ve clearly researched this, why should we cover it in the course?
Although I’ve studied Open Education and OER as standalone concepts, I’m incredibly interested in looking at them through the lens of modern copyright. Particularly focusing on some of these questions:
- Where do they fit in the grander scheme of things?
- Are traditional copyrights still perceived as the only way to go for academic materials?
- How can we advocate to change outdated perspectives of ownership of knowledge?
- If all information is a remix or mashup of previous information, why does copyright (in its traditional form) still exist?
- Has technology so changed the modern construct of knowledge that traditional copyright becomes obsolete?
From a research perspective, I’m also interested in examining how copyright prohibits access to primary sources and how Creative Commons licenses might be used to increase access to cultural and historical materials while protecting provenance and ensuring proper attribution to the collection, series, and holding entity (metadata!).
Some very important questions in here. You might already know much more than I do about literacy, digital or otherwise, but I find it is essentially a concept built on shifting sands…intrinsically, without even including the concept of the digital and technology. Some of these topics are already an explicit part of the course agenda—working with Belshaw’s book w/r/t literacy and Mike Caulfield’s book when it comes to authority and evaluating news/info, etc. (I think the latter’s concept as encapsulated in the short book we will read is rather profound when it comes to student literacy). I do want to challenge you a bit on “digital natives.” I don’t like the term itself for a few reasons, but I wonder mostly about the idea and its potential lack of predictive value: can you tell anything useful about a student because they are a “digital native?” And how are you defining that term—is it an expression of age or experience? Mainly I want to point you to, if you haven’t considered it already, the wealth of literature questioning particular notions of “digital natives.”
Regarding Open Education: this is an ongoing and long-term passion of mine as well! I obviously have my own perspective on this which, reading your questions, I suspect aligns pretty closely with yours. That helps define a personal perspective…but then how to teach/promote/support/facilitate open education and OER—that’s a whole other ball of wax. And lately a question in the community that has really intrigued me has to do with the question of “open pedagogy.” I’m a proponent of open ed as a contextual characteristic of teaching and learning, a kind of “posture” adopted by an educator. But what does that mean for “open pedagogy?” And is there something useful to be had by considering pedagogical premises that can only be had through some definition of open? See some discussion here: https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/5009
One thing I’ve learned professionally after 14 years in education? Most of what we know is subject to shift. Shift comes in a variety of formats — research reveals new methodologies, conceptual frameworks or contexts change, a new buzzword makes its rounds encouraging change, etc. At the end of the day, it’s important to know your context and how your definitions of concept drive your approach and define your work. When we think about literacy, I would argue that its almost wholly subject to context. Context based on ability or experience of the individual, what task they are being asked to perform or measured by, etc. Given the broad definition I cited above (“‘literacy’ encompasses the ability to read and right or an individual demonstrating competency or skill in a certain area”) the term could really be applied in any number of situations, contexts, or circumstances.
As to “digital natives,” I quite agree with you (and should have phrased the question “given that our students are assumed to be digital natives”). This was a concept introduced in my Masters coursework and, as a former educator, I had a different perspective than some of my peers who were focusing more heavily on the information science side of things. We make rather significant assumptions about the capabilities of our students simply because their generation has had the ability to access to certain technologies since birth. In this, we often fail to account for students whose families couldn’t afford to provide access to those technologies, use patterns of the individual user (there is no universal experience), and how the devices are being used by the individual. For example, when I was a kid, very basic video games (Centipede, Pac-Man, Asteroids, etc.) were all the rage among my friends. Not surprisingly, I begged my father for an Atari! His response was to subscribe me to a Basic programming magazine that included game code so I would learn to enter code. In this instance, both my friends and I grew up playing video games, but I had the benefit of learning to troubleshoot code, see the logic progressions it followed, etc. Two very different experiences, with (ostensibly) the same end result — we all played video games.
As to Open Ed, I’m glad to hear you’re passionate about it as well and thanks for sharing the article. That said, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the dichotomy Wiley is attempting to create in the concept of OER-enabled pedagogy. I firmly believe that good pedagogy is good pedagogy; we can talk about how theorists argue things differ for adult learners (Malcolm Knowles and Andragogy), however, I’ve always been a bit skeptical. Even as a child, I wanted to know how my learning related to my experience, I wanted to share those ties and personal connections, and I despised anyone wasting my time. (Sounds like andragogy you say? Nope. Good pedagogy.) I would posit that how we learn doesn’t drastically shift when we hit 18, rather there has been a shift in seeking to understand how that learning takes place across the spectrum.
So, back to the OER-enabled pedagogy. In this he is trying to examine how the 5 Rs (retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute) enable different types of pedagogy (“the method and practice of teaching,” according to Oxford). I’m troubled by the dichotomy because I’m not sure I believe OER make new methods or practices of teaching possible. What they can do, however, is add to the value, scalability, and reach of quality teaching methods. OER also allows us to consider new ways of delivering content to our students and in what they are then able to accomplish with the content, but the methodologies we go through in the process will likely hinge on good pedagogy and what we know works. I’m willing to further consider the topic, but that’s my gut reaction at this point.
w/r/t OER pedagogy — dichotomies can be useful when they are used as lenses rather than to exclude. Knowing David, I think his approach might be useful as a kind of creative constraint for understanding. I feel the same way about most differential approaches to understanding…they are fine as levers, not so good as bludgeons.
Like you, I’m not sure that OER makes new methods or practices possible. But I’m not sure they *don’t* either. I am also wary of being too reductivist in defining “new” here—good pedagogy is good pedagogy for sure, but does that really mean there’s nothing new, or no potential for it? It reminds me of literature analysis that reduces all of literature to X number of plots. Technically it can be done, but it ignores that “new” and “different” in these contexts might be, pragmatically and in practice, different from being literally completely new.
For example, while the principles of collaboration may be the same, I think the ability to collaborate in a virtual space introduces possibilities that are pragmatically new even if the fundamental principles remain the same. And I further think that considering what they allow that wasn’t possible before is an important lens for figuring out how they can be used productively (or avoided).
Myself, I’m just not yet willing to think that nothing new is possible, particularly when we are effectively looking at the infant of technology and prognosticating about how it will look, act, feel and be as an adult…