Open Research
This reflection is coming from the GO_GN sessions being held as part of the OER19 conference in Galway, Ireland. It’s from a tweet sent out by Rob Farrow, who’s research writing I’ve been examining and including in my own scholarly efforts.
The information on slide nine in this presentation caught my attention and catalyzed my thinking. In attempting to define myself, and engage as an open researcher, have I been true to the concept of what it means to be an open researcher? How am I negotiating the questions asked from Cronin’s (2017) work (found on slide 21) to my current writing. I’ve written documents for courses that have yet to see the light of day – hidden away in a dark corner of my computer folders and stored in a binder on a shelf. Is this being open in my work as a researcher? Perhaps not. Perhaps this is part of how I balance privacy and openness. These documents, written to meet course requirements, are in a NOT-YET state, of being there, but not yet ready for open sharing. They are full of ideas that I could and should share with a trusted network (as suggested on slide 13) in order to hone my thinking. Underlying this reluctance is my imposter syndrome, as faced by many researchers.
Several links and resources are available in this slide presentation:
- Why Open Research? http://whyopenresearch.org/index
- OER Hub – Researching open education http://oerhub.net/
- OER Hub – Researchers Pack http://oerhub.net/research-outputs/researchers-pack/
- ROER4D – researching open education for development http://roer4d.org/
- Open Education in Theory and Practice https://www.slideshare.net/robertfarrow/open-education-in-theory-and-praxis
There is more to think about, but the first step for me is to consider how and when to share my writing with others in open forums, to gain feedback, as modelled by Doug Belshaw [Read the first complete draft of my doctoral thesis on digital literacies – blog post]. This also led me to his blog post titled A 3-Step Guide to completing your thesis – something worth remembering since he mentions his use of concept mapping (created in XMind software) as part of step two. This reminds me of the VUE software I used during my masters work, but have not been able to find an alternative for … yet.
So this is my opener into becoming more open about my open research. Small steps, one step at a time. This is a fresh start into my open educational research journey.
