Category Archives: Open Online Courses

A web, not a website

In Teaching with WordPress, one of the week 2 topics for discussion is to think about how to design a web. This comes from a quote from Stephen Downes in a presentation called “Design Elements in a Personal Learning Environment,” where he says: “A MOOC is a web, not a website.” Now, in this he is talking about what later came to be known as cMOOCs, or connectivist MOOCs (see my blog posts here and here for a discussion of cMOOCs). Many MOOCs today are more like websites than webs. But what does that mean, really?

To me, having experienced several open online courses that I would call “cMOOCs,” designing a course as a web means that one focuses more on providing opportunities for people to connect with each other than on providing content that they all need to get and be assessed on. The curriculum comes in large part from the participants, who shape what is talked about and how the course goes by what they write, what they link to, the questions they raise, etc. And perhaps most importantly, the best value for me in such courses is that the connections I have made continue onwards, long past the end of the courses. From my experience in various open online courses I have gone on to collaborate with people on designing and facilitating an open online course, on research projects, and, well, just on fun.

I will tell anyone who will listen that my experiences in connectivist-style open online courses has changed my life. For example, here’s a map of all the things that have changed in my professional activities as a result of taking my first open online course, ETMOOC, in early 2013. (The embed interface is not that great; I used MindMup for this map, and it’s a little clunky…it’s just that that is what I started with so I kept it in there!) This link should get you to a full page version of the mind map.

But my question is, how do I design my own on-campus courses so that they are more web-like and less website-like? I’m not thinking that my students’ lives are going to be changed in quite the same way as mine has been changed by my experiences in open online courses, but I would like for there to be more connections between students, and between students and myself, through online interactions. And there isn’t much that is doing that in my WordPress course websites right now.

Right now my WordPress sites for my on-campus courses don’t do a whole lot beyond giving content: here are the readings, here are the assignment instructions, etc. That’s a website. For example, see the website for the course I’m teaching right now, Introduction to Philosophy, here.

Sometimes I also ask students to do blog posts (depending on the course); so, for example, for Arts One their blog posts are aggregated onto our class website under “our blog posts,” here. Sometimes I ask them to post some of their work publicly (it’s always up to them whether or not to do it, though), such as with the “non-traditional artifacts” here or the “philosophy in the world” assignments here.

And for the first time ever, just this week I asked students to participate in a discussion on a WP site through comments, using a shortcode to get two pages with the discussions onto a single page: https://blogs.ubc.ca/phil102/weekly-schedule/week-5/ Here’s a short post on how I did that.

I guess I just feel like I’m mostly replicating an LMS with my WordPress sites. And I want to know how I can use the power of the WP blank slate to do more interesting things. That’s one of the things I am hoping to get help with. And a question I asked on Twitter earlier this week is a start!

I made discussions on WordPress!

Okay, so it’s not that fancy, but I’m pretty excited that I got the following to work.

So in my PHIL 102 (Introduction to Philosophy) course this summer, I took one of the sections of the course and did a little bit of a “flip” of it, where I asked students to watch some videos ahead of class, in addition to doing the reading, so I wouldn’t have to do all the lecture in class and we could spend more time face-to-face on what F2F is good at: discussion, interaction.

But I wanted them to also do some kind of activity with the videos so the material sinks in a bit better, and to connect the work outside of class with the videos to the work inside class with the activities. So I decided to ask them to post comments on one of two discussion questions, and I would bring their answers into class to share, and talk about them a bit.

But I didn’t know how to do that on WordPress until I became part of a team of designers and facilitators for a course on Teaching with WordPress. One of the people designing the site set up our front page so that we could show announcements on it, using a shortcode. I copied this idea for the PHIL 102 class. You can see the page where I embedded the discussions, here.

I made each of the two discussion questions a post under the category “discussions.” Then I used the following shortcode on the page linked above to get them onto the page: [loop query=”posts_per_page=3&category_name=discussions” view=”archive”] That requires a plugin that allows for the “loop” shortcode: loop shortcode plugin, made by people at UBC. That’s the same code we use on the front page of the Teaching with WordPress site to get the “latest updates” to show up.

Then, I just asked students to comment on those posts. I told them they could make up a fake name, or use their initials, or use their real name if they wanted. I always want to give them the option of not posting publicly if they choose.

I think it worked pretty well. There was good discussion on the two pages. I’m not sure how well it would work if I had a big class, though–this one is only 40 students, so the discussion didn’t get overwhelming where you have to scroll for days.

Open course design challenges (#TWP15)

Hierarchy by Aha-Soft from the Noun Project. Licensed CC BY 3.0

One of the questions for the weekly discussion for week 1 of Teaching with WordPress is: “What’s your biggest challenge in designing for open?”

I have several course websites on WordPress, and one of the challenges I’ve faced in designing each of them is determining just where to put things and how to hierarchize them in menus so they can be easily found. I don’t know if this is my biggest challenge, but it is one I face each term as I think about redesigning my sites. It is made more important by the fact that the sites are public on the web, and I hope that others who visit them might find the information there useful. So they have to be clear even to people who are not in the course and don’t get the benefit of me talking about where things are on the site!

Here are the sites I have so far:

Introduction to Philosophy (PHIL 102): https://blogs.ubc.ca/phil102

Introduction to Moral Theory (PHIL 230): https://blogs.ubc.ca/phil230

Continental Philosophy seminar (PHIL 449): https://blogs.ubc.ca/phil449

Where are the lecture notes?

When I created the PHIL 102 site in the Fall of 2013 I made a mistake that I rectified when I taught that course again in the Summer of 2015.

When I first created the site, I had a “weekly schedule” so students could find each week and see what they are supposed to read before class and what we’ll be doing in class. I created the weekly schedule as a way to be able to quickly update what students need to read/what we’re doing in case things change over the course of the class (which always happens!), rather than having a static syllabus/schedule. You can see the weekly schedule for the Summer 2015 version here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/phil102 Having a weekly schedule like this I still think is a good idea.

But I decided to put the lecture notes after each class on each of the weekly pages. So, the lecture notes for Plato’s Gorgias would be on the page that discusses what students are to read before the class in which we discuss the Gorgias. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking, because I can’t imagine that was very useful for students. They’d have to go to each page in the weekly schedule to download the lecture notes. And then I realized later that if anyone coming upon my site on the web wanted to see the lecture notes from the course they wouldn’t know where to look.

So now I’ve created a separate page in the course with just the lecture notes: https://blogs.ubc.ca/phil102/lecture-notes/ On the top menu of the course site I have a section called “notes,” and under that are the lecture notes and also notes from the students’ small group discussions in class. I think that’s pretty clear, though perhaps not perfect.

Too many menu items

In my PHIL 449 course (https://blogs.ubc.ca/phil449) I have too many items in the top menu.

It’s just hard to read/find things. There were some things I wanted students to be able to find right away, like the bibliography (which they needed for their research papers), the critical abstracts (where they could read each others’ summaries and reviews of research articles or books), and the “non-traditional artifacts” (which were assignments students chose to do instead of essays). And I couldn’t think of a good way to put those things under something else. I’m still struggling with that, even a year later–I’m not sure how I’d categorize things differently so that there are fewer items in the top menu.

One thing I did differently for the PHIL 102 site is to combine the “home” and “about” pages so I don’t have to have two menu items for that, like I did for the PHIL 449 site. I also put the syllabus on the “about” page for PHIL 102 so I don’t have to have that in a separate menu item either (the menu item is called “About & syllabus”).

Re-naming the weekly schedule

In my course site for Introduction to Moral Theory (PHIL 230), I didn’t make a “weekly” schedule, but instead did it by topic (moral relativism, utilitarianism, Kantianism, etc.). This was because I thought that students would be less likely to find things by remembering which week it was in, than by remembering the topic.

I think this was a good idea, but it also makes each page for each topic longer than they were before. And when I designed the PHIL 102 site for this summer, I went back to the “weekly” idea (but labelled each week in the menu with the author of the readings or the topic) because the pages were already pretty long just by having the schedule for two days on them. That’s because I include not only required readings, but lots of optional resources.

Where to put various resources?

In many of my courses I have handouts or links to other resources that are useful throughout the course. Sometimes I put them under a menu item called “resources” (see, e.g., the PHIL 449 site), but then I thought that students might not find them there. So for PHIL 102 for this summer I decided to put some of them under “assignments,” such as the page with “writing help.” If you click on “Assignments,” then “writing help” is part of the drop-down. And other resources I put directly on the pages where they are needed for assignments. For example, in PHIL 102 students need information on finding and using public domain and CC licensed works, so I put that directly on the page with the assignment they need this information for: https://blogs.ubc.ca/phil102/assignments/philosophy-in-the-world/

For that page I used the “wiki embed” plugin that UBC has installed on UBC Blogs, which allows me to write up the information on a wiki page and then use it in multiple sites. If I change the wiki page, then all the sites that have it embedded are updated. I did this with the public domain/CC licenses information because I figured I’d be using that in other courses as well.

Adding images

When designing the PHIL 102 site for this summer I added images to each of the pages in the weekly schedule. I realized that the pages were very boring with ust text, and I wanted a bit more visual appeal. So I found an image related to the readings for each class meeting and included it there. See, for example, the week we discussed John Stuart Mill and Peter Singer: https://blogs.ubc.ca/phil102/weekly-schedule/week-4/ They’re not the most interesting images, but at least it’s a start.

This is not really related to the issue in this post, which is where to put what/how to organize, but I thought I’d mention it as a change I made to try to improve my sites over time.

Screen shot from PHIL 102 site, Summer 2015

What do you think?

I’m curious if anyone has thoughts about the issue of organizing/hierarchizing/making things easy to find for students and others, or any of the problems/solutions I’ve discussed above. I think I still have some ways to go to make my sites as clear as they can be.

Learning subjectives (#rhizo15)

A drawing I made for #rhizo14, last year

I’m partially participating in Website for #rhizo15, an open, online course in rhizomatic learning. During week one, we were asked in a video posted on that site to think about learning subjectives in addition to (instead of?) learning objectives.

The idea seems to be this: we can never be certain exactly what is going to happen in a learning situation, where we’re going to go; we can have a general outline, but things take on a life of their own when we are learning with others. And even the clearest learning objectives are going to be taken differently, interpreted differently, experienced differently by different people.

Here are a few quotes from the video for week one posted on the #rhizo 15 website that are helping me get a handle on what the topic of discussion is:

How do we think about learning and designing for learning when we don’t know where we’re going?

…learning is an uncertain process, life is an uncertain place, right answers are things that will only exist in storybooks.

How do we still provide enough structure that people know what we’re talking about?

It is that last point that I really want to focus on here.

I agree with the point that we can’t ever know exactly where we are going to go in learning, and that everyone’s learning experience will be different. Those things seem quite clear. But I worry that at times we might move from there into saying, well then, let’s embrace the chaos and give the least amount of structure possible.

Kind of like the #rhizo15 course itself, for which the idea of the “community as the curriculum” is embodied in (at least) the fact that the only curriculum given by the person who started the course consists of short videos with thought-provoking ideas and questions. What else happens rests entirely on the actions and conversations of the participants–what they talk about, what tools they decide to use to do so (e.g., see this Vialogues discussion about week 2’s video), what artifacts they create. Who would have guessed ahead of time that a blog post with a dialogue (by Tania Sheko) would have led, within about a week or so, to the creation of a radio play? (A project I missed while I was at a conference, and am very sad about missing!)

Now, I’m not knocking this lack of structure as if it’s never appropriate. I think it works great for a course like this, one that people join into because they are simply interested, have some time to dedicate to it, want to connect with others who are thinking about these topics, etc. And it works well for thinking about one’s lifelong learning in general, as evidence by Sheko’s dialogue on her blog. Of course I can’t know for certain where my life is going to go, so it makes no sense for me to have rock-solid learning objectives ahead of time.

But it seems to me that the situation is, perhaps rightly, different for students who are paying for courses for which they are being evaluated in ways that attach to a record that is important for their future. I feel a moral imperative to provide enough structure in a course that they can have a good sense of what they need to do in order to earn the grade they hope to earn. There is a strong power imbalance going on in a “traditional” course where I am in charge of giving grades, and if they don’t get enough information about what the expectations are then I feel like I would be being unfair to them. So it’s vitally important to me to figure out a way to recognize and value the fact that learning is uncertain, and that it would be best if students can find their own paths and their own means of learning (with the community of the rest of us in the class) while still having enough structure that students can have a fair sense of how they will be evaluated and what to do to achieve the marks they hope to achieve.

Now, if learning subjectives are mostly a matter of giving students more choice, more freedom to decide what they want to focus on in classes, then I’m all for that. As Laura Pasquini puts it in a recent blog post,

The openness of learning subjectives provides opportunities for students to drive the course agenda and direct their interests for topics.

This is something I think would be great to do, and I haven’t done as much of that as I’d like in the past. I have offered students the choice of more than one kind of assignment to do in one of my courses (a paper or a more creative project), and I’m also experimenting, in upcoming courses, with students choosing how they want their course grade to be calculated–which assignments to count for what. I also want to involve students more in assessing their own work (I already have them engage in peer feedback quite often), so that they take more ownership of it than just relying on the instructor to assess it.

I’m also happy to say to my students that I’m not sure where our discussions of philosophy or literature are going to go, that we’re going to get together in a room and talk about what we’ve read and see what happens, that I can’t come up with learning objectives for each class meeting because the discussion may take us in directions I can’t predict. That makes sense to me too.

But a certain degree of structure is still crucial when we’re teaching courses for which we are evaluating others in ways that can affect their future, I think. I wouldn’t think it fair to walk into such a classroom and say to students that I don’t know what they’re going to be doing, exactly, or what the curriculum is going to be; all I know is I’m going to start with a couple of readings and questions and we’ll see what happens from there. That’s a fine and very interesting way to run an open online course–I love learning this way in courses like this, and thrive on seeing the unexpected things that happen! I’m not convinced it’s fair to students we are evaluating to do so.

Learning is uncertain, life is uncertain, but I feel strongly that I need to respect the imbalance of power between myself and my students and ensure that they have enough structure to be able to have at least a decent grasp on what the expectations are on which they will be evaluated. Maybe we will work on these expectations, perhaps a marking rubric for essays for example, collaboratively. Maybe we will work collaboratively on where we are going to go in the course, in a general sense. But regardless how we get there, I do think I want to try to direct the rhizome with some structure.

P.S. When I first heard about the notion of “rhizomatic learning,” it was in a presentation by Dave Cormier that included a discussion of how it is not necessarily a lens through which we should view all learning situations. I discuss that in a blog post from 2013, here (jump down to “when is rhizomatic learning appropriate?”). Part of the discussion there was that rhizomatic learning fits well in situations where there are not clear answers, but perhaps is not the way to go when one needs to learn certain basic facts before moving on to more complex domains where the answers aren’t clear. But so far in #rhizo15 I haven’t heard much or anything in the way of saying that maybe rhizomatic learning is good for some contexts but not all. I’m curious if people feel that it’s okay to not be rhizomatic in some contexts, or in some aspects of a course, or when learning certain sorts of things.

What is open education?

Wordle of this blog post, from http://www.wordle.net

I wrote the following narrative for a teaching award application, and someone has requested that I post it openly as well, as it may be useful to others. I’m happy to do so! (Update July 18, 2015: unfortunately, I didn’t get the award, but you can see my entire application for it in this post).

This was a section of the application where I describe the basics about what open education is. I then go on, after this, to talk about how I engage in open educational activities in my own work. I might post those sections here later, in separate posts.

If you want to learn more about open education, there is also a great ebook called The Open Education Handbook. David Wiley has created an open course on open education, here: https://learn.canvas.net/courses/4

And here is the open education course at the Open University in the UK that I took in 2013. My blog posts from that course are here.

What is open education?

Financial, legal, technological openness: open educational resources

What is open education? To start, it is useful to consider the various meanings the word “open” can have in “open education.” Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) give a useful overview of some of these meanings, including what they call “financial openness,” “legal openness,” “technological openness, and “social openness.”

A common understanding of “open” is “free,” as in free of cost, or what Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) call “financial openness.” This is the meaning one might immediately think of as associated with Massive, Open, Online Courses. These are courses that are available for anyone with a reliable internet connection to take, free of cost.[1] Financial openness is also exemplified when a teacher makes a set of lecture notes, essay topics, a video, an image, etc. available for others to use without a fee.

“Legal openness” refers to the degree to which teaching materials, student work, research and more are licensed to allow others to reuse, revise, and redistribute. Some MOOCs, for example, may only allow you to view materials, not download them to revise or share them with others.[2] The “Open Definition” by the Open Knowledge Foundation addresses this meaning of open directly: “Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness)” (Open Knowledge Foundation, n.d.). David Wiley, in a widely-used definition of “open content,” lists similar requirements for openness, and labels them the “five R’s”:

Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend) (Wiley, n.d.)

Wiley argues that the more of these five activities that are allowed, the more “open” a work or set of materials is. How one alerts others to the possibility that they can use one’s work in such ways is through an open license, such as a Creative Commons license. [3] Giving one’s work an open license means that one retains copyright, but allows others to use, share, and sometimes also revise the work without asking permission each time.

Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) also discuss “technological openness,” which refers to the use of different sorts of software tools. Those that are open source are more open technologically than those that are not. In addition, tools that allow for easy editing by anyone, without having to purchase the software, are more open: thus, documents in Open Office or Google Documents are considered more open than those in Microsoft Word. Both David Wiley and “The Open Definition” also acknowledge the importance of technological openness: if a work can only be edited using tools that are very expensive, or that only run on certain platforms, or that require a high level of expertise, it is less open.

Open education is often discussed in terms of using or creating “open educational resources,” or OER—these combine financial, legal, and technological openness. According to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,

OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, n.d.).

Thus, syllabi, lecture notes, video recordings of lectures, slides, animations, assignments, podcasts, and more can be OER, so long as they are given an open license. Engaging in open education can be as simple as assigning one or more OER for students to read, hear, watch in one’s classes, or creating OER for others to use, revise and share themselves.

Social openness: open pedagogy and students as producers

Finally, Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) discuss “social openness”: “the willingness to make materials available beyond the confines of the classroom by lecturers, students and university management” (p. 105). Social openness not only involves making teaching materials available to a wider audience, but also engaging in more collaborative activities among students, between students and instructors, and between both and the wider community. Hodgkinson-Williams and Gray (2009) point to a range between (1) lecturer-centred openness, in which, for example, an instructor creates all curriculum materials and shares them openly, to (2) more student-centred openness, involving students contributing to the curriculum through adding content in things such as blogs and wikis, to (3) inviting contributions and collaborations between students, instructors, and members of the public—such as through connecting with professionals in the field (p. 105).

Similarly, the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, drafted in 2007 and currently signed by nearly 2500 individuals and over 250 organizations, focuses on creation and use of OER; but it also emphasizes changing one’s pedagogy to invite more collaboration between instructors, students and the public:

We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go (“Cape Town Open Education Declaration,” 2007).

Such collaborative pedagogical approaches are sometimes referred to as “open pedagogy.” Wiley (2013) defines open pedagogy as educational activities that are only possible because materials are made available with an open license. Examples he gives include: asking students to revise and remix OER that are used in a course in order to create tutorials for aspects of the course that students often struggle with, and asking students to create or edit Wikipedia entries on topics discussed in a course. Similarly, though using a different term, Ehlers (2011) labels such activities “open educational practices”: “practices which support the (re)use and production of OER through institutional policies, promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path” (p. 4). Open educational practices, like Wiley’s view of open education, involve the use and creation of OER in courses where learners are collaborators and co-producers of the curriculum. Thus, “[t]he pure usage of … open educational resources in a traditional closed and top-down, instructive, exam-focused learning environment is not open educational practice,” according to Ehlers (2011, p. 5), but doing so in the context of a course where students revise such materials and act as collaborators and co-producers of curriculum is.

Tom Woodward expands on this view of open pedagogy to refer to “a general philosophy of openness (and connection) in all elements of the pedagogical process,” where “[o]pen is a purposeful path towards connection and community” (Grush, 2013; italics in original). Thus, open pedagogy can also include open assignments, which allow students to shape how they will show evidence of learning (or even create assignments for other students to do); open course planning, in which one invites comments and contributions from others when planning a course; and what Woodward calls “open products,” where students publish their work “for an audience greater than their instructor. … Their work, being open, has the potential to be used for something larger than the course itself and to be part of a larger global conversation” (Grush, 2013).

Asking students to create open products, to do work openly and publicly and thereby contribute to knowledge production both inside and beyond the course, is also part of a pedagogical model that Neary and Winn (2009) call “the student as producer.” Contrasting with the idea of the student as a “consumer” of knowledge transmitted by an expert, and higher education as guided by market forces for the sake of students’ future employability, the student as producer model can be defined briefly as: “undergraduate students working collaboratively with academics to create work of social importance that is full of academic content and value, while at the same time reinvigorating the university beyond the logic of market economics” (Neary and Winn, 2009, p. 193). The student as producer approach “aims to radically democratize the process of knowledge production” (Neary and Winn, 2009, p. 201). Bruff (2013), citing Bass and Elmendorf (n.d.), emphasizes openness in the student as producer model, by arguing for the importance of students sharing their work with “authentic audiences,” people beyond just the instructor who can benefit from what they are producing. In addition, Bruff (2013) lists two other elements of his view of the student as producer model: students work on open-ended questions or problems, ones that don’t yet have a solution (rather than only working to get the “right” solution to a problem), and students have some autonomy in choosing and carrying out projects.

I am here linking the student as producer model with open pedagogy as discussed above, because I think there is significant overlap; I refer to all of these here as “open pedagogy.” Examples of open pedagogy include activities from asking students to make public blog posts (or posts that are at least shared with the rest of the class, even if they are not public), having students create websites or wikis that showcase a research project they have completed, encouraging students to revise OER and re-share them for other students, teachers and the public, to opening one’s classroom activities to participation by those not officially registered in the course (such as by having discussions on social media, opening up presentations by doing them on webinars, and more).

In my work in open education, I have used, created and shared open educational resources, and I have also engaged in various activities I am putting under the general label of open pedagogy.

[In the rest of the application I discuss my open educational activities…]

——————————————————–

[1] Many MOOCs currently are offered through central organizations such as EdX (https://www.edx.org/), Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/), Future Learn (https://www.futurelearn.com/), Iversity (https://iversity.org/), and UnX (courses offered in Spanish and Portuguese) (http://www.redunx.org/web/aprende/cursos). But there are also institutions of higher education that offer their own MOOCs on their own platforms, without connecting to one of these kinds of organizations.

[2] For example, the Coursera terms of use say: “You may download material from the Sites only for your own personal, non-commercial use. You may not otherwise copy, reproduce, retransmit, distribute, publish, commercially exploit or otherwise transfer any material, nor may you modify or create derivatives works of the material.” (Coursera, 2014).

[3] Creative Commons licenses provide a range of choices depending on how one wants to share one’s work (e.g., one can restrict the work to non-commercial uses, one can insist that any new works made from the original be shared also with an open license, or one can allow others to reuse the work but not allow any revisions). Finally, Creative Commons has a public domain license by which one can signal that they are releasing their work into the public domain, free to use, revise, redistribute without restriction on how and for what purpose, and without the requirement that the original creator be attributed. See Creative Commons, “About the licenses” for more: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/.

Works Cited

Bass, R. and Elmendorf, H. (n.d.). Social pedagogies: Teagle Foundation white paper. Retrieved from https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/bassr/social-pedagogies/

Bruff, D. (2013, September 3). Students as Producers: An Introduction [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/2013/09/students-as-producers-an-introduction/

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration. (2007). Read the Declaration. Retrieved from http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration

Coursera. (2014). Terms of Use. Retrieved from https://www.coursera.org/about/terms

Ehlers, U.-D. (2011). Extending the Territory: From Open Educational Resources to Open Educational Practices. Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, 15(2), 1–10.

Grush, M. (2013, November 12). Open Pedagogy: Connection, Community, and Transparency–A Q&A with Tom Woodward. Retrieved February 15, 2015, from http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/11/12/open-pedagogy-connection-community-and-transparency.aspx

Hodgkinson-Williams, C., & Gray, E. (2009). Degrees of openness: The emergence of Open Educational Resources at the University of Cape Town. International Journal of Education and Development Using Information and Communication Technology, 5(5), 101–116. Retrieved from http://ijedict.dec.uwi.edu/viewarticle.php?id=864

Neary, M., & Winn, J. (2009). The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education. In The Future of Higher Education: Policy, Pedagogy and the Student Experience (pp. 192–210). London, UK: Continuum International Publishing Group. Retrieved from http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/1675/

Open Knowledge Foundation. (n.d.). The Open Definition. Retrieved from http://opendefinition.org/od/

Wiley, D. (n.d.). The open content definition. Retrieved from http://opencontent.org/definition/

Wiley, D. (2013, October 21). What is Open Pedagogy? [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (n.d.). Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education/open-educational-resources

Hello TWP15!

I’m part of a team designing and facilitating an open online course called “Teaching with Word Press,” which will be held in June 2015. You can see our developing site, complete with what we’ve come up with so far for modules, here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/teachwordpress/

And our twitter hashtag is #TWP15 (thus the title of this post!).

It’s still very much a work in progress, and we welcome comments, suggestions–just make comments on the pages/posts! Specifically, we’d love to have comments on our draft syllabus (and maybe we should call it something else, like “schedule”). You can comment on each of the three modules linked there as well.

A little about me and Word Press

I’ve been using Word Press for many years for this blog, but only recently started using it for my courses. Right now I manage sites for my on-campus courses, including the following:

Philosophy 102, Introduction to Philosophy (soon to be updated for Summer 2015)

Philosophy 230, Introduction to Moral Theory (last taught Fall 2014)

Philosophy 449, Continental Philosophy (last taught Spring 2014)

Arts One seminar (a group of 20 students)

Arts One Open (a site where we publish video recordings of lectures, podcasts, blog posts by students and profs, and more)

On the Arts One sites, students and professors make blog posts on their own blog sites and we aggregate them to the main site. On the Philosophy course sites, I’ve just asked students to do posts on the main course site, rather than creating their own blogs (mostly because Arts One is a year-long course, so it makes more sense to ask them to o through the work of creating their own site!).

For all of the sites, I post most of my course materials publicly on the site, and the sites have a general site-wide license (excepting student posts) of CC BY.

On my Arts One seminar site, I’ve been working with some developers here at UBC to create a system where students can submit essays through Gravity Forms, and have those essays only be accessible to me and the members of their small groups. The small group members can then comment on the essays on the site.

What I’d like to learn how to do

I really want to start incorporating online quizzes, or comprehension checks–whether for marks or just for formative purposes. I have worked with Gravity Forms only a little bit, and would like to learn more.

Some people at UBC have been experimenting with Learning Wrappers around videos, such as can be seen on the UBC Digital Tatoo site, here. Below the video on that link, there are sections for “think,” “explore,” and “discuss,” which take you to places where you can answer questions, find more resources, and engage in discussion. That site is run on Word Press too, so this sort of thing is possible!

I’d also like to learn how to optimize the organization of materials on my sites. I think I could improve that, and I’d love to hear from participants how to do so.

One of my favourite things about facilitating courses like this is actually participating alongside others, and learning from them. I’m looking forward to that!

Open and free, redux; Or, yes the words do matter

I am helping to facilitate a course right now at Peer 2 Peer University called “Why Open?” I did so last year as well, and managed to squeeze out a few blog posts during that course, which can be found in 2013 posts under the Why Open category on this blog.

We’re in week 2 of the course, and one of the things we’ve asked participants to do is to read a few documents about the differences between “open” and “free.” I blogged a bit about this last year, but realized as I was doing the readings this year that there is still a lot I don’t quite get. And the best way for me to understand things that I find complicated is to write about them.

Free software and open content

Last year I didn’t really bother with focusing on software to think about the differences between “open” and “free,” but this year I decided it was high time I get familiar with this issue. Here’s where I’m at in my understanding so far, from reading some of the things posted for week 2 of our course, plus also a couple of other articles, noted below.

GNU image from Pixabay.

The original in this dichotomy was free software, defined by four freedoms–as the Free Software Foundation puts it in their “free software definition”:

A program is free software if the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:

The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is nonfree. While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.

There are, of course, similarities between these freedoms and those of the “open content definition” created by David Wiley, which now has 5 Rs:

The term “open content” describes any copyrightable work (traditionally excluding software, which is described by other terms like “open source”) that is licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:

Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)

Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)

Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)

Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

Both of these refer to what one can do with the work, the software, etc.–one should be able to revise it, reuse it, redistribute it, etc. Of course, I’m glossing over differences between these two definitions and lists of freedoms, but the basic idea is similar I think.

Free software and open source software

Finley argues in “Where the Free Software Movement Went Wrong (and How to Fix it)” that much of the software that fits under the definition of open source according to the Open Source Initiative would likely also be “free software” according to the four freedoms above. But honestly, looking at the four freedoms above and this definition of OSS, I’m having a hard time seeing exactly where they differ. I think that freedom 0 for FS is not really in the OSS definition, for one thing. And freedom 3, redistribution, is turned into the freedom to redistribute copies as part of an aggregation of software programs in the OSS definition. So there are practical differences between the two (this short article explains briefly how FS is always OSS, but not vice versa).

Tux2, by Larry Ewing, on Wikimedia Commons.

The Open Source Initiative’s FAQs on the difference between free software and open source software isn’t terribly helpful in trying to understand the differences. It states that the definitions of FS and OSS use different language, but ultimately get to the same place. I’m not entirely sure that’s the case.

Stallman says, in “Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software”, that there is a big difference in values and purposes. Those who support “free software” are motivated by and focus on the freedom of the user/developer to do what they will with the software. While proponents of “open source software,” Stallman argues, aren’t so concerned about such freedoms and are instead interested in the pragmatic benefits that can be had through using open source software–better programs, easier ability to gather data, etc. And as a result, the OSS people aren’t worried if some of the four freedoms get curtailed, such as through “Tivoization”.

According to Morozov, in “The Meme Hustler“, Free Software (and its proponent, Richard Stallman) focused on the freedoms of the user of software–their ability to use it on various machines, to change the code, to redistribute it, etc. Morozov claims that Open Source Software, and its proponent Tim O’Reilly, focused on the freedom of developers:

O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied. This was the freedom of the producer, the Randian entrepreneur, who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics. The most important freedom, as O’Reilly put it in a 2001 exchange with Stallman, is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”

“Freedom” here means being free to develop the software I want, how I want to, and letting you choose whether you want to accept my terms or go shopping for something else. This is the freedom of the free market, perhaps, with all the common arguments about improved productivity, efficiency, innovation, etc. that come along with that view of freedom (which may not actually be accurate, but that’s a different issue).

The words

One thing that is particularly interesting to me in all this is that there is a great deal of emphasis given to the particular word chosen. Some say the OSS supporters wanted to distance themselves from the ideology of the FS movement because the latter was not attractive to businesses (e.g., see Wikipedia on the history of free and open source software). “Free” could sound too much like “gratis” (no cost), “freeware”–which I imagine not too many for-profit businesses are going to want to emphasize. And if you’re not concerned about user freedoms, why focus on the word “free” anyway?

Enter “open,” which Morozov discusses fairly extensively in “The Meme Hustler.” He notes the ambiguity of the word: “Few words in the English language pack as much ambiguity and sexiness as ‘open.'” Morozov points out that the word “open” is similar to the word “law” in that both can mean so many different things: “from scientific ‘laws’ to moral ‘laws’ to ‘laws’ of the market to administrative ‘laws,’ the same word captures many different social relations.” This seems right to me (well, at least, that “open” is ambiguous; not sure about it being sexy); the fact that so many people and projects and organizations and businesses can claim to be “open” while doing very different things attests to that. When you consider all the various kinds of things claimed to have an “open” version (a sample list can be found in section 4 of the “openness” wiki entry from Peer 2 Peer Foundation), you might wonder, as I do, what holds them all together.

So the “open” in OSS can mean that code is available to view/study/revise, and also that software creation should be left to the “open” market without too many barriers on what one must allow users to do. You do not have to give users freedoms besides freedom of choice of which platform/app they want to use, on the terms offered by the providers.

All of this is making me wonder if I don’t like the word “free” better than open, given the sort of thing Stallman was after. But at the same time, of course, “free” is too ambiguous as well. Too often it sounds like no- or low-cost, which doesn’t capture the kinds of freedoms listed in the bullet points of both the FS definition and the open content definition at the beginning of this post.

I can see why some people, such as Chris Sakkas of Living Libre, have decided to try to use a different word–he uses “libre,” which he defines as follows (under “understanding libre” on the Living Libre page):

Describes a work that can be shared and adapted without limitations, though with conditions

A libre work can be shared and adapted by anyone in the world.

When the creator places their work under a libre licence, they give permission for everyone now and in the future to share and adapt their work. This permission, once given, cannot be withdrawn.

This permission is unlimited. You can share and adapt their work no matter who you are or how you are sharing it. You can sell it, print it out, put it on a file-sharing network, and so on.

This permission is conditional. When adapting their work, you have to obey certain conditions. The most popular is attribution: if you share or adapt a work, you have to give credit to the original creator. Another is a copyleft restriction. If you adapt a copyleft work, you must place your adaptation under the same copyleft licence.

Questions I’m left with

Is coming up with a new word the way to go? If “open” is ambiguous, how will a new word that most are not familiar with not also end up meaning many different things, since it will be hard to come to an agreement on a single definition?

Or, does it matter if “open” is so ambiguous? Wouldn’t we just be talking past one another if we mean different things with the same word? Doesn’t having so many meanings to the word invite people and organizations to claim they are “open” when what they are doing bears not a whole lot of resemblance to what many would call “open” activities?

Is there anything that ties all “open” things together so as to justify using the same word for them?

What do you think?

“Why Open?” course at P2PU is back, August 2014

Last year I was part of a team that ran a course at P2PU called “Why Open?”, in which we discussed the various meanings of openness, engaged in some open practices, and talked about potential benefits and drawbacks/obstacles to openness.

We’re running it again starting August 10, and registration is open now!

You can see the course itself at https://p2pu.org/en/courses/2314/why-open/

Or read a blog post summarizing it at the School of Open blog.

Last year I learned a lot from participants, and expect to do so again this year!

Springtime photoblitz

For the online digital storytelling course called DS106, week 3 (last week) was all about telling stories in photos. I managed to do one of the assignments for that week, just yesterday: a photoblitzing safari. For this assignment, one has 15 minutes to take pictures, trying to fit as many of the following categories as one can:

Take a photo dominated by a single color.
Take a photo of an interesting shadow.
Take a photo of something futuristic.
Take a photo at an unusual angle, e.g. looking looking up at something or looking down at something, or from the view of an ant.
Take a photo into bright light.
Take a photo of someone else’s shoe or foot.
Make an inanimate object look alive.
Make a photo that uses converging lines to draw us into the photo
Take a photo of two things that do not belong together.
Take a photo that shows a repeating pattern.
Take a photo where you move the camera as you take the photo, so it gives the subject a suggestion of motion.
Take a photo that is looking through a frame or opening to something else.
Take a photo that represents joy.
Make a photo that is abstract, that would make someone ask, “Is that a photograph?”
Take a photo that represents a metaphor for complexity.

I did a similar kind of photoblitz about six months ago, for the Headless version of ds106 that ran in the Fall of 2013. Here’s my post on that one on Tumblr. Most of my ds106 stuff is on that Tumblelog, but this time I wanted to do it on a Word Press site so I could take advantage of something else I learned from this week’s ds106 assignments: creating a gallery of images in Word Press. These instructions from Word Press work a bit differently than what I had to do here on this blog, because this one has an extra step when uploading media, during which one has to avow that what one is uploading doesn’t violate copyright. But I figured out how to do a gallery nevertheless.

So here it is …

: End time

: Repeating pattern and converging lines

: Colour and complexity

: Repeating pattern?

: Abstract (and also complexity)

: One colour

: From below

: Double frame

: They sort of belong together, sort of not.

: Converging lines

: Start time

Now, it looked fine until I realized I didn’t have the right version of one of the photos, and when I changed it out the whole gallery went into reverse order (the “end time” photo is at the beginning and the “start time” at the end). Now, no matter what I do, no matter whether I say “ascending” or “descending” order, it won’t change the order. There seem to be little boxes where I could put numbers in to force the order, but I don’t seem to be able to type into those boxes. So now I’m stuck with this order unless I delete the whole gallery and start over (which is not an option at this point, given that actually creating the gallery was not terribly straightforward and I might have to re-upload all the images).

So while this might work very well on WordPress.com blogs, on UBC Blogs it’s not working very well. Alas. I also can’t seem to control the fact that all one can see are thumbnails until clicking on the images; this is the only option I have for a gallery on this blog; there are more options for WordPress.com blogs.

Thoughts on these images

I went to about the same place where I did my photoblitz last Fall, not because I thought it was the best place, but because it is on the way to and from my home to work (yes, I work on Sundays too!), and it has the most variety of things. I tried a different place on my walk home, but as I was looking around there just wasn’t that much in the way of variety of things, patterns, colours, etc.

The light was not great (again, just like last Fall). It was cloudy rather than sunny, so I couldn’t get bright light or shadows–whaddya want, it’s Vancouver. I kept all the photos just as they came out on my phone, except the one of the tree with pink and white blossoms. It was just so utterly dull without a little apping up; all I did was play around a bit with iPhoto on my computer, adjusting things like exposure, contrast and saturation.

The “From below” image was taken under one of the frames in the “Double frame” image. I was going for something like the rule of thirds, with the top line at the top third and the leaf on the left third, but the top line is a little too high. Still, I think that (with the caveat of the crappy light), that’s kind of a nice image. We have lots of awnings made of glass here in Vancouver that get all dirty from the rain and debris from trees, and they look kind of yucky. But this image made it look less yucky and more kind of interesting, possibly abstract.

The picture of the daffodil was supposed to be one dominated by a single colour, not just b/c the flower takes up so much of the frame, but also because it is such a bright and vibrant colour. I didn’t have to mess around with any settings on that one; it’s just how it came out on my phone. Not the best closeup image by far, but not bad for an iPhone. There’s even a little bokeh in the background!

My “abstract” photo was of a waterfall. It didn’t come out quite as abstract as I wanted; you can still tell pretty easily that it’s a photograph, and one that is blurry where the water is moving. It looked cool when I took the photo, but not as great when it came out on the computer. Part of the problem is that whenever I zoom in with my phone, the image comes out blurry and pixellated a bit. I needed to have a real camera with me to do this image well. It also represents complexity, as fluid dynamics is extremely complex!

The first repeating pattern image is not really all that repeating–I just thought the bark looked interesting, with the lichen on it. I think this is a cedar tree of some kind.

My second colour and complexity image, the one I adjusted a bit in iPhoto, looks closer to what these flowers look like in good light (not in cloudy light). It’s also an image of complexity, given how branches buds grow (fractals and such).

With the last repeating pattern image, I liked how the lines curved in the foreground and then started converging in the background. There isn’t as much convergence as I wanted in the background, though.

Of all these images, I think I like the “From below” one best. It is just the most interesting image, to me, visually. It’s not that easy to tell what it is, why there’s a leaf in it. And it’s close to the rule of thirds, just not quite!

Concluding thoughts

I really like doing these photoblitzes–they are challenging but fun, and they definitely get you to pay close attention to your surroundings in a way you wouldn’t do before. I found myself looking at lampposts and rubbish bins to see if any angle on them might lead to an image of something “futuristic,” for example (didn’t come up with anything), or whether any inanimate object around me could be photographed in a way that made it look alive (again, nothing). I played around with moving my phone while taking a picture to simulate motion (didn’t work), and I was looking for converging lines, repeating patters, and complexity all over!

I’ve decided that it’s definitely time for me to take #phonar and finally get my photography skills in better shape. Looks like the next one isn’t until Sept/Oct 2014, though, when I’ll be super busy with teaching again. Sigh.

The shape of things falling apart

I’m participating in the open online digital storytelling course called DS106, which is happening on a shortened, 7 week schedule until about mid-May. For the first week, we were asked (among other things that I didn’t have time to do because I’m still teaching right now) to think about the shapes of stories. Two things we could look at were a video in which Kurt Vonnegut explains some familiar story shapes, and a web page in which Kenn Adams talk about the idea of a “story spine.” We were asked to think about a story familiar to us in terms of these ideas.

In a course I’m teaching called Arts One (a team-taught, interdisciplinary course for first-year students at the University of British Columbia), we’re reading and discussing Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart this upcoming week. So I figured I’d try to analyze this text using these two discussions of the shapes of stories.

Vonnegut’s story shapes

In this video by Vonnegut, several story arcs are described:

1. “Man in a hole”: someone starts of being above average in terms of good/bad fortune, then goes significantly downwards, then gets out of the hole by the end, back to approximately where s/he started.

2. “Boy meets girl”: someone starts off in a pretty average position of good/bad fortune, then finds something great or something amazing happens to him/her, then they lose it, then they get it back again (or something else that brings them back up).

3. Cinderella: someone starts off very low on the good/bad fortune scale, climbs upward, then falls down, then goes back up. In Cinderella’s case, she ends up with ultimate, off the scale happiness.

Of course, a pattern is easily recognized here: one somehow at some point goes downward in the good/bad fortune scale, and then goes back up. Maybe they go up before they go down, but regardless there is some downward movement and back upward movement.

Can we read Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as fitting one of these shapes? I don’t think so, because it has more of a tragic story shape. To me, that means that someone starts off pretty high up on the good/bad fortune scale, or starts off middling and moves up, and then goes downward…and the story ends. That’s pretty much what happens here. Of course, perhaps that’s one of Vonnegut’s story shapes too, it’s just that we don’t see the whole talk from which this video is taken. He’s only talking about the “comedies” (happy endings) rather than the “tragedies.” This seems pretty clear a tragedy.

At the beginning of the story, Okonkwo is said already to be famous as a wrestler. He has excelled in life far beyond his father, Unoka, who was “lazy and improvident and quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow” (4). He is also mired in debt, and his wives and children “barely had enough to eat” (5). Onkonkwo is ashamed of his father and has done much better for himself by the beginning of the novel. He is not only renowned as a wrestler, he has also “shown incredible prowess in two inter-tribal wars,” has “two barns full of yams,” has just married his third wife, and has taken two titles (8). He starts off in a very good position in his society.

Things start going downhill for him after he takes part in killing a boy who has lived with him for several years. Ikemefuna was sent to live in Okonkwo’s village as part of a settlement between clans, when another clan murdered a girl of Okonkwo’s clan. Ikemefuna lived in Okonkwo’s household for several years, when an oracle decrees that he must be killed. An elder tells Okonkwo not to participate in the killing (57), but he ends up doing so when Ikemefuna runs to him after someone else strikes him first, and Okonkwo, fearing “being thought weak,” strikes him as well and kills him (61).

Things start going downhill after this. During a funeral ceremony for one of the men of the village, Okonkwo’s gun accidentally goes off and kills the 16 year old son of the dead man (124). He has to leave the clan for seven years. He goes back to the village of his mother and works there during that time, and is upset because he is not rising higher in his clan like he had hoped. During this time missionaries come to his old village and the one he is living in as well, and he gets the devastating news that one of his sons has joined the new religion.

When at the end of his seven years of exile Okonkwo returns to his village, he finds that the clan is broken apart, with some people going over to the new religion and a new rule of law and court system run by the missionaries. Okonkwo’s full downfall comes when he kills one of the new converts who is enforcing the laws of the missionaries, hoping that the rest of his clan will join him in rebellion against them. But the clan does not act; instead, they ask why Okonkwo killed the man (204-205). The next we hear about Okonkwo his body is dangling from a tree, after he has chosen to hang himself.

This story starts from a place of relative prosperity, and the protagonist simply goes downhill. We might even think about him having a character flaw, a “hamartia” in the ancient Greek language of tragedy, that leads him to this downfall. In Okonkwo’s case it could be his temper, his ruling of his household with a heavy hand (13). He beats one of his wives during the “Week of Peace” (29), which is against the rules of their religion, and even shoots at one of his wives at one point (39). It could also be his overbearing fear of weakness and effeminateness, which is what leads him to kill Ikemefuna. But then again, this could just be me approaching the story from my 21st century, North American values.

Kenn Adams and the story spine

According to this post, the story spine is a way to come up with ideas for a well-crafted story. It is just the backbone, just the basics, on which other elements of the story can be hung. It goes something like this:

1. The beginning: establishes the main character’s world and everyday routine. “Once upon a time…” and “Every day…”

2. The event: but one day, the routine is broken.

3. The middle: the consequences of breaking the routine. “Because of that…” and “because of that…” and “because of that…”

4. The climax: “until finally…” the character “embarks on success or failure.”

5. The end: success or failure occurs, and “a new routine is established”

This fits quite well with Achebe’s novel. The first few chapters establish Okonkwo’s world, the daily routines, the rituals, the seasonal festivals, and more. Then one day he kills Ikemefuna. Or maybe the event in this story should be thought of as accidentally killing the son of a man during that man’s funeral, since that really breaks up his routine: because of that, Okonkwo has to go into exile. Because of that he does not prosper in his clan as he had planned.

Then there was also the arrival of the missionaries, which doesn’t have any direct causal connection to what Okonkwo has done (no “because of that” here), but which ends up “breaking the routine” in an entirely different and much more destructive way. Because of the missionaries’ arrival, Okonkwo’s son ends up estranged from his father. And the missionaries end up jailing Okonkwo and others at one point until the village pays a fine. And then on top of that there was the killing of the religious spirit by a convert, and all of this seems to lead to the climax: Okonkwo killing one of the converts and hoping the rest of the clan will join him in a war. But he has misread them; they are as weak as his son, and he cannot face his life anymore. The end: failure.

This is, at least, how I’m reading the text before hearing one of our teaching team lecture on it tomorrow…maybe I’ll change my mind about the story and its shape later.

Concluding thoughts

This was a really interesting exercise–I discovered that there are certain shapes of stories that are common, that you can find within many stories, such as the up-down movement of fortune or the story spine. I can see how practice in finding these sorts of shapes in stories might help one better construct stories oneself. Interesting that there are some very regular shapes that work, that are repeated over and over.

When I started doing ds106 about a year ago (this is my third iteration already!) I was convinced I had no artistic talent. That myth got busted very quickly. I’m still pretty convinced I don’t know how to create a fictional story that works. Most of my ds106 artworks aren’t really full narrative stories, but images, animated gifs, short videos that don’t really fit any of these kinds of shapes. But maybe it’s time to start busting the idea that I’m just no good at telling stories like this and that it’s some kind of mysterious power that some people have and others don’t. Maybe there’s some kind of basic rules or shapes that one can start with and then fill out. Hmmm… for now, I think I’ll just stick to finding those shapes in others’ stories and slowly work towards maybe one tell telling my own.

Work cited

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Anchor Canada, 2009.