Learning while Learning

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Since I attended the Doctoral Comprehensive Portfolio Defence last week, I’m more aware of the learning I am doing that can be included as part of my own comprehensive portfolio, to model my readiness for continued scholarly inquiry. As part of this observation, I’ll begin to collect all the tasks and projects where I am extending my understanding, and learning about learning in the open. The first one is the Creative Commons Certification Course that I’ve been taking over the previous ten weeks. The second is the Mozilla Leadership course I am just starting to undertake, with colleagues in the Virtually Connecting community.

The Creative Commons Certification requirements includes a collection of resources and thinking as a showcase of lessons learned during the course. I have created an AirTable collection (for the first time) where I’ve collected the eight additional resources, with annotations, to support the CC Certification future course iterations. Here is that AirTable collection.

The second part of the culminating task was a 500 word essay “describing how you can best advocate for open values, practices and resources within your systems”. Here is my response.

As a designated Open Educator Fellow with eCampus Ontario, I will advocate for open values, practices, and resources, not only at my own institution, but those across the province. I am passionate about bringing open educational practices into higher education spaces in order to provide opportunities for students in all fields of study to engage with course content, mentors and models in the field, as well as be able to connect beyond the duration of the course itself. Purchasing a ‘throw-away’ text, or completing a ‘throw-away’ assignment, is not an efficient use of valuable learner’s time, energy, and efforts. I will continue to model and speak out about open access, open pedagogy, and open practices, specifically into the K-12 educational spaces that my students will inhabit.

My basic awareness of CC licensing and the application of CC licensing to my work as an educator has been expanded in this course. The issue that I’m taking away, and including in my advocacy efforts, within my own institution, but bringing to an awareness for others in higher education spaces, is copyright and intellectual property rights, specifically as it applies to instructor made course resources and instructional design. One point of advocacy that I am working on, is the ability to CC license the course content I create. One challenge is the precariousness of my position as a contract lecturer in my institution.

With a greater awareness of the licensing structure (Unit 3.1), the adaptation of licensed materials (Unit 4.4), and licensing compatibilities (Unit 4.4), I will be speaking and advocating from an informed position. I will specifically be able to integrate the metaphor for collections vs adaptations created by Nate A. to extend this discourse. I can use the blog posts created from this course as a starting point for conversations, as well as link to the work from others in this course to support my advocacy work.

One key lesson is the need to be informed, to engage in the Creative Commons movement, and become a ‘commoner’. This fits with my underlying spirit of ‘ubuntu’. Unfortunately, my efforts to this point have been largely silent, with little movement in the policy front in my institution, for the open education movement. In this, I considered my position as ‘one’, without a voice. I know this has changed, as a direct result of this course, to ‘many’, particularly with the advocacy support from eCampus Ontario, where their position is firmly in the OER, CC license, and open education conversations. I am happy to be connected and networked to the OEFellows, and the OEORangers, another group of educators in Ontario who advocate for open education.