Novak’s Law

The best way to promote a university is to expose the work of its people – Novak Rogic

A while back, my colleague Novak made the above comment at a conference and I jokingly commented on twitter that I was going to refer to that statement as “Novak’s Law”, which seemed to resonate with a few people. The reason it resonated, I believe, is that it is one of those self evident statements that everyone pretty much intuitively grasps even if it takes some organizational confidence to empower the people (faculty, staff, and students) who make up a university to share their knowledge and work broadly, both formally and informally.

presentation

Open Badges, Flexible Pedagogies, Hands-On Learning (Slides)

Recently, I had the opportunity to co-facilitate a couple of different sessions with Erin Fields, a librarian at UBC (which continues my ongoing strategy to associate with innovative and passionate people and then integrate myself into their presentations). The first session took place at the CTLT Institute and focused on starting a conversation around how open badges could be used in higher education. My part was a mostly an open badge 101 workshop which built on this overview I had written earlier. The session was also used to help inform the development of a UBC funded project that will be developing a badge infrastructure and framework. More information about that project can be found at http://badges.open.ubc.ca, including a nice write up of the workshop. As a side note, there was also a related workshop which focused more on student perspectives of badges and the full notes of that session are worth checking out.

Anyway, here’s the slides from our session:

Erin and I presented again at ETUG and this time we focused on how to integrate some of the innovative pedagogies found in maker culture into classroom teaching. Rather than focus specifically on the making itself, we tried to trace the embedded practices (which, as Audrey Watters notes, involve such radical themes as small group discussion, collaboration, peer-to-peer learning, experimentation, inquiry, curiosity, and play) with effective learning. Erin weaved in educational theorists like Frerie and Papert, while I focused on some of the emerging practice frameworks like Mike Neary’s work on the Student as Producer Model.

Here are those slides:

BCopenEd, Open UBC

Lots of Great Open Education Workshops at ETUG in June

I can’t believe how many great open education workshops are happening in the lower BC mainland in the next month. In addition to the stuff happening on my own campus, the ETUG Spring Workshop takes place on June 12-13th and there are lots of amazing open ed sessions listed on the agenda.

ETUG is the BC Educational Technology Users Group, which is a grassroots community of BC educators that are interested in teaching, learning and ed tech in higher ed. Some of the open education themed sessions that I’m looking forward to include:

Plus, there will be a poster session, 3D printer demo, and, most importantly, a pub night. There’s also nice parallel thread in both the ETUG Workshop and the CTLT Institute on a “do it yourself” approach (something, for example, that can be seen in the ETUG Keynote by Jentery Sayers on maker cultures or in the CTLT VideoCamp).

BCopenEd, Open UBC

Open Education Related Events at the CTLT Institute

Every spring, the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning & Technology hosts the CTLT Institute, a series of workshops that share practice and research around teaching, learning and educational technologies. This year, the CTLT Institute takes place from June 3-10, and features 27 workshops led by 44 facilitators from 36 UBC departments and four universities. A number of these workshop are organized around the theme of “opening pedagogies” and relate to different aspects of open education. There are some really amazing speakers and interesting sessions planned, including:

Open Badges, Flexible Pedagogies
Jun 4, 2014, 1:15pm – 2:15pm
Irving K Barber Learning Centre – Fraser River Room 2.27

An open badge is a digital symbol that signifies concrete evidence of accomplishments, skills, qualities, or participation in experiences. It can provide a visual record of a learner’s achievement and development combined with the required proof. Furthermore, instructors and instructional designers can use educational badges to influence engagement and learning through the provision of focused goals, tasks, and affirmation of performance. This interactive session will explore open badges and how they may be used in higher educations. It will also be used to help inform the development of a Flexible Learning-TLEF funded project that will be developing a badge infrastructure and framework at UBC.

Teaching and Learning in the Open: Why/Not?
Jun 5, 2014, 1:15pm – 3:45pm
Irving K Barber Learning Centre – Fraser River Room 2.27

Open education has been much in the news lately in the form of Massive, Open, Online Courses (MOOCs). But there are numerous ways to engage in “open education,” some of them lost in the MOOC-hype of late. In this session we will discuss several ways in which one might make one’s courses more open, ranging from putting course materials online with a license allowing them to be revised and reused, to assigning open texts (those that are free to use, reuse and revise), to inviting people outside the university to participate in one’s on-campus course in limited ways (without making the course into a MOOC). We will also engage in a discussion of the possible upsides and downsides of doing any of these things.

VideoCamp: Let’s Make Some Videos!
Jun 6, 2014, 1:15pm – 4:00pm
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre – Seminar Room 2.22A/B

VideoCamp is an informal, three-part participatory workshop focused on building skills and community for “do It yourself” (DIY) style media creation at UBC. We’ll strap on our hiking boots and backpacks and set out together to explore the ins-and-outs of creating effective educational videos. Come share your own projects and ideas as we take a hands-on look at principals, techniques, and best practices for self-created media. Inspire and be inspired as we play with different tools and look at some available resources for creating videos without large budgets.

Student as Producers: Enhancing Student Learning Through Meaningful Participation
Jun 9, 2014, 1:15pm – 3:45pm
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre – Seminar Room 2.22A/B

The student as producer pedagogical model emphasizes the role of the student as collaborators in the production of knowledge. In this model, the university’s approaches to learning and research are closer aligned; for example, students, similar to researchers, are asked to share their work with others and not only with their immediate instructor or advisor. This session will examine both how educators and technologies can support learners’ in their role as active participants in their learning. We will hear from educators and academic leaders at the University of British Columbia and Vanderbilt University.

Be sure to check out the full listing for more information, including speaker bios. Registration for these events are free.

BCopenEd, Creative Commons, presentation, Student as Producer

The Media & The Message (Slides)

“What we are teaching and the tools we are teaching it with are in dialogue; how we teach can be an example of what we teach.” – Jon Festinger

I recently had the opportunity to give a talk for the BC Council on Admissions and Transfer‘s Communications and Media Articulation Committee (CAMAC). When I was invited, I was given the rather non-specific topic of online education, copyright, and technology – which, to be honest, delighted me as these three areas are often the holy trifecta of open education. The general thread of my presentation was that:

The future of education is not about information transmission but about scaffolding learning and knowledge building around information
Open licenses (such as Creative Commons) provide a simple solution in contrast to the complexity involved in aspects of copyright
Open education resource (OER) adoption and creation provide for the ability to build and improve the scaffolding of learning
Open approaches are highly effective methods for enabling this learning
The alignment of the student as owner of their learning and as collaborators in knowledge creation (e.g. the Student as Producer Model) is dependent on open approaches and open licenses
Open technologies and an alignment with the open internet are necessary to enable effective use of both OER and open pedagogies

Most of this I’ve talked about before but enjoyed compiling some independent aspects into a single talk. Here are the slides from the presentation: