Openness and the Open Mindset in Learning INTRO MUSIC HOST Welcome to our podcast discussing openness and the open mindset in learning. The openness of open educational resources is truly fundamental. It speaks to how the resources are used, the spirit in which they are shared, and the deeper meaning of the learning environments we try to create. What does it mean to be truly open, to practice as an open educator, and to foster a mindset of openness in ourselves and in our classrooms? Royce Kimmons, an Assistant Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University, has considered these questions and provides us with a definition of openness and the open mindset. ROYCE KIMMONS Openness is a difficult thing to define, and part of the reason is that it’s such a general term. We use it every day, and so everyone has a lot of preconceived notions about what openness means. I think generally our preconceived notions are positive. We don’t have a lot of negative connotations that arise in our minds when we hear the word “open” or “openness.” But I think that sometimes those kind of preconceptions prevent us from thinking fully and completely about what openness can be and what it should be. When I think of openness and the way that I operationalize it in the work that I do, I start from kind of the conversation that started in the software development community when open source arose, where openness was seen as a way of sharing and building upon the work of one another in a way that allowed for better products to be produced, it allowed for people to explore, to have access to other people’s work, to learn from one another, and so forth. So I think that sharing is an essential element of openness. Piggybacking that, though, I think also that transparency is an essential aspect of openness. The idea that it’s not just that I’m sharing a finished product with you but I’m willing to share, again in the case of software, all of my code; I’m willing to open up this code that I’ve worked on line by line for days and days and days to your scrutiny, so you can see exactly what I’m doing. In education, I think that transparency is really important in the sense that openness suggests that we should be sharing our classrooms with others, and not just present a you know, single, polished view of our classroom on our parent-teacher conference days where parents come in and they see maybe just one example of something we’re doing in the class that’s great, but so that others can see what act- what the struggles we’re facing in the classroom and how we resolve them. So, as I’m creating resources in my class, as I’m creating activities, making those available to other people so that they can learn from them as well, even though they’re maybe not perfect activities or perfect lesson plans. So I think that there is some level of need for a thick skin with openness a little bit, in the sense that you have to be willing to open yourself up to other people you have to be willing to… by sharing ourselves with others, we make ourselves a little vulnerable to others, we make ourselves potentially open to a little bit of scrutiny. And I think going with that, openness implies that we’re willing to adapt based upon that scrutiny. So if I am sharing lesson plans with other teachers, and I am looking at their lesson plans, and they’re giving me valuable feedback on maybe what I could improve, that I’m willing to do that. I’m willing to change my practice to be more effective. So I think, again, as I define openness, I define it as sharing, I define it as transparency, but then the third one I also think is very important, and I think that inherent in any definition of openness should be an expectation of generosity. HOST Sharing, transparency and generosity are three important attitudes for nurturing an open mindset. Kimmons provides a further explanation of what he sees as the essential ethic of openness. ROYCE KIMMONS So I mean, if you think of it like a personal relationship: if I am sharing resources with you, if I share something with you but my goal is, in doing that is for you to share something back with me, I give you resource A with the understanding that you’re going to give me resource B, that’s not really sharing. That’s kind of a transactional approach to sharing, whereas I see a generous approach to sharing being that I’m sharing resource A with you because I genuinely care about you, and I genuinely want you to have access to this. I genuinely want your life to be better for it. And I think that is an essential ethic to openness. So I think that if we are sharing, if we’re transparent, and if we’re generous in what we’re doing, then all those things together define openness for us, they, that is what it means to be an open educator. Language is very important and this goes back to the early days of the software movement where there was big debate between early innovators between: should we call software that we’re sharing “open sourced software,” should we call it “free software,” should we call it “free and open-source software.” Because the language that we use has implicit assumptions that go with it. There’s nothing about the term “Learning Object” for instance, that implies that it is something that should be shared. Or that implies that it’s something that - that everyone should have access to. The term “Learning Object” I think is really helpful in thinking about, like, the flexibility of learning resources. Because we can pull multiple learning objects together to create a learning experience for instance. It does not bring with it the benefit of the language that suggests that those objects should be things that are freely available to many people. The Learning Objects, again, just the term, make sense from a pedagogical perspective, or can be appealing to creating and designing instruction that is adaptable. It does not help us to address some of the bigger social issues that we face related to lack of equity and access to resources, or de-professionalization of teaching or from teaching from resources that we have no control over. So by using the word “open” and using it intentionally and with clear definition of what we mean when we say “open,” it helps to reinforce the importance of these big ideas of: sharing, of transparency, and of generosity in the resources that we create. HOST If openness,, is a mindset what is it about an open educational resource that makes it particularly open? Early work in this area centered around the concept of learning objects, or educational resources which could be combined,The critical element of “openness” was only realized later, with David Wiley’s Four R Framework of open education. Recently those 4 R’s were expanded to five R’s retaining, reusing, revising, remixing, and redistributing. Bea de los Arcos, Research Associate of the OER Research Hub Project at the Open University of the UK, uses the five R’s to define openness in open educational resources. BEA DE LOS ARCOS Open means having the freedom to retain this particular resource, so that you can make copies of the content, you can own these copies, that you have the freedom to reuse the content, use the content in a variety of ways. You have the freedom to revise, so that you can adapt it, you can change it, you can modify it, you can adjust it to your needs. You have the freedom to remix, so you combine it with the revised content. You create something new, and that something new, you have the freedom to redistribute. So that’s why an open educational resource is not just a learning object or a learning object is not necessarily an open educational resource because it’s not necessarily open. The “open” bit comes with the freedom to retain, the freedom to reuse, to revise, to remix, and redistribute. HOST de los Arcos goes on to explain that an open mindset is an openness that affects both our practice and our responsibility to our learners. BEA DE LOS ARCOS There’s another thing which is interesting and it’s the way openness allows teachers to actually not be just locked up in one way of teaching and one way of doing things. It’s very much having the opportunity to have a look at how other people do things and how other teachers have taught this particular point. So you’re going to have this idea that, while before, you have a textbook and you use the textbook in class and you very much follow the textbook from chapter one to chapter two to chapter three, and that’s very much it and that’s the way you teach. Now you can bring into your classroom a different perspective and different views and different ways to talk about things and to see the kids learn. So that helps teachers, that is what makes teachers better at their profession. In K-12, we have a bigger responsibility than anybody else in the sense that we get the kids when they’re still small. So if we starting telling them about the difference between copyright and Creative Commons, if we talk to them about openness, if you talk to them about what it means to share online, you know, as part of, it’s part of the curriculum, part of the curriculum related to digital skills. So if we do that; if we bring openness to the class, you know, both in our teaching practices, and in you know, into their learning, then they experience openness when they’re small, when they’re kids, when they’re in school, then they’re more likely to bring that openness with them along, as they grow up, and as they’ll go into university, they’ll go wherever they go and be able to judge for themselves what the goodness of openness is and demand that openness from other teachers as they get older, I think. So that for me, it’s huge and it doesn’t have to be necessarily a burden but, but something that we need to carry happily on our shoulders as in we have this moral responsibility to talk to kids about openness so that they grow as open people. HOST This moral responsibility to foster a mindset and demand for openness in our learners, is one which is also endorsed by Randy LaBonte, CEO of the Canadian e-Learning Network. RANDY LABONTE OER is the economy and the base and foundation for our ability to engage learning at higher levels of thinking and more personalized independence for students to really strive and be better prepared for our 21st century, which is here, and I think we not only need to have students prepared to live in a more open and fluid environment in society, we need to create those environments in K to 12, and I believe strongly that open educational resources are a strong part of that. HOST David Porter, CEO of eCampus Ontario, suggests that a bold K-12 OER initiative can be led by a bold public. DAVID PORTER I think open is the term that is used to describe a set of practices, a set of resources and a set of beliefs in education that can go anywhere from something that is the result of public investment (public taxpayer funds) designated for the education of the citizenry, should be available to everyone really. That’s the minimal requirement for open. But a lot of the instructors have taken it well beyond that into the Open Practice arena, saying “Look, we’re not the only people who know stuff. There are other experts in the field who we should be drawing upon for knowledge and are willing to share openly. And by the way, our students, all throughout their academic careers, know stuff too and can contribute back and really be part of a rich environment of knowledge sharing.” And so I think the real proponents of openness at the ideologue end of the scale are the folks who think everything that we do benefits from public knowledge and knowledge that contributes to the public good being available for free and unencumbered. And that’s personally what I believe. HOST Rory McGreal, UNESCO Chairholder in Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University, agrees that a move towards open educational resources is not only beneficial, it is essential to the future of education. RORY McGREAL I believe, based on facts, based on more than 30 years of experience in developing learning objects and online resources and supporting them, that it is essential for us in education to move towards open educational resources. I believe that we cannot continue to work to share our material in a restrictive copyright environment. And after all, the first thing we teach in education is how to share, and we need to promote the sharing of information - and I believe it’s not just a good thing to do, it is an essential thing to do. HOST Michael Canuel, CEO of LEARN, sums things up by sharing a quote that may inspire educators to consider the power of open learning: MICHAEL CANUEL I just had found a quote that I thought was particularly pertinent in an article I was reading today and it was from William Gibson, who in the early 1990’s said “ The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” And I thought, “Wow that’s really appropriate.” Because everything is already here, it’’s just not evenly distributed and we need to fix that. We need to make it such that it is accessible, that it is employed in such a way that all of our students, all of our learners, have that opportunity to see the rich and varied range of resources that are out there. That I think can be integrated into every teacher’s classroom, into the curriculum just about everywhere and anywhere. So I think that my closing thought “we just need to work on evenly distributing the opportunities and the accessibility.” HOST Special thanks to our guests, Michael Canuel of LEARN, Royce Kimmons, of Brigham Young University, Bea( de los Arcos of the OER Research Hub Project, Randy Labonte of the Canadian e-Learning Network, David Porter with eCampus Ontario and Rory McGreal,, UNESCO Chair in Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University. We hope you enjoyed listening to this podcast and will take some time to explore the other podcasts in this series taking a closer look at Open Educational Resources. This resource was funded by the Alberta Open Educational Resources initiative, which is made possible through an investment from the Alberta government. In keeping with principals of Open Education, this podcast is available under an open license, CC-by-SA. The music "AM-Trans" and "Cash Rules" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Share-alike 4.0 International license. CLOSING MUSIC