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I am about to start a second #WIHEA project with an even more ambitious remit that the previous one and I'm delighted to have many of the first team on board as they have already proven themselves to be great co-researchers. The focus of the earlier project was upon how language teaching and learning is changing in the digital age. We found essentially that there are far more opportunities to connect and interact than before and that, despite the learning curves involved in navigating digital spaces incorporating digital approaches (when done well) helps to extend learning and brings access to new literacies which had not always been fully explored in a learning context elsewhere.

This project will be focussing more on the nature of such approaches and the issues that arise when we embrace open online resources and practices as part of the learning landscape. We are reaching out to a wider Warwick audience for this, involving our careers and skills professionals, Education and Linguistics as well as a fully open audience through a G+ community here. The project, #knowhow will offer opportunities to explore how we manage our professional digital identity, how to manage issues such as copyright and ownership online and of course how to understand the various micro-cultures that operate within the digital environment. The "students" in this case are all of us, whether we are staff or students as we are all learning together.

I have enrolled on the #lermooc as a way of finding a community of practice to support this work as there is a tight budget and deadline ('twas ever thus) and I need to ensure that I find time and space to reflect on what we discover. I usually find my reflection is facilitated by the input of others. As an open practitioner myself I am keen to understand how working in the open may be perceived by others so I look forward to a challenging but ultimately informative experience.

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I am about to start a second #WIHEA project with an even more ambitious remit that the previous one and I'm delighted to have many of the first team on board as they have already proven themselves to be great co-researchers.

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Authors Catherine Cronin National University of Ireland, Galway

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Openness and Praxis: Exploring the Use of Open Educational Practices in Higher Education | The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning

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Open educational practices (OEP) is a broad descriptor of practices that include the creation, use, and reuse of open educational resources (OER) as well as open pedagogies and open sharing of teaching practices. As compared with OER, there has been little empirical research on individual educators’ use of OEP for teaching in higher education. This research study addresses that gap, exploring the digital and pedagogical strategies of a diverse group of university educators, focusing on whether, why, and how they use OEP for teaching. The study was conducted at one Irish university; semi-structured interviews were carried out with educators across multiple disciplines. Only a minority of educators used OEP. Using constructivist grounded theory, a model of the concept “Using OEP for teaching” was constructed showing four dimensions shared by open educators: balancing privacy and openness, developing digital literacies, valuing social learning, and challenging traditional teaching role expectations. The use of OEP by educators is complex, personal, and contextual; it is also continually negotiated. These findings suggest that research-informed policies and collaborative and critical approaches to openness are required to support staff, students, and learning in an increasingly complex higher education environment.

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Final project poster for the WIHEA #knowhow project.

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Mabel's magical garden by Teresa Mackinnon

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Created for the WIHEA #knowhow project to celebrate open educational practice.

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Blogging in different spaces shares the message more widely.

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Easter break ending, we must pick up the pace again on the #KNOWHOW project. Having carried out some action research (#LERMOOC) during the break I am determined to get the word out around campus of this opportunity for staff and students to understand and take advantage of the potential of open practice to enhance lives but also ever more aware of the need for strong support.

First things first, the break has not been without progress on the project front. The #LERMOOC opportunity produced a cognitive review of the project plan which should give a real wake up call to project participants, highlighting as it does the size of the task ahead. Communication with my team is a priority and I will try to get a face to face opportunity for that next week, meanwhile an email and a shared page will start the term.

We're going to take the metaphor of seeds (which complements the image above, I have been the mother hen incubating her project eggs so far). Once these eggs hatch they will need the product of our germinated seeds if they are to grow and thrive. Time for the the eggs to hatch, the seeds to be sown and watered, and for each of us to get nurturing so that it is clear across campus and beyond that Warwick is open for learning!

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Easter break ending, we must pick up the pace again on the #KNOWHOW project. Having carried out some action research (#LERMOOC) during the break I am determined to get the word out around campus of this opportunity for staff and students to understand and take advantage of the potential of open practice to enhance lives but also ever more aware of the need for strong support.

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Created during the project

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Web pages created for our Learning and Development Centre

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Resources from the WIHEA #knowhow project to support open educational practice for students and staff.

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A shared open space

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An open group for explorers of open practice in education

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Shared #WIHEA #knowhow blog

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Knowledge as a Public Good?!

"We ought to be [...] making knowledge a free good", urges Keith Griffin (2003) in his paper Economic Globalisation and Institutions of Global Governance

And Eamon Bailey, one of the Three Wise Men in Dave Eggers' dystopian novel The Circle , asks, "in this short life [...] why shouldn't everyone have equal access to [...] the knowledge of the world?" (b)

Let us begin discussing the issue of treating knowledge as a public good by deconstructing the latter.
By definition a "pure public good" is non-excludable and non-rival; now, for the non-economists among us, what does that mean?

Non-excludable means quite literally that no one can be excluded from consuming the public good; it is accessible to everyone.

Non-rival means that me consuming the public good does not lower the utility you derive from the consumption of the same good; there is no first-come-first-serve experience.

A classic example for a pure public good are street lights: we can all walk on the pavement and make use of them guiding us through the night and the fact that others are walking under the same street lights as we are does not make them less useful.
However, life is not always as easy as that; enter: the Tragedy of the Commons. For those of us who are not really comfortable with this concept, described in the 1960s by Garrett Hardin, here is a brief explanation.

Picture a common land which can be used by everyone. If you were a farmer, you would want to graze as many of your cows on there as possible. Well, unsurprisingly, your fellow farmers would want to do the same. But if you all did, the combined amount of cattle would exhaust the pasture and destroy it in the long run. Excessive use of a shared resource can bring about negative externalities. Long story short, the Tragedy of the Commons conceptualises the short-term interest of the individual versus the long-term welfare of society at large.
A very relevant and topical example: climate change and the overfishing of our seas.

Now, in order to avoid this dilemma that tends to occur with public goods, there are barriers to entry which either occur naturally (think traffic congestion) or which are constructed by us (think entry fees). See the chart on the right for a classification of goods.

So,where would we put knowledge on this grid?
Wikipedia lists knowledge as an example for a public good, do we agree?
Let us investigate the "purity" of knowledge as a public good.

First of all, we need to ask whether knowledge is a rival good.
Does me knowing something makes knowing the same thing less useful to you?

If you enjoy "intellectual superiority" and like to be the know-it-all, then probably yes. But from a more serious perspective, no. Two people sharing the same knowledge creates a breeding ground for even more knowledge. It feels redundant to provide arguments, so let me remind you that it was Watson AND Crick who discovered DNA - not either Watson or Crick.

Moving on to the second characteristic, we need to ask whether we can we exclude people from knowledge. Spoiler: this post was written by someone who has taken out a tuition fee loan to go to university. Well, yes obviously, there are ways to exclude people from learning new things and extending their knowledge. And whilst university may be technically free in other countries, textbooks are pretty much equally expensive no matter where you study. Which brings us to another way of excluding others from knowledge: copyright. Whilst I very much agree, that any sort of contribution or discovery should be attributed properly to whoever it is stemming from, I also agree that more open ways of licensing, such as Creative Commons offer great opportunities for sharing and remixing of resources. And it is through sharing and exchange of knowledge that we learn, is it not?
As Griffin points out, "the function of copyright legislation clearly has shifted from stimulating innovative works to protecting the income generating power of intellectual property". I like to call this the crux of copyright; we need to find a way of protecting someone's intellectual property without shutting others out, without "depriving them of something they have a right to. Knowledge is a basic human right. Equal access [...] is a basic human right." (b)

So where do we stand then?
Does knowledge fit the criteria for a public good?
It does not.
Knowledge may be a non-rival good but it is not a non-excludable good. Referring back to our goods definition matrix, one might even argue that knowledge is like pay TV or a fancy club - if you are privileged enough, you have access to it.

But let us imagine knowledge was a public good. Public goods can be exploited because selfish individuals can free-ride. I still get to breathe better air even though I drive to work by car whilst my colleagues cycle. And I still have access to openly licensed work even though I keep all my work to myself. And sooner or later, others will realise that and jump on the free-riding bandwagon until the race to the bottom is in full swing.

Should knowledge be a public good, or is it good that it currently is not?

Is sharing really caring?

a Griffin, K. (2003). Economic Globalisation and Institutions of Global Governance. Development and Change , 34(5), pp.789-807.

[note: the title "sharing is caring - privacy is theft" is also taken from Eggers' novel]

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"We ought to be [...] making knowledge a free good", urges Keith Griffin (2003) in his paper Economic Globalisation and Institutions of Global Governance And Eamon Bailey, one of the Three Wise Men in Dave Eggers' dystopian novel The Circle , asks, "in this short life [...]

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A support framework for higher education institutions

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Sowing the seeds for a fairer world.

The internet has provided new arenas for learning in which participation and contribution have a prominent position (Drotner, 2008; Dohn, 2009 cited in Bradley, L and Vigmo, S.) providing learners and teachers alike with a plethora of opportunities for interaction which should make knowledge sharing and learning more accessible than ever before. However, the ambition shared by UNESCO in 2002 in the first global OER forum to support the sustainability of teaching globally has proved to be challenging to achieve. With the context for funding of Higher Education in the UK uncertain and the cost of studying an ever increasing burden, there has never been a more important time to support new ways of considering access to and sharing of knowledge.

Supported by a little internal funding for teaching development, a team of students and staff from different disciplines set about creating little OER (Weller, 2011) such as video tutorials and connecting institutional open practitioners in order to discover how receptive our community is to opening up education (Inamorato et al, 2016). Using open sharing through social media tools (Purvis et al, 2015) the WIHEA #knowhow project aimed to address the skills gap that exists for both teachers and learners to give wider awareness of how to locate and contribute to opportunities for learning through connecting in open digital spaces. We investigated the steps needed in order to normalise effective open practice, informed by an understanding that such practice is complex, personal and contextual (Cronin, 2017) hoping to help others work confidently in the new digital domain for scholarship.

This presentation tells the story, sharing the approach adopted and the highlights and challenges of our short but ongoing experiment. Lessons learned may help to inform an approach to the dissemination of open educational practice (OEP) in other settings.

Bradley, R and Vigmo, S. (2016).  Pedagogical framing of OER - The case of language teaching. Open Praxis [online] vol. 8 (4), pp. 283–295. Available at https://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/view/336 [Accessed 13th Jan. 2018].

Cronin, C. (2017) Openness and Praxis: Exploring the Use of Open Educational Practices in Higher Education. IRRODL [online] Available http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3096 [Accessed 13 Jan.2018]

Inamorato dos Santos, A., Punie, Y., Castaño-Muñoz, J. (2016) Opening up Education: A Support Framework for Higher Education Institutions. JRC Science for Policy Report, EUR 27938 EN; doi:10.2791/293408

Purvis, A et al, (2015) Experiences of Social Media in Higher Education: Barriers, Enablers and Next Steps. In #SocMedHE proceedings. [online]. Sheffield. Sheffield Hallam University. Available at: https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/socmedhe/files/2016/11/Purvis.pdf [Accessed 13th  Jan.2018].

Weller, M. (2011). The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic.