Open Practice and My Academic Philosophy, Sort Of… Erm, Maybe… Perhaps..?!

Having got my promotion case through the sub-Faculty level committee (with support and encouragement from senior departmental colleagues), it’s time for another complete rewrite to try to get it though the Faculty committee. Guidance suggests that it is not inappropriate – and may even be encouraged – for a candidate to include something about their academic philosophy, so here are some scribbled thoughts on mine…

One of the declared Charter objects (sic) of the Open University is "to promote the educational well-being of the community generally", as well as " the advancement and dissemination of learning and knowledge". Both as a full-time PhD student with the OU (1993-1997), and then as an academic (1999-), I have pursued a model of open practice, driven by the idea of learning in public, with the aim of communicating academic knowledge into, and as part of, wider communities of practice, modeling learning behaviour through demonstrating my own learning processes, and originating new ideas in a challengeable and open way as part of my own learning journey.

My interest in open educational resources is in part a subterfuge, driven by a desire that educators be more open in demonstrating their own learning and critical practices, including the confusion and misconceptions they grapple with along the way, rather than being seen simply as professors of some sort of inalienable academic truth.

My interest in short course development is based on the belief that for the University to contribute effectively to continued lifelong education and professional development, we need to have offerings that are at an appropriate level of granularity as well as academic level. Degrees represent only one - early part - of that journey. Learners are unlikely to take more than one undergraduate degree in their lifetime, but there is no reason why they should not continue to engage in learning throughout their life. Evidence from the first wave of MOOCs suggests that many participants in those courses were already graduates, with an appreciation of the values of learning and the skills to enable them to engage with those offerings. The characteristation of MOOCs as cMOOCs xMOOCs (traditional course style offerings) or the looser networked modeled "connectivist MOOCs", xMOOCs cMOOCs, [H/T @r3becca in the comments;-)] represent different educational philosophies: the former may cruelly be described as being based on a model in which the learner expects to be taught (and the instructors expect to profess), whereas the latter requires that participants are engaged in a more personal, yet still collaborative, learning journey, where it is up to each participant to make sense of the world in an open and public way, informed and aided, but also challenged, by other participants. That's how I work every day. I try to make sense of the world to myself, often for a purpose, in public.

Much of my own learning is the direct result of applied problem solving. I try to learn something every day, often as the result of trying to do something each day that I haven't been able to do before. The OUseful.info blog is my own learning diary and a place I can look to refer to things I have previously learned. The posts are written in a way that reinforces my own learning, as a learning resource. The posts often take longer to write than the time taken to discover or originate the thing learned, because in them I try to represent a reflection and retelling of the rationale for the learning event and the context in which it arose: a problem to be solved, my state of knowledge at the time, the means by which I came to make sense of the situation in order to proceed, and the learning nugget that resulted. The thing I can see or do now but couldn't before. Capturing the "I couldn't do X because of Y but now I can, by doing Z" supports a similar form of discovery as the one supported by question and answer sites: the content is auto-optimised to include both naive and expert information, which aids discovery. (It often amused me that course descriptions would often be phrased in the terms and language you might expect to know having completed the course. Which doesn't help the novice discover it a priori, before they have learned those keywords, concepts or phrases that the course will introduce them to...). The posts also try to model my own learning process, demonstrating the confusion, showing where I had a misapprehension of just plain got it wrong. The blog also represents a telling of my own learning journey over an extended period of time, and such may be though of as an uncourse, something that could perhaps be looked at post hoc as a course but that was originated as my own personal learning journey unfolded.

Hmmm… 1500 words for the whole begging letter, so I need to cut the above down to a sentence…