OEP

  • OEP,  oer

    The Open Ed identity crisis

    I’ve been keeping out of the debate around the OpenEd conference panel (Rajiv has an excellent analysis of it, if you want to catch up), partly because it seemed a very N. American discussion, but also partly because I found it, well, boring. But then I thought about why it bored me, and that was, well, interesting (perhaps). Firstly, to clarify, it wasn’t the objections made very clearly by people such as Billy Meinke-Lau or Michelle Reed that induced my ennui. These are important and valid arguments and I thank them for articulating them. Rather it was that the panel itself, and the ensuant kerfuffle, are symptomatic of a narrowing…

  • Books,  OEP,  politics

    Gatherer calories and invisible artefacts – labour in OEP

    I’m reading Angela Saini’s excellent Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong at the moment, which examines the range of ways science has misrepresented, simplified and ignored women. There’s a lot to dig into, and she writes clearly and knowledgeably, so I’d recommend it. While acknowledging I am writing about areas outside of my expertise, this reading, combined with some other conversations has sparked some thoughts that may be of interest. One of the chapters in Saini’s book looks at how anthropology had elevated the role of the hunter in hunter-gatherer societies, until a feminist movement in the 80s and 90s caused a reappraisal of much of the literature in the…

  • OEP,  open education

    Mapping the open education landscape

    This post follows on from the previous one, which focused on the Open Education Beginners Guide. In this I want to look at the citation network in more detail. To restate, this work arose from some initial research Viv Rolfe did, exploring the references for open education. Using a bibliographic search for “open education” and related terms, she identified a set of publications in the 1970s and 80s, which referenced earlier foundational work. This work was largely a product of the growth of open universities and distance learning. However, what is more latterly often meant by open education (particularly in the US) rarely relates to this earlier work. Katy Jordan…

  • OEP

    The open gift

    The second of my OER17 posts. Having come down on the side of a loosely defining OEP, a connected strand was the idea of openness as a gift. In Maha Bali’s keynote she mentioned that gift giving can be problematic, we don’t always know that people want that gift, they feel indebted, and it may be inappropriate. In our panel session later, I wondered whether this was applicable to openness in general – we give the gift of open to people, in the assumption they will want it, or it will do them good. Maybe they don’t want it. In that sense maybe it’s like giving someone a dog –…

  • OEP

    My definition is this

    I was at OER17 last week (I have another post about the evolution of the OER conference coming up – but in short, great work everybody). I have a couple of posts now in an attempt to fuse together some strands that came out of that and subsequent discussions, particularly around the topic of Open Educational Practice. The first strand is around definitions. Beck gave a good overview of definitions of OEP in her talk, which led nicely into a presentation from Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz on the use of critical pragmatism to address issues in OEP. Laura and Catherine took a fairly broad approach to what constitutes OEP,…

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