It was truly rewarding last week to travel to Los Angeles and represent with Martha Burtis, the legion of ds106 at the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub Reclaim Open Learning Symposium. We were being recognized as one of five top examples of “organizations that are transforming higher education toward connected and creative learning, open in content and access, participatory, and building on a growing range of experiments and innovations in networked learning.”
We were in good company with two other projects that do this reclaiming via a distributed network model of learning, a.k.a. the original cMOOC (REDACTED for #mooctober), the others being phonar, the open photography course at Coventry University and FemTechNet or DOCC (What’s Up?).
This recognition by DML suggests this distributed, non superstar professorial, less than giantly massive open model has legs. It is after all, based on something that has scaled well, the internet itself.
Right?
Ask Howard Rheingold, who is putting the same model to use now with a Reclaim Hosting site running his Social Media Issues class for Stanford University.
Howard is totally #4life with #ds106
cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine
Better yet, this gathering meant being among friends/colleagues, fellow winners, one might say a British Invasion of Reclaiming, with Jonathan Worth here for phonar, and Josie Fraser, another winner, for DigiLit Leicester
cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine
The symposium opened with a conversation with John Seely Brown a.k.a JSB and Amin Saberi (Yet Another Stanford Prof Spinning Off a M-Word Company– CEO of NovoEd), moderated by Anya Kamenetz
On the next day, we started with open demos of the projects, here John Seely Brown tunes into Phonar
cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine
Martha and I found that in trying to explain ds106, it was never the same each time. We had a live ds106 radio broadcast going, so sometimes we talked more about that component, others about the course, or the assignment bank, or the community, or the headless course
cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine
I was both taken back and somewhat pleased that ds106 is not so easy to encapsulate. There is too much there to try and make understandable by talking about it, you get ds106 by doing ds106.
If anything comes close to really getting to the heart fo ds106, it is a just released podcast by ds106 participant Brian Bennett who interviewed Jim Groom and I a few weeks ago. Brian really shows his audio show editing/production chops with Chalkstar to Rockstar #05 ““ ds106 Is The 5th Dimension of Teaching and Learning
The day was a whirlwind blur. One panel on “Connected Learning, Digital Arts and Humanities” was ds106, phonar, and FemTechNet (who are very well represented by students Susie Ferrell and Jade Ulrich) – here is the audience, which may not seem huge
cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine
But we have Mimi Ito front left who represented the entire Internet, so the audience was huge and the session deftly handled by moderator Liz Losh
At mid day, there was a sign that learning might be open, but lunch was not 
cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine
The afternoon got even more blurry as Martha and I were roped in by Howard and Anya on some kind of mission to do something I still do not full understand:
We will work all day to create a distributed multimedia open course on Reclaiming Open Learning, hacking together a syllabus, activities, assignments, competencies, and more across platforms.
I am not convinced a course on reclaiming open learning is really what is needed, what is needed IMHO is more community and networking. But people did brainstorm in an open google doc, and then Howard asked Martha and if we could hack something together. I have to hand ot to Martha, she stepped up, registered a domain (Howard footed the bill?), and showed the small group her clever approach to building a site to capture and organize resources.
I sat in the back and toyed with the site innards and theme.
Here is where this unraveled for me, because the outline of the course ended up being a resource collecting thing. It was a good discussion, and the group got a chance to see something come together quickly.
I am not sure what will come from it, but the domain is out there http://reclaimopen.org/.
See the thing is, I don’t get what is being reclaimed? Open learning has been happening in many corners and growing for some time everywhere except in magazines and newspaper headlines.
There is of course maybe it being a counter movement to the M-word thing?
I guess I feel nothing to RECLAIM, since I have never stopped claiming open in the first place. I’m not trying to be a snob about this, but the whole notion of reclaiming something is fuzzy. Claim, reclaim, just be out there in the open being open, and connected, and doing open learning. Thats what all five groups are doing.
But then again, raising awareness and pushing out more about open learning cannot but be a Good Thing.
I do understand that the site (maybe http://open.media.mit.edu/) will eventually list all 80 some projects who applied. That is worthy to recognize all of them. And more beyond them.
cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine
Claim, reclaim, course, community, where-ever it goes has a somewhat William Gibson-y feeling of being not evenly distributed. So go find it, connect it, or do it. Don’t wait for a course to tell you how.
Look at the capital letter R. Just snap off the front leg, and now you are a P.
In the world of Open Educational Resources, the five Rs are like chapter/verse of the induction, repeat after me:
Apparently things get a bit more murky in businesses built upon OER… or maybe not, you tell me.
C’mon Alan, just the facts, man.
Ironically, with Dragnet being a show I watched regularly on TV as a kid, my memory is wrong– Sgt Friday never said on Dragnet “Just the facts, ma’am”
Again, another internet rabbit hole adventure with twitter flame offs that was accidental in the way it started. About a week ago on browsing the discussions on the CCCOER email list I came across a post from around May 25 from Naomi
I can’t say why I decided to poke around. Lumen Learning is of course a big player in the OER space especially built on the reputation of the co-founder, one of the legends in open education. I’ve used many of their resources. Course Hero I know much less about except that it’s some kind of site built on students uploading course materials to share and some twitter scuttlebut months back when a digital pedagogy figurehead took a position there.
So I did a web search on “Lumen Learning Art Course” and found one SUNY course indeed hosted at Lumen. But then found a few more courses with lumenlearning.com urls that are re-directed to Course Hero.
From my reply
Alan Levine
Quite a few responses came in with people sharing similar experiences, and being at unease that course materials their faculty used from Lumen were now on Course Hero (because of it’s reputation the latter’s domain is often blocked on campuses).
I hesitated some about tweeting. I am really moving somewhat away from giving so much attention to twitter, but heck, there I went:
It seemed very odd that course URLs would be redirected without any kind of announcement from either company. Is there a right to redirect at whim?
More responses on the CCCOER thread included what Lumen was telling faculty who were asking questions:
So the only R left is the right to link to content? Nice. Others reported:
Oh. Another response indicated a rep for Lumen suggested to a faculty that the “port the content from Course Hero into Blackboard”?
This would be the right to do the nearly impossible, as Course Hero provides no kind of content export. Are there any R’s left?
Now Course Hero provides the course content in tact, what is wrong with that, one might ask the grumpy old blogger. Well, you need to visit one of these “community OER course” try the link, like the San Jacinto math course (you can guess from the URLs that these were created by a institution that has no access to their own course materials?)
Yes, scroll past the table of contents and click on the “More Study Resources for You”. So the course content is just clickbait to get learners to either pay for access or to toss more documents into the Course Hero vat. What they are doing and why they might buy content is pretty visible:
Steel Wagstaff provided maybe the most clear explanation which says these “community OER courses” they hosted for a long term they could no longer support so a “business arrangement” was made to send them to Course Hero. I don’t have any knowledge on who created their “community OER courses” but someone did, and that person/group has 0 of the 5 Rs in place.
More than that, if Lumen has a collection of “community OER courses” they needed help hosting, why did they not reach out to the Open Education community? Was Course Hero really the only viable option to sustain this content? Is there no kind of internet archive or skilled course archivists out there?
Delmar Larsen at Libretexts jumped right in the fray and shared they had already gotten content from a heft of these courses and was likely able to get them all made available on that platform. If the originals were from Pressbooks, I’d bet a loonie or even a toonie that Pressbooks would have stepped up (maybe).
A lot of people seemed to be scrambling to find an alternative source, but I would wait to see what Libretexts comes up with. If I had me druthers, all those Course hero links would just wither from neglect.
So all we have is some speculation, and already this is passing news. It just seems weird, but Delmar assures me that this is business as usual.
We can tell who the Course Heroes are and are not.
And with irony as bitter sour as it is, the iming aligns with Audrey Watters understandable exit
as well as Jim Groom’s take on Capitalized (in all ways) EdTech.
So yeah, out with the Rights to R*5 and we start now with the Right to Profit from OER content. It’s just P’s all the way down. Given the public silence of the two players here, all we have is guesswork. The information I know of are within the CCCOER email thread.
If anything is a call to detach from profit oriented platforms and reclaim the web for your own, well this call has been screaming for a long time. It might be louder now, but shrug goes most of the world as they keep clicking the Like/Retweet buttons to keep the Ad Matrix humming.
Keep on Reclaiming, Hippies!
https://cogdogblog.com/2013/10/keep-on-reclaimin/
Featured Image: Text created with Vintage Punk font at Font-Generator.com superimposed on Cadmium telluride solar cell flickr photo by oakridgelabnews shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license (for some reason the latter came up on a search for “switcheroo” go figure).
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