Thinking in the Open

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In a blog post written by Helen Crump (From another Helen) she links to a blog post by Suzan Koseoglu [Boundaries of Openness] which references writing by Parker J. Palmer. How did my experience with Parker Palmer’s work lead me back to this today? It’s definitely caught my attention since there is a clear connection to this beginning work on being an openly, open educator.

There are many comments on Suzan’s blog post – I’m capturing a few here for further reflection.

  1. Suzan Koseoglu – “Ok, so Angel used “personal narrative accounts shared through individual interviews, written lived experience descriptions (van Manen, 1990, p. 63-66), and other digital media artifacts created as part of the learning activities while the course was in progress.” She also kept a journal to document her reflections (we are already doing this with our blogs). Her research questions were:(1) What is it like to be an adult learner in online learning environments? (2) What is it like to experience engagement in online learning environments? and (3) How do various elements of learning online and dynamics of the learning environment influence adult learners’ feelings of engagement?”
  2. Catherine Cronin – “You asked for ideas re: conducting this research. A few thoughts come to mind. Firstly, I think the notion of meaning-making is key. How do participants define, for themselves, the concept openness? Methods such as phenomenology (as you are considering) and constructivist grounded theory (as I have used) are well-suited to this objective. For example, I did not ask participants in my study about their use of open practices, I simply asked about the digital tools & spaces they used for learning, research and teaching (what/how/why) and then followed their narratives and reflections re: practices, values, pedagogy, openness, privacy, etc.”
  3. Catherine Cronin – “Secondly, as you consider boundaries, it may be useful to consider a range of participants… not just gender, race, age, etc., but also experience. I learned as much, for example, from participants who did not use OEP as those who did — whether it was someone adamantly against openness, or someone who’d considered (or experimented) with OEP but then chose to step back. That range was incredibly useful for my study; other types of diversity of experience may be useful for yours.”
  4. Maha Bali – “the value of including/interviewing people who choose not to be open. Let me say I think of people who are not open on two fronts: people who have the technical ability and digital literacy to be open but choose not to, and people who are open in their personality but not digitally (whom I still consider open; I dislike the way some people make it as if the Internet is what enabled openness ; openness existed way before the internet, but Internet esp 2.0 helped it a whole lot). I wonder if these two categories are reductionist and there are other folks who for example have both the personality and digital literacies but have institutional or personal constraints on the extent to which they can be open at this point in their lives (contextual, continuously negotiated as Catherine says)“
  5. Suzan Koseoglu – “one thing I find intriguing is following participant narratives and reflections to understand the open self. That is a very sensitive approach that might help us see the big picture and avoid assumptions.”

With each of these quotes, there is deeper thinking required. Worth keeping in my reflective toolkit for future work.