I gave a presentation last night for the Vancouver Institute for Social Research, a fantastic program that provides free lectures at an art gallery downtown for anyone to attend. This term’s series has focused on sovereignty, and I decided to give a talk on Foucault’s claim that in common ways of thinking about power in political theory (in the 1970s at least), we still have not yet cut off the head of the king:
What we need … is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the King’s head: in political theory that has still to be done (Interview, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon. Pantheon, 1980).
I contrasted the “juridico-discursive” view of power that, according to Foucault, has dominated political interpretations of power (and that is descended from the way monarchies came about and established themselves), with disciplinary power and bio-power.
That’s surprisingly difficult to answer. Here’s how I tried to describe it recently in an application for a teaching award, in which I discussed my work in open education.
Originally designed as a zombie game played on Twitter (and thus called “Twitter vs. Zombies”), we have also created a new version called “Technology vs. Zen.” Both games are played through Twitter, and are meant to bring people together in order to create collaborative stories. The other part of the purpose of the game is to help people learn how to use Twitter, and to give them motivation to create and share digital artifacts such as blog posts, images, videos, and more. The game usually happens over the course of a weekend, often lasting about three days.
In “Twitter vs. Zombies” the overall setting of the game is a zombie apocalypse, where there are zombies who have started to infect humans. You can see the website for the third iteration of the zombie version, here: https://twittervszombies3.wordpress.com/basics/. On Twitter, one can be bitten by a zombie through the use of a hashtag, and then has a certain number of minutes to dodge or be rescued by someone else before they turn into a zombie themselves. But the game goes beyond this; the most interesting parts of the game are when people take on missions where they have to add to the ongoing story in the game through a blog post, a picture, a video, a drawing they take a picture of, a song, or many other things. These aspects of the game happen through new rule releases that occur about every 12 hours: https://twittervszombies3.wordpress.com/rules/
In “Technology vs. Zen” the setting is an apocalyptic scene of unknown origin; participants are to imagine that they have woken up to find a wasteland around them, dead and dying plants, deserted city streets. The game site for this version is here: http://tvsz.us. The point of the game is to figure out what has happened and to determine how to approach solving the problem. Players begin on one of two teams: “technology” or “nature,” each team devoted to either a technological solution or one that has to do with working more in tune with nature. Participants start out recruiting others for their teams, but then are asked to engage in missions such as finding food, building a shelter, describing what they think has happened, and determining an approach to solving the problem (examples of such missions can be found here: http://tvsz.us/story-2/).
A number of people have used #TvsZ in their courses, asking students to play in order to experience collaborative storytelling and connecting with people around the globe in a team that has to work together in order to accomplish their missions. They have also used it to show an example of open and emergent pedagogy, though outside of a specific course context. Finally, it serves as an engaging way to encourage students to learn how to create and post digital objects—though the game sites don’t have information on how to do so, participants learn this from each other (or from their instructor, if they are playing the game as part of a course). As the current TvsZ planning team wrote in an abstract for an upcoming conference presentation:
This game builds digital literacy through creating avenues for participants to engage in international collaboration, to compose for a visible and active audience, and to craft personal learning networks. It is a dynamic experience for engaging students in transmedia storytelling and narrative collaboration, and it can democratize the classroom by blurring the line between teacher and student. The game design itself is democratized through emergent rules: players re-shape the rules and revise the narrative as the game unfolds. (This quote comes from the abstract reprinted below)
But even since writing that, the game has changed again. This time we’re thinking of not having any teams to start with and asking people to create their own teams. Thus, there might not be a “technology” team or a “nature” team, but entirely different ones.
That’s one of the wonderful things about this game: it is continually evolving. And not only between games, but within the game itself: rules change over time, new missions are created for teams to complete, and participants are asked to suggest changes during the game as well. And actually, participants sometimes just change the game themselves by choosing to do something quite different than what we designed; in a recent version, which had a divide between humans and zombies, a group of people decided they didn’t want to be either humans or zombies and participate in biting or escaping bites, but to rather be neutral commentators who created poetry about the game.
What does one get out of playing the game? Here are a couple of blog posts I found with reflections on experiences in various versions: one by Karen Young, and one by Kevin Hodgson.
I think I’ll just let our abstracts, which are pretty detailed, speak for themselves. We have two presentations, a longer one and a shorter one.
Here’s the abstract for the long, 2.5 hour workshop. This one is called Perforate Your Classroom: Collaboratively Hack the Open Online Game #TvsZ 6.0.” During this workshop, people will learn about the game, start playing it, learn how it has been used in courses, and work together on how they might change it for their own educational purposes.
Here’s our abstract for the shorter session. This one is called “Perforating the Classroom: How Hacking the Online Game #TvsZ 6.0 Brings Together Faculty, Students and Community Members.” It is just for talking about how we changed the original #TvsZ from a zombie narrative to a more generic apocalypse narrative, and why, and how we engaged in cross-world collaboration to do so.
I have been waiting to make this post, because like last year, all the sessions this year were videorecorded, and I was going to wait until the recordings were posted on Youtube so I could embed mine here. But the conference was in November of 2014, and it’s now February of 2015, and the Open Education Conference Youtube channel still just has the keynotes from the 2014 conference up. So I’m going to at least post my slides here.
This presentation is from the Open Education Conference 2014 in Washington, DC. It was about UBC’s Policy 81, and my fears that it may have lead to enough bad feelings among some people at UBC that they are no longer willing to share teaching materials with an open license. I did a small survey (28 people responded) of faculty members at UBC who had opted out of Policy 81 by signing up on a registry to do so, and found that that was indeed the case for some.
I also have a lengthy set of notes for the presentation (surprisingly lengthy, given that I spoke for about 20-25 minutes, if I remember correctly (so obviously I skimmed over much of this!). In case you’re wanting more background on any of this, you can check out the notes:
Finally, as a result of this presentation, I was interviewed by Jenni Hayman of the Open Policy Network about UBC’s Policy 81. You can see a video recording of this interview, which was done via Skype, on the OPN blog.
Governance at UBC
At the presentation at the conference, some people asked about whether or not there was shared governance at UBC–how could it be that the administration and the faculty union were so at odds on this issue? A good question. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure how governance works at UBC, but here’s what I do know.
11 people appointed by the lieutenant governor, two of whom should be from a list of nominees from the alumni association
3 students (undergrad or grad)
3 faculty members
2 UBC employees who are not faculty members
So there are just three faculty members out of 21 people on the board, and 11 out of those 21 are not currently at UBC (though two of those 11 are probably alumni, from what I can tell). The faculty voice, then, is pretty small.
There is also the Senate of UBC, which is part of the overall governance. The membership of the Senate is pretty complicated, so I’ll just copy here from the University Act, part 7:
(a) the chancellor;
(b) the president, who is the senate’s chair;
(c) the academic vice president who must work through a part not specified under section 3.1 or equivalent;
(d) the deans of faculties who must work through a part not specified under section 3.1;
(e) the chief librarian or a person designated for the purpose by the chief librarian;
(f) the director of continuing education or a person designated for the purpose by the director;
(g) a number of faculty members equal to twice the number of senate members provided in paragraphs (a) to (f), to consist of 2 members of each faculty elected by the members of that faculty, and the remainder elected by the faculty members in the manner that they, in joint meeting, determine, but only faculty members employed through parts not specified under section 3.1 can vote or be elected;
(h) a number of students, equal to the number of senate members provided in paragraphs (a) to (f), elected from the students who are members of an undergraduate student society or a graduate student society, in a manner that ensures that at least one student from each faculty is elected, but only students studying through parts not specified under section 3.1 can vote or be elected;
(i) 4 persons who are not faculty members, elected by and from the convocation;
(j) one member to be elected by the governing body of each affiliated college of the university;
(k) additional members, determined by the senate, without altering the ratio set out in paragraphs (g) and (h).
So clearly, the Senate has a much greater representation of the faculty than the Board of Governors. But which body does what?
The Board of Governors is responsible for the business of the University – its administration, finances, operations, assets and place in the community – and the integrity of such.
The Senates have a more focused responsibility for the academic integrity of the University, subject to the Board’s involvement where academic matters interface with matters of business and the larger community.
According to the longer list on the site, the Board of Governors has a say in most of the activities and policies of the university. The things that the Senate determines on its own are mostly to do with academic matters, such as academic discipline, final exams, admit students, grant degrees, and manage the library.
The procedure for adopting policies by the Board of Governors, such as Policy 81, seems to be that the policy is proposed, then there is a comment period, and then a vote is held among the Board. The UBC Faculty Association (our faculty union) expressed serious concerns about Policy 81 in February 2014, but the policy was passed anyway.
A revised policy
In February 2015, a revised policy 81 was put forward for comment. Please see a later blog post for information on that.
I am trying to keep a record of all my presentations here on this blog, because otherwise I forget about them! Which I did; there are two presentations from 2013 that I gave at UBC on open education and MOOCs. The slides for these have been on Slideshare for awhile, but I’m posting them here so I have a record of everything in one place.
However, these presentations are not terribly self-explanatory on their own (lots of pictures sometimes w/o a lot of text), and I no longer have my notes for them, unfortunately. So really, this is just as a record that I did them, for myself.
Here’s one I gave at the CTLT Institute at UBC in May of 2013, on open education and connectivist MOOCs. I talked about the difference between “xMOOCs” and “cMOOCs,” gave some examples of cMOOCs, and used my recent experience with ETMOOC as an example to illustrate the cMOOC model.
And here’s a similar one I gave during Open UBC week in October of 2013, but this time talking about what I myself am doing in terms of open education. I talked about two open online courses that I was part of designing and facilitating: OOE13 and Why Open?. I also talked about what aspects of my on-campus courses I was making openly available, including in Philosophy 102 and through the Arts One Open site. There is a recording of this presentation available on YouTube.
I was part of a debate on the value of MOOCs for higher education during UBC’s Open Access Week, on Oct. 29, 2014.
Here is the description of the event and speaker bios, from the Open UBC 2014 website (not sure how long the link is going to be active, so copied the description here). (The following text is licensed CC-BY)
Debate: Are MOOCs Good for Higher Education?
Description
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are subject to both hype and criticism. In 2012, the New York Times declared it was the year of MOOC, while critics branded 2013 as the year of the anti-MOOC. Today, the debate about the impact that MOOCs are having, and will have, on higher education continues and the topic of MOOCs often dominates conversations and questions about how changes in technologies, pedagogies, learning analytics, economics, student demographics, and open education will impact student learning. Many universities, including UBC, are experimenting with MOOCs in different ways – from trying to understand how to scale learning to how to best use MOOC resources on campus.
This session will explore different types of MOOCs, the possible role for MOOCs in higher education, and their benefits and drawbacks.
Speaker Bios.
Angela Redish (moderator) is the University of British Columbia’s Vice Provost and Associate Vice President for Enrollment and Academic Facilities. Dr. Redish served as a professor in the Department of Economics in the Faculty of Arts at UBC for nearly 30 years. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Western Ontario, and her subsequent research studied the evolution of the European and North American monetary and banking systems. She served as Special Adviser at the Bank of Canada in 2000-2001, and continues to be active in monetary policy debates. Her teaching has been mainly in the areas of economic history, monetary and macro-economies.
Jon Beasley-Murray is an Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of British Columbia. He has taught a wide range of courses, from Spanish Language to Latin American literature surveys and seminars on topics ranging from “The Latin American Dictator Novel” to “Mexican Film.” His use of Wikipedia in the classroom has led to press coverage in multiple languages across the globe.
Jon is a vocal critic of the current model of learning and assessment common in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), especially for the Humanities. He blogs at Posthegemony and is the author of Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America. His current book projects include “American Ruins,” on the significance of six ruined sites from Alberta, Canada, to Santiago de Chile. He is also working on a project on “The Latin American Multitude,” which traces the relationships between Caribbean piracy and the Spanish state, and indigenous insurgency and the discourse of Latin American independence.
Gregor Kiczales is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Most of his research has focused on programming language design and implementation. He is best known for his work on aspect-oriented programming, and he led the Xerox PARC team that developed aspect-oriented programming and AspectJ. He is a co-author of “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol” and was one of the designers of the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). He is also the instructor for the Introduction to Systematic Program Design MOOC at Coursera. His discussion of the benefits of MOOCs can be found on the Digital Learning blog.
Christina Hendricks is a Senior Instructor in Philosophy and Arts One at the University of British Columbia. While on sabbatical during the 2012-2013 academic year, she participated in a number of MOOCs, of different types. Ever since then she has used her MOOC participation as a form of professional development and a way to make connections with other teachers and researchers around the world. She has also been one of the co-facilitators for an open online course (not massive) at Peer 2 Peer University called“Why Open?”, and is a part of a project called Arts One Open that is opening up the Arts One program as much as possible to the public.
For my portion of the debate, I wanted to talk about openness (duh…it was open access week!) and the degree to which what many people think of as MOOCs are open (some of them not very). I talked a bit about OERs (open educational resources) and open textbooks as ways to make MOOCs more open, and also about opening up the curriculum and content to co-creation by participants. This led me to cMOOCs, which could be described as having a more open pedagogy. I briefly touched on the value of cMOOCs for higher education, partly as professional development for faculty and for lifelong learning for students.
Jon Beasley-Murray has posted a copy of what he said during this debate, on his blog.
I’m told this session was recorded and the recording will be posted on YouTube, but I don’t think it’s there yet. In the meantime, here are my slides from the debate. I just had 12 minutes max, though I expect I went over time a bit!
In October of 2014 I was invited to give a short presentation on open leadership to OCLMOOC, an open online course for Alberta educators. I was at first unsure what I would say, as I thought perhaps “open leadership” was some category or theory of leadership I had never heard of but was being asked to talk about. But Susan Spellman Cann, who invited me to speak, assured me that I had plenty to talk about because I myself was an open leader.
Me? An open leader? I just started learning about, thinking about, and beginning to practice open education in Spring 2013–a mere year and a half ago. And I started being much more active on my blog and on Twitter starting around then too. I certainly didn’t think of myself as an open leader (yet).
But Susan convinced me, and I thought I might just have some useful things to share about what it might mean to be an open leader, if indeed I could consider myself one. So I agreed.
Here are the slides I used for the short presentation. And the recording of the session on Blackboard Collaborate can be found by a link on this page on the OCLMOOC website.
Oh, and the closed door on one of the slides is actually an animated gif of a door opening; it makes no sense for the door to be closed! It just doesn’t work on Slideshare, darnit!
I also gave a presentation at the conference/workshop, on open education. I didn’t count how many people were there, but I’d estimate around 12 or so, which was a nice number to have. We had some good small group discussions, from what I could tell. The main problem is that I relied on the idea that someone in each group would have a computer or tablet to write the group’s ideas on a google doc. That only worked for two of the four groups (and for one of those, one person was trying to edit the google doc on an ipad and it wouldn’t type on the doc. Apparently you need to switch to desktop view on the google docs site to edit: https://sites.google.com/site/gappsforipad/docs).
Someone in another session had groups write ideas down on paper, and then he collected those and typed them into a single document himself. Next time I’d have some handouts available to do that for the groups w/o easy access to the google doc!
Here is the agenda I wrote up for the session, to give you a sense of what we did: AAPT2014-PhilOpenEdu-agenda
Click here for the google doc I asked people to put their group’s ideas on: You’ll notice that only two groups could type on the doc; the other ideas didn’t get written down. I wanted to type them on there as people spoke, but I was too busy responding, facilitating, etc.
In early June of 2014 I facilitated a workshop on open education during the CTLT Institute (Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology). I have a few slides that I used in the workshop, which are embedded below.
Also, with the help of Will Engle, Strategist for Open Education Initiatives at CTLT, I made a wiki page for this workshop, that has most of the workshop information on it. Through the magic of UBC blogs, I’m embedding that wiki page here. There’s this cool thing on the UBC wiki that allows you to get a shortcode to embed wiki pages, and then the info below should update when the wiki page is updated. Neat, hey? If you want to see the original wiki page instead, it’s here.
The agenda for the session is probably of the most interest to people; that’s the first item below. There are also results from an informal survey I did on open education (which is still open until about July 28, because I’m doing another workshop at the end of July, so feel free to add your response too!), links to what people said in their groups during the workshop, links to sites talked about by the panelists who spoke at the session, and more.
The attendance at this session was not as great as I would have liked, so the groups pages on the wiki are not as populated as they might have been if there had been more people. But we had interesting discussions nonetheless!
One lesson learned: we need to market sessions like this not so much as ‘open education,’ because that only tends to attract people who are already interested in and often already doing open educational activities. Rather, we should advertise them as ways to improve your teaching (b/c if teaching work is open, people feel pressure to make it as good as possible), ways to improve student engagement and quality of student work (same thing), and ways to incorporate the “students as producers” idea into classes (if open educational activities involve students creating part of the course content). That might attract more people who may not initially be interested just in open education, and open education can be valuable for these and other, generally-applicable pedagogical reasons!
On Nov. 21, 2013, I did a workshop with graduate students in Philosophy at UBC on providing effective feedback on essays. I tried to ground as much as I could on work in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
Here are the slides for the workshop (note, we did more than this…this is just all I have slides for):
Carless, D. (2006). Differing perceptions in the feedback process. Studies in Higher Education, 31(2), 219-233.
Chanock, K. (2000). Comments on essays: Do students understand what tutors write? Teaching in Higher Education, 5(1), 95-105.
Lizzio, A. and Wilson, K. (2008). Feedback on assessment: Students’ perceptions of quality and effectiveness. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 33(3), 263-275.
Lunsford, R.F. (1997). When less is more: Principles for responding in the disciplines. New Directions For Teaching and Learning, 69, 91-104.
Nicol, D.J. and Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006). Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice. Studies in Higher Education, 31(2), 199-218.
Sadler, D.R. (1989). Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems. Instructional Science, 18, 119-144.
Walker, M. (2009). An investigation into written comments on assignments: do students find them usable? Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 34(1), 67-78.
Weaver, M.R. (2006). Do students value feedback? Student perceptions of tutors’ written responses. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 31(3), 379-394.
I also wanted to see what people were saying about it during the presentation, in case there were some ideas there that are useful for my continuing research into this issue (and there were!). So I made a Storify story. Here’s the link to it on Storify if you’d rather see it there.