Skills

Jupyter BOAT

by
Detail of medieval illustrated manuscript marginalia of four rats holding oars in an open wooden boat resting on some water on top of page ornamentation with an image of the planet Jupiter in the sky.

Collage of "Hubble Spies Spooky Shadow on Jupiter's Giant Eye (color)" by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, licensed via CC BY 2.0 and a detail of marginalia of rats in a boat from Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, page 162, circa 1367 from Ms. 143 in the collection of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, which has no known copyright and considered to be in the public domain.

You may have seen the publication of BOAT, the bulk open attribution tool, that used a spreadsheet to enable you to generate open attribution/licensing statements for any collection of works. I’m now releasing another version of BOAT, that does exactly the same thing, but using a computational notebook instead of a spreadsheet to generate well-formed open attribution/licensing statements from a list of basic information about a collection of works.

Bulk Open Attribution Tool (BOAT) 1.0 (now 1.4)

by
Detail of medieval illustrated manuscript marginalia of four rats holding oars in an open wooden boat resting on water on top of some page ornamentation.

Detail of marginalia of rats in a boat from Pontifical of Guillaume Durand, page 162, circa 1367 from Ms. 143 in the collection of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, which has no known copyright and considered to be in the public domain.

When you are sharing your own creations openly or looking to credit other open works properly and want to create good licensing or attribution statements, what if you have more than one work that you want to create license or attribution statements for? I offer BOAT as an example spreadsheet that anyone can copy and modify to turn their own list of open works into well-structured license/attribution statements.

Tiny Social Reading Activities

by
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?

Read more

Who needs digital skills?

by
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.

Read more

Opening Knowledge Practices

by
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”?

Read more