Jonnie's Distributed and Open Learning Blog

In the final week of our EDCI 339 course, the students of the course, invited educators and anyone else who wished to follow along on Twitter had the opportunity to participate in a “Twitterchat” to further discuss the topics of the course. I also reflected on this in my topic 4 blog post. I mention in that post that while I have had a twitter account for several years, I am generally not very active with it as most of my contacts who I interact with on social media tend to use other platforms more regularly. I do see a benefit of using Twitter in higher education settings as a way to informally collaborate and discuss ideas among others who share similar interests. The discussion worked well in our situation as we were able to bring together a diverse group of learners and experienced educators who all had some common ground and background on the discussion topic. Using the hashtag #edci339 we can continue to keep the discussion going and open to others to participate at any time. Twitter’s restricted character limit encourages everyone to be concise with their comments and opinions, allowing for many voices to be heard. I found this to be a much more efficient way to gain perspective from everyone than reading through several in depth blog posts.

I have chosen to revise my topic 2 blog post. I felt that through these readings, as well as through the pod project, the ideas of open and distributed learning really started to become more clear to me. With what I know now I would like to reflect further on this and how I can apply this to my current teaching context as a music educator.

Although I love my role as a teacher who gets to introduce and inspire students to the joy of learning an instrument and making music with others, I sometimes feel limited in what I can offer in a traditional public school setting. Typically in a band class students learn to play an instrument from a limited list of options. While students may be playing different instruments they still focus on a fairly specific set of skills common to these instruments to learn the basic mechanics of creating a good sound and some music theory in order to be able to read and interpret the music that is provided. Students in a class generally all play the same music, most of which is born out of centuries old Western European traditions, written by a fairly small group of highly educated composers backed by large publishing companies. Ethan Hein (2020) states in his article on the racial politics of music education, “even when school music programs include Afrological musics in the repertoire or curriculum, they present them within a Eurological context, holding students to the norms of white bodily comportment,” and later, “If music only consisted of technical procedures, then it would perhaps be acceptable for educators to train students on “purely musical” matters, and not to worry about social or ethical concerns. However, a praxial philosophy requires us to recognize that music is intrinsically social, and that educators therefore have a responsibility to recognize this social aspect and its attendant ethical implications.” There is obviously a lot more to learn about music and to being a musician than to just being able to perform in a concert band. I know a lot of music educators, myself included, consider one of their primary goals to be inspiring students to develop a love of music that continues past graduation and that they continue to make music a part of their lives into adulthood. These are of course worthwhile goals however, while many students really enjoy and benefit from the experience and community built through their school music classes we don’t always do as much as we can to prepare them for when they are removed from this community after graduation and need to find new communities or ways to interact with music in a meaningful way. I think that introducing students to some music related open learning options along the way would really help to bridge this gap and provide students with many more options to extend their learning, and discover other ways to engage in music including alternatives to our current Euro-centric model.

I mentioned in my original post that during our remote learning phase this Spring many of my assignments for students became more asynchronous and flexible. I realize now that I was already using many elements of open learning without realizing it. Students were encouraged to take what they had learned up to that point and choose from a variety of open-ended activities to further explore their musical interests and report back on what they learned or demonstrate through performance. With a few adjustments many of these assignments can become true renewable assignments as discussed by Wiley and Hilton (2018) in topic 4. I see now that I could be doing more to encourage collaboration with others through these assignments but with what I now know about open education platforms I think this would be easy to do. Through our twitter chat and looking through the feeds of some of the participating and recommended educators I was easily directed to some music related links to open education resources including links to online courses on a variety of topics ranging from basic theory to advanced arranging and songwriting, educational materials from professional musicians, free sheet music, and links to scholarly music articles. (Examples here, I plan to look into some of the courses on songwriting and jazz piano through coursera and futurelearn when I have time later this summer). Through services like spotify, soundcloud, and youtube students now have immediate access to almost any piece of recorded music and can often find instructional videos on how to learn an instrument and play countless popular songs. I remember clearly the look of shock on some of my students faces when I once told them that I didn’t have youtube growing up but I still managed to learn the ins and outs of playing the saxophone on my own. With what is available today to anyone who wants to dive deeply down the rabbit hole it is no wonder we see so many young musical prodigies.

Hein, E. (2020). The Racial Politics of Music Education. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2020/the-racial-politics-of-music-education/?fbclid=IwAR3ZhT3OV3Qyb_FvCq_-1boZ3ZLv6oS16q3Tjq378ikht3iL04lbBqfIwg8

Humboldt State University. (2020). Open Educational Resources (OER): Music. Retrieved July 25, 2020, from https://libguides.humboldt.edu/openedu/mus

Jordan, K., & Weller, M. (2017). Jordan, K. & Weller, M. (2017) Openness and Education: A beginners’ guide. Global OER Graduate Network. Retrieved July 14, from https://go-gn.net/research/openness-and-education-a-beginners-guide/

Major, C. W. (2015). Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. Retrieved July 14, 2020, from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=3318874 (pp. 88-105)

Wiley, D., & Hilton, J. (2018). Defining OER-Enabled Pedagogy. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. Retrieved July 23, 2020, from https://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3601/4724

This week we were encouraged to explore twitter as an educational tool and actively engage in a live twitterchat focussing on the topics of our course using the hashtag #edci339. I have had a twitter account for a number of years but have not been an active user mainly because many of my closer personal contacts tend to use other forms of social media such as facebook and instagram. I use social media for a number of reasons. As a performing musician I use it to promote upcoming gigs and content for groups that I play with. I also try to promote other local musicians and music I enjoy in order to support the local music scene and musicians in general. I also use it to connect with personal friends, to organize social gatherings, to access news articles on topics of interest and of course for all of the hilarious memes. As an educator there are a few online communities that I am a part of through social media where some worthwhile and interesting posts make it to my news feed, however I am generally not very active in posting or commenting in these communities. Usually these communities involve at least some other educators who I know personally. When schools first closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic there was a spike in activity in these communities and I was invited to even more groups. Personally, even though I was scrambling myself to find ways to reinvent my teaching and adapt to an online platform, I found it to be a little overwhelming and quickly began to tune out and scroll past the onslaught of information being posted in these groups.

I do see the benefit of twitter and other social media platforms for educators and aspiring educators, mainly for collaboration between teachers and informal discussion of ideas. If you are able to actively engage a community of knowledgeable people who are passionate about the topic of discussion as we were in our twitterchat it can be an effective tool for an open large group discussion. I don’t think there is a platform that I know of that I would use in my own classes in a K-12 setting though. I haven’t been particularly careful about curating my social media accounts to really optimize my feed to my own interests. If I was more serious about using it as an efficient tool for personal professional development as an educator I think this would be key. Generally when I am looking for new teaching ideas or have questions I prefer to make a specific search or I can post a question to a suitable forum now having a better idea of where to look. Generally I prefer this to having a constant stream of information to filter through, although occasionally useful articles will catch my eye through my feed. It seems that with twitter in particular, the voices that are most amplified are first of those who are paying for advertising and secondly those who are active on the platform, tweeting and retweeting regularly and purposefully building their networks.

I wanted to add one thought from the reading for this week, “Defining OER-Enabled Pedagogy” (Wiley and Hilton). I was interested in the idea of writing or rewriting a Wikipedia article as an assignment. Often students are told to avoid Wikipedia as a credible source, however the idea of going to Wikipedia first to get the general accepted knowledge of a subject but then furthering their research by adding pieces which may be missing or may not be correct or asking what questions do you still have, is a great way to encourage critical thinking. This is something I can see myself encouraging students to do in my classes.

Wiley, D., & Hilton, J. (2018). Defining OER-Enabled Pedagogy. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. Retrieved July 23, 2020, from https://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3601/4724

The three articles we read this week each deal with the impact that open education can have on achieving greater equity and inclusivity through education. Education has long been considered to be one of the most powerful tools for achieving equity on a global scale, however in most education systems there are systemic barriers which have prevented many marginalised groups from participating in a truly equitable way. Open education, at least in theory, appears to show a lot of potential to break down these barriers and level the playing field for all learners, however there is a lot of work to do and a lot to consider.

In Chapter 1 of “A Guide to Making Open Textbooks With Students” Derosa and Jhangiani discuss the benefits of open education and open educational resources (OERs). These OERs and the philosophy of open education create greater interaction, accessibility, democracy and depth. Greater freedom and autonomy is given to both teachers and students. Resources and access to education becomes much more affordable. Social justice is woven directly into the curriculum and may be the basis of how the curriculum is formed when students have opportunities to directly contribute to and form the course syllabus. My question here is, if students become the primary drivers of the curriculum will they stay too close to what they already know and miss out on big ideas that they cannot yet conceive of or are too far out of the scope of vision?

In their article “Digital Redlining, Access and Privacy,” Gilliard and Culik outline some of the issues that educational institutions help to perpetuate in terms of withholding and limiting access to information for their students. Certain institutions which focus on preparing students for specific employment goals often in trades or information technology fields are more likely to limit their educational resource databases to serve these specific purposes and can close off opportunities for students to further explore related interests or lead to new discoveries within the field. More research based institutions value a more open network to encourage advancements within fields of study. Often there is a much more significant financial cost associated with attending these elite institutions. My question here is how do we get employers to begin to put more value into hiring people who have learned through open education rather than focusing on certifications and institutional credentials?

In Chapter 4 of “Learning Spaces: Youth, Literacy and New Media in Remote Indigenous Australia,” Inge and Schwab outline 8 design principles which have contributed to effective educational experiences in remote indigenous Australian communities. They discuss embedding education into the culture of the learners. I was reminded of some teachings of a musician and music educator who has had a great influence on me, Victor Wooten. Victor had a unique upbringing being born the youngest child of a family of musicians. From birth he was expected to be a musician and even had his instrument picked out for him to complete the family band. He describes learning to play music in the same way people learn to speak, by having plenty of opportunities to interact and be gently encouraged by others who already understand the language which he likens to “jamming” with professionals. With the current generation a culture has been created, especially within middle/upper working class families, where young people have open access to the internet and technology and the ability to “muck around” in their free time. While providing free public places to use the internet and digital devices for those who do not have this type of access is a good start, they are still at a clear disadvantage to those who have personal control of these devices and unrestricted access at any time of day. If the internet is to be the method of delivering open education this will need to be addressed in order to truly achieve equity for all participants. There is also the question of what about families who do not wish to encourage a culture of open access to the internet and digital devices in their homes? What are other ways we can respectfully merge open education with the culture of our students, especially within a class of significant cultural diversity?

References

Gilliard, C. (2019). Digital Redlining, Access, and Privacy. Retrieved July 20, 2020, from https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/digital-redlining-access-and-privacy

Kral, I., & Schwab, R. G. (2012). 4, Design Principles for Indigenous Learning Spaces. In Learning spaces: Youth, literacy and new media in remote Indigenous Australia. Acton, A.C.T.: ANU E Press. Retrieved July 20, 2020 from https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p197731/html/ch04.html?referer=&page=10#toc_marker-11

Mays, E. (Ed.). (2017). A Guide to Making Open Textbooks With Students. Rebus Community Retrieved July 16, 2020, from https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/chapter/open-pedagogy/ [chapter 1]

Reeves, J. (Producer), & Cheng, A. (Director). (2012, August 13). Music As A Language – Victor Wooten [Video file]. Retrieved July 21, 2020, from https://ed.ted.com/lessons/victor-wooten-music-as-a-language

Here is the link to our Digital Equity and Perspective Pod Project for Learning Pod #9!

https://339projecti.opened.ca/

This week’s readings introduced me to the many possibilities of open education. Jordan and Weller (2017) provide a concise overview of how systems, philosophies and technologies have developed in open education over the last 50 years. This prompted me to think about which of these options would be most effective for myself as a learner, myself as a teacher and for my students as learners. I also felt that it is important to consider the difference between which methods would be most comfortable and enjoyable as a teacher or learner as well as which methods offer the greatest educational value in the long run and hopefully find where this overlaps. I believe a primary objective of teachers is to continually offer a balance of familiarity and challenge to students to give them stepping stones to success. An open education program where students are completely free to pursue their personal interests is a nice ideal but we also need to consider the goals of the course, expectations of the institution and prior knowledge, experience and limitations of the students. The citation network that Jordan and Weller have compiled will be a valuable resource to refer to if and when I am incorporating elements of open learning into my own teaching.

The Claire Howell Major (2015) reading helped me to clarify many of the questions I had about the different systems discussed by Jordan and Weller. By breaking down the organizational elements that create course structure I was able to more easily compare different open learning systems and identify the advantages of each structural element. As a public school teacher there are some elements which I can control and manipulate within the courses I teach and some which are dictated by the educational framework that my school district works under. However, as we now experiment with remote learning opportunities due to the changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, there may be even more flexibility allowed to teachers. Enrollment is traditionally closed in public school settings however this Spring our district had some teachers opening their online classrooms to other students and teachers within the school or even from other schools. The amount of online vs. in-person instruction was more fluid with students having the choice to participate completely online, in-person or a combination of both. My music classes became more asynchronous as I felt the need to be more flexible with deadlines and I gave assignments that could be completed at student’s own pace. The platform is perhaps where teachers have the most autonomy, although we concluded as a staff at the end of the year that it is advantageous for all of the teachers within the school to use the same learning platforms as much as possible. This allows for greater ease of use for students, collaboration amongst teachers and can also help financially by saving on group licensing. The pathway also became much less centralized in my music classes which I think was good for some students and a struggle for others. This is something I will be considering with future classes in order to continue to offer opportunities for students to extend their learning while maintaining the core learning outcomes that I would like all students to achieve.

References

Claire Howell Major. (2015). Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=3318874 (pp. 88-105)

Jordan, K., & Weller, M. (2017). Jordan, K. & Weller, M. (2017) Openness and Education: A beginners’ guide. Global OER Graduate Network.

In reading these three articles I kept seeing the need for balance. What is the right balance of face-to-face vs. digital instruction? How many different platforms or edtech applications should we be using within a school in order to maintain teacher autonomy but not overwhelm students? How important is it for a program to simplify the workload for teachers vs. creating more effective learning experiences for students? Which programs do both? How do edtech programs continue to develop, improve and serve our needs while protecting and respecting student privacy?

I have always felt strongly about the importance of teacher autonomy in their own classes and choosing learning resources that fit their personal teaching style. With digital applications teachers should have a strong grasp of how the program works, understand it’s strengths and limitations and believe in it’s capabilities to effectively enhance student learning. The Stommel article discusses this importance of carefully analyzing the tools we use and how and when to select new ones or retire old ones. When attending pro-d sessions which are promoting new educational programs and lesson ideas I find myself becoming more and more selective with what I actually incorporate into my own teaching. While I often see the benefits of what is being presented I always add my own filter of how does this coincide with what I am already doing and how does this fit with my personal teaching style and values?

In the Vaughn, Garrison and Cleveland-Innes article I found the framework of the three elements of social, cognitive and teaching presence to be very interesting. When we entered our remote teaching phase this Spring, while I thought I had some innovative ideas and strategies to keep students engaged I could also feel that some of the legs of this framework were being swept out from under us, mostly the social presence but also elements of the teaching presence. I often thought to myself while marking student projects “I wish your classmates could see what you did!” I also found myself missing overseeing the learning taking place. While I was very impressed by what students discovered on their own I also wish I could do more to guide and gently intervene to help take their learning to the next level. That said, I did also see more evidence of the cognitive presence with students discovering learning on their own without necessarily being shown every step of the way, something that I would like to remind myself to continue to allow for in my future teaching.

The Regan and Jesse article brought to light that digital privacy is not a singular issue but has many layers and brings up multiple concerns. Just because one type of privacy concern is addressed it does not mean that other privacy issues are not present. Teachers, administrators and school boards again need to carefully analyze the edtech they are using to ensure that students and parents are aware of how their personal information is being handled and how to truly remain anonymous if desired, and that the tech does not contain or contribute to bias or discrimination towards any particular group. An interesting question is how can we expect these applications to adapt, improve and best support learners without also mining the user data that they collect? Also, even if we research and find the “best” edtech for use in our classrooms, what happens to students whose families are not comfortable opting in to these programs? How will the quality of their education be affected? What alternatives are available to them and are we prepared to support them with these alternatives?

References

Regan, P., & Jesse, J. (2019). Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and personalized learning: Twenty-first century student sorting and tracking. Ethics and Information Technology, 21(3), 167-179. DOI: 10.1007/s10676-018-9492-2

Stommel, J. (2018). An urgency of teachers: The work of critical digital pedagogy. Hybrid Pedagogy.

Vaughan, N. D., Garrison, D. R., & Cleveland-Innes, M. (2013). Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry. AU Press. [Chapter 1]