Open Learning Bingo: What Open Education Taught Me

For my first series of experiments applying open learning experience bingo to descriptions of actual learning experiences, I’ve started with experiences cataloged in the Open Pedagogy Notebook. Because student work is super valuable, I decided to start with the entry there from Jamie Marsh that was identified as a student perspective.

The exercise of applying open experience bingo to Marsh’s contribution to the notebook was very illuminating. First of all, the many experience ingredient boxes and dimensions of openness in the bingo card provide a lot of options to consider. It takes some concentration to “check off” openness that seems to be occurring in a description of a variety of learning experiences like Marsh provides. I found myself hesitating sometimes: “Is this an opening of reflection, or connection, or inclusion?” I often just checked off whatever seemed right and pressed ahead. After all, this is bingo, not science ;)

Is this bingo too complicated to be valuable? I think it’s too early to say and I’d like to see a lot more bingo played with a lot more learning experiences before I decide. I’ll note that there’s the simplified version of bingo for people looking for a less complicated activity.

Because Marsh is reflecting on a wide variety of learning experiences and so reflection is emphasized in her post, there may have been other dimensions of openness in the actual learning experiences that didn’t surface in Marsh’s reflection.

Nevertheless, I went through Marsh’s post carefully, highlighting dimensions of openness I thought she surfaced for particular ingredients. You can review/augment my annotations on Marsh’s original post and also see the “bingo card” I marked up as I read.

A 4x4 bingo card with highlights on various dimensions of openness in various learning experience ingredient squares. Materials: connect, reflect; Activities: reflect; Skills: connect, develop, reflect; Tools: blank; People: connect, include, reflect; Roles: connect, reflect, surface; Places: blank; Times: reflect; Goals: blank; Feedback: connect, reflect; Evaluation: connect, reflect; Recognition: connect, reflect; Design: reflect, surface.
An Open Knowledge Practices Learning Experience Bingo 2.0 card that Nate Angell filled out on 5 December 2019 for Jaime Marsh’s post, “What Open Pedagogy Taught Me“.

To bingo, or not to bingo?

My conclusion is that the bingo card is a valuable exercise to go through to think about the ways an experience is already opening, and in which areas it might be opened further.

I recognize that Marsh’s post is sorta meta — more of a surfacing and reflection about learning experiences than just a description of them, and so those dimensions of openness come through very strongly. Folks thinking about the learning experiences behind Marsh’s post might think about how to augment other dimensions of openness, and how to build the surfacing and reflection that Marsh offers in this post into the experiences themselves.

You can see that the tools, places and goals squares on my bingo card are unmarked. Which may mean merely that the openness of these ingredients built in to Marsh’s learning experiences didn’t make it into her reflection. Or maybe those experiences might benefit from some attention to the openness of their tools, places, and goals.

That’s what I’d like to see the open learning bingo card do: suggest areas where learning experiences might be opened further.

Of course my “bingo card” reading of Marsh’s learning experience is just one, so others might surface/change other aspects of the learning experiences she recounts in her post. I’d love to see others bingo Marsh’s post too, so we can compare. I’d also love it if other people would bingo other learning experiences and share them so we can collect more examples of bingoing for open learning. Get your own print-ready/revisable copies of the full and simplified 2.0 bingo cards.

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