Inside Out

1. Inside Out The ALTO Project: Linking OERs to Professional Development and Knowledge Management activities John Casey, Hywell Davies, Chris Follows, Nancy Turner, Ed Webb-Ingall, University of the Arts London, Centre for Learning & Teaching in Art & Design.

2. Inside Out - Content • Problem – moving from subsistence to sustainability • Situational Analysis • Approach – CoPs and Fieldworkers • Rationale & Benefits • Methodology • Knowledge Management • Social Layer • System Design

3. Stating the Problem • The need to move from a subsistence to a sustainable model of HE & OERs – technology will be involved “To meet the staggering global demand for advanced education, a major university needs to be created every week” Sir John Daniels, ceo, COL

4. Situational Analysis – 1 • Staff development in HE has traditionally been supplied by central units • Adapting current teaching practices and cultures to use new technologies presents this centralized development model with critical challenges: • Capacity • Skills

5. Situational Analysis – 2 • OER engagement adds a range of additional needs: IPR, de-contextualization, presentational and media design, and ‘learning design for strangers’ etc. • Ed Tech has not broken through - lack of attention to systemic and soft issues is often cited as some of the causes for this failure (Kumar @ MIT) • But OER engagement ‘surfaces’ systemic and soft issues – so a potentially powerful engine for change

6. Situational Analysis – 3 • Design, development, sharing, reuse and adaption of learning resources are poorly understood • Growing awareness and policy agenda that now privileges process over content and collaboration over delivery – a move from OER to Open Practice (but still needs/builds on OER) • The value proposition of sharing and OER is becoming much more explicit and forceful (Chow)

7. Situational Analysis – 4 • Sharing as a signifier of change

8. Approach • ALTO has approached this challenge in a number of ways: • Tapped into existing communities of practice around a variety of themes and contexts • Employed and trained part-time staff to work with front-line teaching staff across a number of different areas (IPR, learning design etc) – they and the project manager act as ‘Fieldworkers’

9. Rationale • The Fieldworker concept is an established practice in anthropology and ethnographic studies - is used to understand and interact with a culture • Fieldworkers have an important role in the design of socio-technical systems in the workplace - advocated by pioneers like Mumford and by modern practitioners such as Sharples • By mobilizing existing communities of practice and using fieldworkers - OER engagement can potentially be a CPD tool to do more with limited resources • Provides the basis for an economically sustainable means of enhancing educational development provision in a time austerity. • Has implications for existing approaches to educational development, organizational structures and cultures

10. Benefits • Engagement with OER creation is a de facto reflective exercise – designing resources and learning experiences for ‘strangers’ - this takes us out of our normal frame of reference • Everyone has an implicit model of learning and teaching (Biggs, Ramsden) OER engagement brings these models to the surface for discussion • This puts us in the ‘right mind’ set for thinking about designing for flexible and blended learning – tricky in A&D! • Good foundation for introducing and embedding new learning and teaching models

11. Methods • Leverage OER engagement by deliberately introducing flexible and blended learning concepts via the fieldworkers – strategic agenda • Fieldworkers use OER resources as ‘mediating artefacts’ to help practitioners articulate, share and reflect on mental models (Conole) and design strategies • OERs become ‘boundary objects’ that support communication and understanding between CoPs (Wenger) • Fieldworkers encourage and support ‘collaborative learning design’ activities between practitioners (internal and external) - benefits: • Mutual support • Reflection • P2P learning • Low threshold concepts • Shared authentic language • Embedding • CoP development & strengthening

12. Knowledge Management 1 • Early days still • Previous tech-centric approaches have not worked well (Lambe, Friesen, Hoel), some have a dubious rationale and ideological agenda (Friesen) • These are complex socio-technical systems and highly entropic • It is not nearly enough to just provide a mechanism of storage or retrieval • Do not use meaningless and rebarbative jargon with users – use straightforward concrete language • Allow/support users and communities to articulate their own meanings (ontologies) and classifications (taxonomies) record these for later elaboration and mediation

13. Knowledge Management 2 • By all means use a Repo - we use EdShare, it’s good • But do not attempt to impose terminology, vocabularies and taxonomies developed by experts – however well meaning or authoritative • This is not a well-defined domain: • Mainstream public education is a messy and contingent enterprise and is highly dependant on contextual factors – it’s not like military or aviation training – where some tech approaches originated • Introduce a ‘social layer’ for interaction, creation sharing, collaboration and negotiation of content and meanings (example - process arts)

14. The Social Layer – 1 EdShare Repository

15. The Social Layer – 2 http://process.arts.ac.uk/

16. ALTO System Design • A social layer enables the important human factors of communication, collaboration, and participation that are needed for sustainable resource creation, sharing and sense making within community networks • Solutions provided should help, not hinder, participants needs and activities • Guiding system design principle should be the concepts of conviviality (Illich, 1973, Hardt & Negri 2009) and stewardship (Wenger et al, 2009) • Arrange for longer term storage and sense making to be migrated from the social layer to a repository

17. Inside Out Summary • Problem – moving from subsistence to sustainability • Approach – CoPs and Fieldworkers • Rationale & Benefits • Methodology • Knowledge Management • Social Layer • System Design