Tuesday 13 June 2017

Open Educational Resources and Book Printing Machines

"Being open" has been a major theme in educational technology for many years. It goes to the heart of why many have been drawn to education technology in the first place: "let's transform education, make it available to all, liberate ourselves from constraints", and so on. There is an associated economic narrative which speaks of "re-use" and highlights the apparent ridiculousness in the redundancy of so much content - why have 100 videos about the eye when one would do?

The opportunity of technology is always to present people with new options for acting: blogging presents new options for publishing, for example. In effect, new options for acting are new ways of overcoming existing constraints. When looking at any innovation, it is useful to examine the new options it provides, and the constraints it overcomes. Sometimes new technologies introduce new constraints.

What new options does OER provide? What constraints does it overcome?

These are not easy questions to answer - and perhaps because of this, there is much confusion about OER. However, these are important questions to ask, and by exploring them more fully, some insight can be gained into how OER might be transformative.

Enormous amounts of money have been spent on repositories of stuff which are presented as lego bricks for teachers to assemble their teaching. Remember learning objects? Remember widgets? Remember JORUM? The rationale behind much of this was that educational content could be assembled by teachers and incorporated as ready-made chunks of knowledge into new courses. So the constraint was the labour of teachers? Or the cost of resources? OER to the rescue!?

But actually none of this addressed the deep constraint: the course. Who cares about courses? Well, universities do... Courses = Assessment = Money.

Of course, away from courses, there are Open Educational Resources on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Listservs, blogs, wikis, and various other specialised disciplinary forums. Moreover, the tools for searching and retrieving this stuff have got better and better. Email histories are now a major resource of information thanks to vast storage of google and the capabilities of their search tools. All of these things have circumvented the constraint of the course.

Universities care about courses. Open Educational Resources cut the costs of setting courses up. And of course, the skill requirements of the teacher might be seen to be lowered to that of curators where the cost saving implications are attractive to university managers: we don't need teachers - we can get this stuff for free, and pay cheap adjuncts to deliver it! So the constraints are financial and organisational.

But... nobody really understands what happens in teaching and learning. Whilst there are ways in which a video on YouTube might be said to "teach", generally teaching happens within courses. But what does the teacher do?

What happens in teaching and learning is conversation. Ideally, in that conversation, teachers reveal their understanding of something, and learners expose their curiosity. This can happen away from formal courses - most notably on email listservs, where (perhaps) somebody posts a video or a paper, and then people discuss it, but it is something that clearly is meant to happen in formal education.

"Revealing understanding" of something is not the same as presenting somebody with ready-made resources and activities (although someone can reveal their understanding of a subject in a video or a book - or indeed, a blog post!). Teachers have always used textbooks, but conversations usually revolve around a negotiation of the teacher's understanding of the textbook. Most textbooks are sufficiently rich in their content to throw up interesting questions for discussion.

Ready-made resources represent someone else's understanding. They can sometimes present an unwelcome extra barrier for the teacher, since the teacher is trying to reveal their understanding of the subject, but are caught trying to reveal their understanding of somebody else's understanding.

Teachers produce resources to help them articulate their understanding. Some very experienced teachers may even write books about their understanding of a subject. When resources are publishable at this level, things get interesting and a new set of constraints emerges. The big constraint is the publishers.

Let's say a teacher writes a book. They send it to a publisher and sign away their rights to it. In signing away their rights to the content, they are restricted in what they might do with the content in future. The book might be very expensive and so the people who a teacher wants to read it, cannot afford it. There may be chunks of text which they might want to extract and republish for a different audience. They can't do it.

I think this is about to change. One of the exciting developments in recent years has been print-on-demand self-publishing. Alongside this, professional typesetting has become within easy reach of anyone. LaTeX-driven tools like Overleaf (http://overleaf.com) make a once-esoteric skill accessible to all. And the book printing machines like Xerox's Espresso Book Machine are the most powerful exemplars of 3D printing:



Why will academics exploit this? Because, whilst publishing with a respectable publishing house is often seen as a 'status marker', it also constrains the freedom of the academic to manage their own resources and engagement with their academic community.

A self-published open book can exist on GitHub as a LaTeX file, which an academic can fork, republish, reframe, etc. And why not allow others to do the same? And if copies can be printed for very little, why not do your own print run and distribute your book to your academic community yourself? For all teachers, and for all academics, the point of the exercise is conversation.

More importantly, with the production of high quality resources that can be exploited in different ways, the teacher is able to express their understanding of not just one but potentially many subjects. What is the difference between a book on methodology in education research to a book on methodology on health research? Might not the same person have something to say about both? Why shouldn't the resources or the book produced for one not be exploited to do the other?

15 comments:

Suresh said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
srinithya said...

Very good blog, thanks for sharing such a wonderful blog with us. Keep sharing such a worthy information to my vision.
Data Science Course in Chennai
Data Analytics Courses in Chennai
Data Science course in Velachery
RPA Training in Chennai
UiPath Training in Chennai
Blue Prism Training in Chennai

Vicky Ram said...

It is a great post. Keep sharing such kind of useful information.

dgreatwallofchina
Guest posting sites

Aruna ram said...

Thank you for sharing this useful information. I got more information in this blogs comment. keep blogging…
Learn Ethical Hacking in Bangalore
Best Etical Hacking Training in Bangalore
Ethical Hacking Course in Ambattur
Ethical Hacking Course in Annanagar
Ethical Hacking Course in Saidapet
Ethical Hacking Training in Aminjikarai

sathyaramesh said...

I am really enjoying reading your well-written articles. It looks like you spend a lot of effort and time on your blog. I have bookmarked it and I am looking forward to reading new articles. Keep up the good work.

Selenium Training in Chennai
selenium testing training in chennai
iOS Training in Chennai
Digital Marketing Training in Chennai
PHP Course in Velahery
PHP Course in Adyar

pavithra dass said...

I am obliged to you for sharing this piece of information here and updating us with your resourceful guidance. Hope this might benefit many learners. Keep sharing this gainful articles and continue updating us.
RPA Training in Chennai
Robotics Process Automation Training in Chennai
RPA course
Robotic Process Automation Certification
RPA Training

mercyroy said...

Very interesting information that you have shared with us.i have personally thank you for sharing your ideas with us.
Selenium Training in Kelambakkam
Selenium Training in Padur
Selenium Training in Vadapalani
Selenium Training in Amjikarai

Anbarasan14 said...

Thanks for this kind of worthy information. this was really very helpful to me. keep continuing.

English Coaching Center in Chennai
English Coaching in Chennai
Spoken English Center in Chennai
Best Spoken English Coaching Center near me
Spoken English Training in Chennai
Best Spoken English in Chennai
English Language Classes in Chennai

kayal m said...

Your blog is very attractive!!! It's very helpful for improve myself. Thank you for your sharing with great concept.
Web Designing Course in Bangalore
Web Designing Training in Bangalore
Web Designing Course in Tnagar
Web Designing Training in Saidapet
Web Designing Course in Omr
Web Designing Training in Tambaram

Praylin S said...

Great post! Thanks for sharing this with us. Keep us updated.
Mobile Testing Training in Chennai | Mobile Testing Course in Chennai | Mobile Automation Testing Training in Chennai | Mobile Testing Training | Mobile Application Testing Training | Mobile Apps Testing Training | Mobile Application Testing Training in Chennai | Mobile Appium Training in Chennai

jefrin said...

Very good to read the post
Data science training in cehnnai

jvimala said...

Very Clear Explanation. Thank you to share this
Regards,

Data Science certification Chennai
Data Science Training in Chennai
Data Science Training institutes in Chennai
Data Science Course in Chennai

jefrin said...

Great work thanks for sharing
Best blue prism training institute chennai

mobile app development toronto said...

It’s really a cool and useful piece of information. I’m glad that you shared this useful information with us. Please keep us up to date like this. Thanks for sharing.

singa said...

best body massager