Karen Cangialosi: On Empowering Students to Open Knowledge Practices

I just attended Achieving the Dream’s first Teaching and Learning Summit in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. The Summit had four tracks, each focused on a specific domain of teaching and learning:

  • Open Educational Resources: Beyond Cost
  • Guided Pathways: Ensuring Students Are Learning
  • Culturally Responsive Practices: Leveraging Knowledge for Equity
  • Adaptive Courseware for Early Success

I participated in the adaptive courseware track — guided by participants from Every Learner Everywhere — where I collaborated with the good folks at Houston Community College and other community colleges in Florida, Ohio, and Texas that are adopting adaptive learning platforms to improve student success.

The buzz at plenary sessions and mealtimes convinced me that participants in every track were as deeply engaged in the practical details of transforming teaching and learning as we were in the adaptive learning track. We had an incredibly productive couple of days together, making connections across disciplines and geographies to see how we might implement adaptive learning tools for various courses. These adaptive tools promise to enable students to take personalized learning pathways for knowledge and comprehension — speeding past what they already know and identifying where they might focus — while also enabling teachers to spend more time on higher-level, active learning, helping students apply, analyze and synthesize concepts.

Enter Karen

After all that wide-ranging, hands on work, the highlight of the gathering for me was when participants from all four tracks came together for a closing, plenary keynote from Karen Cangialosi on open pedagogy. Karen gave us all a truly remarkable experience.

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Opening Nouns & Verbs

Wooden doors ajar in a stone garden wall.

Arbour Hill Gardens by William Murphey licensed CC BY-SA.

The open education community I run with is filled with the kind of people who think words really matter. For a while now we’ve been debating what to call the things we care about and do: open practices, open resources, open pedagogy, open licensing, open this, open that. Our debate is hot enough to make some people turn away and others dig in. But when words matter this much it signals real tensions in beliefs, priorities, territories and relationships.

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Caring for OER

Painting showing a shepherd running away from his flock while a wolf kills sheep.

"The Bad Shepherd" by Jan Brueghel the Younger in the public domain.

This is the beginning of a post I’m researching on the CARE Framework using a workflow that includes Zotero to record and display reference information and Hypothesis to record and display notes.

As I haven’t drafted any content yet, so far this post just displays the references and notes I’ve already collected.

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Random Encounters: Thinking Beyond the Totality

Image of a solar eclipse during totality.

"Totality" by Geoff Livingston licensed CC BY-NC-ND.

This post involves a bit of Frankenstein thinking, because two — seemingly unrelated — posts I came across recently made connections for me. Let’s see if I can explain why I think they’re connected. TL;DR: While I have gigantic respect for both authors of these posts, I think both ask us to view things too generally, without paying attention to details that matter.

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Open Licensing Over TV Dinners and Smoothies

Image of a TV dinner in a foil tray with different Creative Commons licenses badges on the different food items. This work, CC TV Dinner by Nate Angell is licensed under CC BY, and is a derivative of tv dinner 1 by adrigu (https://flic.kr/p/6AMLDF) used under CC BY, and various Creative Commons license buttons by Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads) used under CC BY.

An offhand, only half-serious comment I made in the Creative Commons open education slack channel in response to a very worthy question from BCCampus’ Amanda Coolidge led to a new (?) metaphor to help explain the different open-licensing implications between collecting and redistributing a group of works with different open licenses versus actually remixing several works to form a new, derivative work: hereafter known as the TV dinner vs the smoothie.

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From 5R Permissions to 5R Practices

Image of an open safe deposit box.

Cropped from Open Monumenten Dag 2010 by Jeroen van Luin licensed CC BY.

I’ve been working with open resources for some time and have recently wanted to make a profound shift in the way I think about open permissions, or “the 5Rs” (Retain, Reuse, Remix, Revise, Redistribute) as they are known. TL;DR: Let’s move away from thinking of the 5Rs as qualities of artifacts and instead think of them as tools we use in the activities of opening knowledge practices.

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