Nate Angell

Wandering IQ. Raised by wolves. Friend to cheese. Working to bend the arc of justice.

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Opening Knowledge Practices

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Painting of a male head made of flowers.
Spring (1563) by Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

I’ve become increasingly interested in how I can help empower people to have greater agency in their lives to build a better life for us all through our mutual engagement in acquiring, generating and sharing knowledge, an effort I’m calling “opening knowledge practices” or OKP for short.

Why do I call it “opening knowledge practices”?

Given my background, I think the best place for me to focus is on those activities where knowledge is at the center, where people are explicitly acting in roles like student, teacher, researcher, scholar, or librarian, pursuing, making and spreading knowledge. I would also argue (without any evidence beyond my own experience) that focusing on activities when knowledge is central can have a greater (or maybe even the greatest) positive effect on fostering human agency to improve our common life.

I’m using “opening” rather than just “open”, in part as an acknowledgement that there are already significant (aligned) efforts organized around the term “open knowledge” (eg, OKI), but mostly to emphasize the active, verb form of “opening”, rather than the adjective “open” modifying some — perhaps more static — noun. Knowledge is not static and the process of opening it is ever ongoing. OKP is an active process, never finished. In the same vein, I use “opening” to emphasize my view that the most useful way to think about openness itself is not as a static quality, but as a bendy characteristic. For me, something is open for a moment, in a context, for these people and purposes, according to a (contested) definition of open. I like to think of something opening as a part of a process — like a flower or a mind — rather than being open as a state, like a door or gate. I want to focus on the process of opening, not the Platonic ideal of the open object. In this light, the famous 5Rs of OER are not a litmus test that measures how open something is, but a map that can guide us down an opening path (as David Wiley himself suggests).

And lastly, I use “practices” to indicate a focus on the human activities related to knowledge, rather than the common focus on knowledge artifacts, products or results. “Practices” also has the advantage of suggesting that when we are opening knowledge, we are always “practicing” for the next time, rather than participating in some final performance.

So, let’s open some knowledge practices!

In starting to organize my own thinking around OKP, I’ve settled on four primary areas of focus:

Literacies: Not just reading and writing, not just information or digital or media or web literacy, but all of that. Most generally: various ways of understanding information and its uses in all the ways one encounters it.

Skills: Abilities to access, manipulate and create information in order to act.

Identity: Evolving understanding of the self as a negotiation between the personal and the social (I’ll add: online and off, face-to-face and at a distance).

Community: An active practice in making meaningful connections with people who have shared interests, inside and outside one’s normal circles, and collaborating with them to make things happen.

Moving forward, I’ll work to refine OKP and use these four focuses — literacies, skills, identity, community — as a toolkit to explore the dimensions of knowledge practices, how they are opening, and/or how we might work together to open them more.

Note: I’ll be using the hashtag #okp to tag these activities. My apologies for collisions with the film Oru Kanavu Pola (which looks like it might be pretty good), the Australian philanthropy/marketing firm O’Keefe and Partners (which refers to itself as #OKP on social media — seems a bit like talking about oneself in the third person), the Onion Knight Project of the Final Fantasy game, the OnLine Kitchen Party fan group for the Canadian folk/rock group Great Big Sea, or anything else.

Marketing Hypothesis

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Man in red sweater holding a notebook with overlaid text saying "My notebook lives with me."I’m incredibly excited—and deeply honored—to be joining the team at Hypothesis, the organization behind the capabilities that enable everyone to take digital notes, everywhere. At Hypothesis, I’ll be leading marketing: telling the stories that engage people to add a new layer to the web.

Buttons that activate Hypothesis.If you haven’t seen Hypothesis before, look in the upper right corner of my blog and you’ll see buttons that let you create and add to your own digital notebook of annotated links. For your further travels, the easiest way to use Hypothesis everywhere is with our Chrome browser extension.

Why Join Hypothesis?

Let me count the ways < see how annotation works! I’m inspired to join Hypothesis because it hearkens to what speaks to me: an essential need that people recognize and will sustain.

  1. For more reasons than I can go into here, information literacy has never been more important. Persistent, shared engagement with reading is the foundation of literacy. Annotation records, personalizes, and connects engagement across the digital landscape. This needs to happen.
  2. Educators, journalists, publishers, and researchers—among others—are already using or calling for the kind of universal annotation Hypothesis provides. There’s a call to answer.
  3. Hypothesis’s standards-based, nonprofit, growth-friendly model can enable good practices to spread wide and persist to be meaningful. It will succeed.

Why marketing?

Getting the story right is essential. To make the changes I want to see happen, I need to connect others to what matters to them. Story has always been a part of my work, but I’ve taken on so many things across my career that I’ve never been able to make story my primary focus. At Hypothesis, I’ll be joining an awesome team that’s already doing such great work that I’ll have the unfamiliar luxury to focus my efforts on making the story matter: Why do we need annotation? How do we annotate? Who needs to know?

It seems like all paths were pointing me to Hypothesis. In true serendipity, I first learned of Hypothesis from a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick, who went on to found Little Bird, where I radically transmogrified my skills and experience as part of their founding team. Next I moved to Lumen Learning, where we recognized how annotation could raise teaching and learning to new levels and were already piloting Hypothesis in combination with open educational resources (OER).

Looking back, I can see I’ve been devoted to expanding access to critical engagement with information from my academic studies—where I focused on how media and culture intermix—to each of my jobs, where my focus has always been to enable deeper engagement with information for a wider array of folks. It makes sense that I would get to Hypothesis, where we are working “to enable a conversation over the world’s knowledge”.

I’m leaving Lumen in good hands: a team of talented folks continues the important work we started together to spread OER broadly in higher education: Alexis Clifton, Alyson Day, Alyson Indrunas, Bracken Mosbacker, Gary Abernethy, Heather Angell, Josh Baron, Paul Golisch, Ross Strader, Suzanne Jenkins, and all the other folks doing amazing work less in the public eye. A special thanks to my Lumen colleague, Julie Curtis, whose leadership of communications and strategy at Lumen taught me so much that will help me at Hypothesis and beyond. And of course nothing Lumen does would be possible without the vision cofounders David Wiley and Kim Thanos provide. Thank you all for the great work we have done together!

Going forward: let marginalia reign!

Post-Fact Fictions: Let’s get REAL about Information Literacy

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Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL)

Graphic showing overlapping petals labelled information literacy, data literacy, statistical literacy, critical reasoning, visual literacy, technology literacy.
Literacy Rainbow (6/6) by Justin Grimes licensed CC BY-SA.

I’m still thinking about the 2016 US election and what it means for the people, ideas and future I care about. One thing that is clear to me is that understanding and participating in such an election calls on all of us—regardless of our point of view—to increase our information literacy and use it to inform our critical reasoning. How’s your statistical and data literacy doing?

Folks are saying we now live in a “post fact” world, but I recognize that “facts” have always been generated within cultural, political, economic, and social contexts. If anything, we are drowning in facts, not sailing away from them. To survive, we need to get better at understanding how facts are now made, circulated, and given value.

As I continue to explore how what I’m calling “renewable experiential and applied learning” (REAL) can provide ways to improve education, I keep coming back to information literacy as a fitting and necessary foundation for REAL experiences based on renewable assignments. Renewable assignments promote learning goals for information literacy, and in turn, information literacy is a necessary component for learner success in REAL work. I’ll also provide a specific, example of a renewable assignment that demonstrates this close connection with information literacy.

Let’s start with the learning goals outlined in the best open resource on information literacy I know, the Open SUNY Textbook (OST) Information Literacy User’s Guide, and see how these goals both describe and call out for a REAL approach. Each one of these goals is fleshed out in the Introduction to this work, including more specific goals that are mapped to behavioral, cognitive, affective, and metacognitive domains.

Goal 1: Evaluate content critically, including dynamic, online content that changes and evolves.

While renewable assignments don’t necessarily require critical thinking, they do engage learners in open works that become dynamic through their own and others’ interactions. Obviously, any good assignment would also ask learners to exercise critical thinking.

Goal 2: Understand personal privacy, information ethics, and intellectual property issues in changing technology environments.

The open-licensing component of renewable assignments asks learners to engage directly with the privacy and property rights of information, not merely in the object of the assignment, but by design also in the output of the assignment—their own work. Because learners’ work will live openly, they will at a minimum need to grapple enough with questions of privacy and intellectual property to publish their work with an open license. Questions of ethics aren’t necessarily built in to renewable assignments, but like with critical thinking in Goal 1, are natural extensions of thoughtful activities.

Goal 3: Share information and collaborate in a variety of participatory environments.

Again, REAL’s very structure leads learners to engage directly with this learning goal, as sharing through open publication is built into every renewable assignment. Like ethics and critical thinking, collaboration may not be a component of every renewable activity, but it’s a short step away when assignments ask learners to engage with already existing open materials often built collaboratively, and publish their own work openly, thereby inviting future collaboration.

Goal 4: Demonstrate ability to connect learning and research strategies with lifelong learning processes and personal, academic, and professional goals.

REAL’s experiential and applied components specifically ask learners to think in multiple contexts directly tied to their larger lives, traveling the circuit from learning to experiential activity and back again to reflection.

Example Renewable Assignment

For a concrete example, here’s a simple assignment, inspired by some of the activities in that same original OST work on information literacy and designed to lead to the same learning goals, but devised to be renewable, and fit any group participating in a common activity.

Assignment: Building a Choral Handbook

Simply, ask your group to build a guide for whatever activities the group shares collaboratively. I call this a “choral” handbook based on ideas from Mike Caulfield about how multiple, choral explanations can aid learning. Your group can make its own Choral Handbook using tools common and familiar to the group. A truly renewable assignment would produce a public, openly licensed handbook that would then be enriched and improved as new people engage in the exercise.

Part 1: Document

  1. Go to the place where you engage in any activity common to our group.
  2. Which part of the activity do you think is hard but you know how to do?
  3. Do that hard part. Take notes. Drawing or taking pictures can be helpful. Look up things you don’t know.
  4. Post your description of that hard part of the activity and the step-by-step actions you take to do it in a good place in our Choral Handbook.
  5. For each step, include if you created or where you found that information so others know where your guidance comes from.

Part 2: Reenact

  1. Read our Choral Handbook to find a post about a different activity or part of an activity that you don’t know how to do as well or you think can be improved.
  2. Follow the steps in the post. Pay attention to where the information in each step comes from: is it credible? Is there better information?
  3. Ignore, add, or change steps as you see fit. Take notes. Drawing or taking pictures can be helpful. Look up things you don’t know.
  4. Alongside that same post, add a new post of the step-by-step actions you take to do that activity that you think improves on or provides a worthy alternative to the original post. Remember, because all posts in our Choral Handbook are openly-licensed to permit revision and reuse, you can reuse any or all of any other post in your own work as long as you attribute the original author.
  5. For each step, include if you created or where you found that information so others know where your guidance comes from.

Part 3: Reflect

  1. Return to your post from Part 1. Based on your experience reenacting a different activity in Part 2, is there anything you would add, take away, or change to make it better?
  2. Revise your post as you see fit.
  3. For each step, add any new or changed sources of information.

Open Batteries

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Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL)

Kid's art hung on fridge.
Josh’s First Fridge Art by Jessica, licensed CC BY-SA.

When kids are little, we are quick to share their works, without worrying if they are worthy, or if sharing gets in the way of the creator’s growth. A first scribble hung on the fridge engages its crayon-wielding artist in community, audience, and their own creative evolution. I still remember my first daughter’s prolific Blue Period, quickly far too large for her limited fridge gallery.

Yet as soon as kids enter school, their work descends into an underworld of assessment: kindergarten’s finger paintings give way to worksheets, reports, and standardized tests that fall quickly to their final, lonely resting places, giving off the dying breath of grades.

In a previous post on an “electric” metaphor for renewable experiential and applied learning (REAL), I suggested that renewable assignments—assignments where students produce meaningful, public works—store value like batteries, not only for their creators, but also for future learners and the community at large.

What makes an assignment renewable? A renewable assignment should be meaningful beyond its role in learning and assessment. This is the simple power of experiential learning: when an assignment engages a learner and their work in the larger world, it provides opportunities for learning that go beyond mere graded exercises.

But experiential learning—easier said then done!  How can a learner take first steps in the larger world when that larger world is made out of expensive materials that specifically prohibit contribution, modification, and republication?

Truly renewable assignments engage learners in open materials—openly licensed or in the public domain—so that learners are free to take small, first steps, and increasingly larger strides, to contribute to and modify meaningful works, and also republish their contributions to put real experience in their learning.

Artifacts produced by open, renewable assignments store the engagement of each learner—not only so each learner can build on their experience, but also so others can too, “renewing” the assignment again and again.

REAL Circuits of Learning

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Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL)

Now that Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning has an acronym (REAL), the next thing it needs is metaphors and cocktail napkin sketches…so here goes:

Napkin sketch showing learners moving between educational educational and workplace settings along a circuit, generating and storing value in OER-based renewable assignments.

A key part of REAL’s “renewability” is the idea of connecting learning and experience in virtuous cycles that rotate through activities in educational organizations and the wider world of communities and workplaces. My first metaphor for these virtuous cycles is an electrical circuit:

  1. Learners are the electrical charge,
  2. traveling from knowledge-building activities in educational settings
  3. across conduits to activities of practice in community/workplace settings
  4. and then completing the circuit by returning to their original educational setting.
  5. Once returned, learners amplify their experience by engaging in renewable assignments
  6. that further their learning and enable assessment of their progress toward learning goals.

In this “electric” metaphor, the openly-licensed artifacts (OER) that learners generate via renewable assignments at different points around the circuit act as batteries, storing the power of learning to later empower other learners and learning.