Literacies

Tiny Social Reading Activities

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A handout describing a tiny social reading activity, with logos from Pressbooks, Hypothesis and H5P across the bottom.

A simple way to enrich online classes by making up tiny #SocialReading activities to help people practice key skills. Making a new tiny social reading activity is easy, just complete three sentences:

  1. I want people to learn…
  2. Together we’ll be reading…
  3. We’ll share…

This idea started with a poster session Jeremy Dean (@dr_jdean), Steel Wagstaff (@steelwagstaff) and I gave at EDUCAUSE 2019 #EDU19. We used it to show how one can invent simple, but powerful learning activities that could be delivered face-to-face or online, using tools like Pressbooks, Hypothesis and H5P.

I’ve shared some example “tiny social reading activities” from the poster session and the Twitter thread where I reintroduced this idea. Share your own examples, either as annotations or comments here, and/or added on to that Twitter thread. What are simple ways you can imagine learners sharing their engagement with texts to make reading more visible, active and social?

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Who needs digital skills?

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A lot of Lego people sitting in Lego bleachers.

IMG_8496 by Costantino Beretta licensed CC BY-SA.

Everyone, that’s who.

A central premise of opening knowledge practices (OKP) is that everyone benefits when people augment their literacies, skills, identities and communities with digital practices. I’ll say it again: everyone benefits — not just practicing individuals, but society as a whole. Just like everyone benefits when people learn to read and write.

So OKP is more than yet another call for technology education or job training, it’s a call to open knowledge practices as widely as possible, for people of all ages, in all stages of life or lines of work, whatever their existing literacies, skills, identities and communities.

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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 everyone 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”?

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