Part of reason, and the point in time, when we draw distinction between open education and open pedagogy.
The design for learning was intentional.
Yet we didn’t onboard through @Downes it was more through @cogdog and Jim Groom and #DS106.
At the time @wiobyrne and I were doc students at UCONN, coming at it more from a situated cognition perspective, while being drawn to Vygotsky and CHAT, and studying under a cognitivist theorist trained by Jean Chall.
Lets call it multiple perspectives on unfolding realities. Dewey Pragmatism and an embrace of ambiguity.
The first Open Pedagogy course I tried to run was a self designed class by doc students on Vygotsky using the Zoetero Firefox plugin.
Quickly realized expertise does matter, we had none, fell back on secondary sources, specifically Cambridge handbook
Didn’t make it far.
There was, and is, the XMCA Listserv, we are leaving listservs out of the discussion becuase learning often happens there in spite of rather than due to design.
Email is the first truly federated system, but we use “web based” in our definition as ontologogical move of exclusion
Plus page limits.
I came across #DS106 on Twitter with #DS106radio and actually thought a colleague was discussing an underground radio station in Seattle with @cogdog
@wiobyrne and I had been blogging in our classrooms with students for a few years by 2007-08.
We followed what Jim and Alan did across Twitter.
Twitter’s role in Open Pedagogy couldn’t be overstated, as these courses grew EduTwitter blew up simultaneously, first through #edchat, then hundreds of weekly specific chats, the PLN became a thing, then VC money flooded into edtech.
@wiobyrne and I hopped into this PLN thing hardcore with the rest of the few
(a small minority of on the ground teachers)
We were late to Twitter as well (I was 5/09) at the same time we were both (and still do) living la vita Google. They kept buying cool stuff we were already using.
This eventually lead to us exploring using Google Apps as Free LMS, we used Moodle in the past…but it was Moodle.
GAFL started as a Google Group but then migrated to G+ when it launched.
One legacy G+ will leave behind is the influence the design choices had on how those who work in Open Pedagogy think as we build feeds, or want feeds of distributed networks
If you look at Google Classroom and you look at G+ the influence there is evident.
And who are we kidding, Google though GAFE and Chromebook domination will define design in the LMS space for decades to come
Though I am not totally worried about this as i think it bodes well for the rise of PWAs over Native Apps (more as a protection move against i)S)…but that is a different story…back to history and theory
@wiobyrne and I first tried to develop a course and portfolio system and blogs using Moodle and Mahara for the Connecticut Technical High School System
This evolved into our Online Research and Media Skills course work a theory of new literacies from a blogpost:
Evolution of the Online Research and Media Skills Curriculum
We changed the name to ORMS to better align with Common Core Storm. We are also in teacher prepare it is our job to teach teachers what they are required to teach.
Ian turned this into a MOOC on Google Sites: used in his classes and at a conference we organized https://sites.google.com/site/ormsmnli
While this was all happening online we also worked with great scholars from 2010-2014 organizing the New Literacies institutes in North Carolina and Massachusetts.
There we met @dogtrax who attended our first conference in MA but new more than the teachers.
This brings up the physicality and embodiment of Open Pedagogy. At some point you meet IRL, this changes the learning, especially week long conferences and gatherings
All of our conferences were on wikispaces but few teachers ever had their own website, we were always pushing that.
You can’t talk about open pedagogy and not talk about pushing people onto their own domains.
And talking about a Domain of Your Own brings you back to Jim Groom and others involved in the early days of #ds106radio
Yet our audience was never on their own domain (yet), and the conversion rate is slow, active 1+ year even lower
Is it not Open Pedagogy if these folks join our networks through their silos?
I don’t think so.(Seeign the double b=negative I am saying its the distibuted nature that makes it open and not the platform)
Don’t kid yourself everyone onboard to the web through a silo.
A Gold Star HTML Only person rarer than any rainbow vomiting unicorn.
It was just moveable type, LiveJournal, MySpace, GeoCities.
many places like wikispaces that is now gone to the dustbin
Yet back to learning theory, Connectivism, and Vygotsky, Situated Cogntion, you know the fun stuff…I believe we have responsibility to encourage people to publish from their own domain.
It is privacy through data empowerment. Control what you publish.
I also do not think technology changes the way we learn and still come at learning from a more situated and pragmatic approach than connectivism.
Yet I do think technology takes advantage of the way the brain works.
Social media in general leaves you less happy because it messes with brain chemicals much like drugs.
Cognitive scientists are on staff to ensure their notifications appear often in front of you.
We need to account for this in any learning theory.
It is also hard to recreate the community that exists in the open courses where we all have traveled since 2008 in my online classes.
Purpose and practice change learning.
We have been at this for a 10 years, asking someone to bring in the social practices of open pedagogy after 10 minutes is crazy.
Especially when a class is a class in a list that someone else decided you must take.
We also know privilege plays a role here as well.
The completion rates of online learning among people of color and community colleges are abysmal. Might as well enroll in a MOOC.
In 2013 @wiobyrne and I along with others started to organize or first MOOCs across Blogs and feeds with #WalkMyWorld. WalkMyWorld began out our NCTE Potery sessions. Ian and I have been presenting about blogging and tech since 2007. Nobody came to the sessions. So Sue Ringler-Pet Ian and I came up with esoteric poetry titles and taught the content through tech. In 2014 this became #WalkMyworld. Of course all of our case studies are on Storify so they are gone forever.
I worry about diversity and inclusion. Open Pedagogy if is an issue of social justice, it is about learning so it is always about social justice, must intentional;y design for diversity and inclusion.
I also have seen the audience stagnate. We are the same group of traveling bard in the next meta course about online learning or MOOCs or tech or pedagogy…wash rinse repeat.
Worried about this but you are all my friends so not too worried as we have fun.
But this brings me back to my recent explorations of Vygotsky and perezhivanie and a Domain of Ones Own.
Blunden, states perezhivanie is more than a “lived experience” and says it doesn’t translate into English.
I am beginning see the domain and unfolding of identity across networks as perezhivanie
perezhivaniyaha that unfolds online at different times has shifted.
In the early days of the Web ,while folks still came online through some tool, people were doing their identity work as they built the web.
It reflects their values and bias (sorry majority of worldpopulation) but it was also the work of “others” who found refuge.
Now however the Me(s) we project on to the world and those the world projects back onto us are algorithmically determined.
As a parent and educator this frightens me. I don’t want a feed to decide my friends.
I think we need to stress to the public you need to control how you are shaped from a canonical url
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