Someone messed with the pad and I can't figure out how to restore authorship colours, but at least we can get the information back!
- Welcome to Why Open? at the School of Open!
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WHAT'S ON THIS DOCUMENT (scroll down to see these!)
truyen
- Links to important course information
- Collaborative documents--add your ideas/
thoughts/comments/questions, please! - Signup for Google+ Hangouts for the course; links to notes on those and recordings for them
- Times for weekly Twitter chats and links to polls for those
- Your comments/feedback! Here's a place for you to add your feedback on the course, give suggestions, etc.
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1. LINKS TO IMPORTANT COURSE INFORMATION
Course page at School of Open (P2PU): https://p2pu.org/en/courses/588/why-open/
Help with web tools, like Google+ (for Google Hangouts), Twitter, and blogs (including how to connect to our blog hub): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bjo28BnP_uUediEtFuKvUtzKKsQvD1llFEtZIDgwhDg/edit#heading=h.ntvs2kqn6bbm
Help with video and audio tools (for the final project): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QFCkKAdyb0Qg3xCaGSH9luw1jeQVVvP-vy_47G3MW9E/edit
Blog hub: http://www.whyopencourse.org/bloghub
Twitter archive: http://www.whyopencourse.org/tweets/
Links page, for collecting links people find relevant: http://www.whyopencourse.org/links/
Instructions for how to register with this page so you can add links: http://www.whyopencourse.org/links/
Responses to survey on people's views of openness (for week 1): http://pad.p2pu.org/p/What_does_%22open%22_mean_to_you
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2. COLLABORATIVE DOCUMENTS
We decided at our first Google Hangout (recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1E5t7CKcCA) to create a couple of collaborative documents. This is to collect ideas that might otherwise be spread across blogs, or to continue conversations that were started in the Hangouts or on Twitter. There may be more we decide to create, later.
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3. GOOGLE HANGOUTS SIGNUPS
We will be hosting 5 Google Hangouts throughout this four-week course (plus one week for the final project). The first one has been scheduled already; the others will be scheduled after participants fill out a web poll saying which times will work best for them.
There can only be 10 people in each hangout, so how we'll handle that is to aks you to sign up for them below. We will need both your name and the email address you used to sign up for Google+ in order to find you (I htink you'll need a gmail account to sign up for Google+). It would be great if you could put a link to your Google+ profile, which will make it VERY easy for us to find you and invite you just in case we can't find you on G+ with your email.
You can also find the URL for each hangout shortly before it starts, here on the pad, just in case you don't get an email or a notice on Google+ inviting you to the hangout.
Questions about Google+ and Hangouts? Try this document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bjo28BnP_uUediEtFuKvUtzKKsQvD1llFEtZIDgwhDg/edit
What we'll do during the hangouts: unless otherwise noted, we'll use this time to talk about any questions or comments you have about what you've read/watched/written. Facilitators will prepare topics to discuss if we run out of participant-generated topics!
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= Week 1 Google Hangout (7 August): Intro to the course and What does "open" mean? =
Wed, 7 August at 18:00 BST/10am US PDT / 1:00 PM EST
Facilitated by Christina Hendricks
Link to join: https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/a6763eba63f1ce195de3453e937a0b756c2bc584?authuser=0&hl=en (can't use this link anymore because the Hangout is over)
Link to the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1E5t7CKcCA
Participants (RSVP here). We will invite the first 9 people who RSVP to the Google hangout at the time specified.
(Christina invited everyone on the list, but didn't hear from Ricky or Alex (Laila, I invited you too but we got started late b/c my watch stopped! So that's probably why we missed you! - I started wondering if I had miscalculated the time. Will watch the recording!). Hope I invited Ricky and Alex correctly and that you got the message but couldn't come, rather than that you never got the message! - Was having problems with my G+ notifications. I ended up getting them a few hours later. Should be fixed for the next!
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Session Notes:
- Closed communication vs Open Communication
- Closed = Only one party speaks
- Open = Participatory; all parties have a say in actions and policies that affect them.
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- Digital divide - divide between those who can code and those who cannot. What good is open source software to those who cannot modify the software? The code should be in a format that's easy to access and understdand.
- -- For those who don't know how to code, using open source software vs closed is pretty much the same experience.
- Google is much easier to access for most people: this is something proprietary software is doing well. How do we make freedom real in free software?
- Programming is an advanced phase of digital literacy, it's a long process to be able to participate in coding.
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- -- for view countering the claim that the user experience is the same for open source and closed software, see this post: http://sci-sun.blogspot.ca/2013/08/what-does-openness-mean-to-me.html
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- Is openness a continuum, or are things either open or closed, without degrees of each?
- -- some think a continuum; one person said if not all the way open, something is closed
- One point of view: it's either closed or open, no middle ground. An open organisation should have an empowered community that is engaged in decision-making process. The important point is where the locus of control is. Who has the power?
- The values upheld by the community are what matters. They have a bearing on the culture of openness.
- Contradictory: we need to include the real world, nuances. There's a space for grey areas. Let's not discard efforts towards openness even though they're not perfect.
- We can have an open mindset and yet not feel like it's always a good trade-off to live up to it.
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- Do we need rules to make the space more open? Values or rules can help avoid closing off the conversation by offending others for instance. We might need trade-offs...
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- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
-- we talked a bit about the difference between free as in free lunch (doesn't cost anything), and free as in freedom (open to reuse, revision by others)--many products are free as in free lunch, but not free as in freedom (e.g., Google products). Many recent developments have tended towards making software gratis while losing out on the freedoms outlined by the free culture movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open-source_software_packages
- Open source needs a marketing team.
- -- like some companies offer discounts to college students for their products so the students will continue using them later, or some businesses have contracts with companies so they use just that product and require new employees to be able to use that product
- -- how can we explain the value of open products to people so they start using those? Can't offer discounts on free products!
- -- since this course is called "why open?", if we could get some answers to that question we could share them with others.
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- Another thing open (if we're talking specifically about open source software) needs are UX/UI people. Too often the interface makes a heap of sense to the people who coded it and not a great deal to the people who are meant to use it.
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Next steps
- We decided to create a couple of new course pads to discuss these issues (linked at the top of this document):
- How to "market" open products and practices so that people know they exist and may choose those over the closed ones. Pad created! here: http://pad.p2pu.org/p/How_to_spread_open
- A document where we share our ideas on "why open?"--why should we do things openly, use open products, make what we create open? Then when this document is finished we can share it with others. So far in the course the work on this issue is being done mostly on blogs, so distributed across the web. Let's bring it together into one document on which everyone can contribute their ideas. Pad created! Here: http://pad.p2pu.org/Why_open_discussion
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= Week 2 Google Hangout (15th August):
Thursday, 15th August at 20:00 EAT (GMT +3)
Facilitated by Simeon Oriko
Recording available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--GefrIULjc
Session notes
Open activities in groups: what challenges and opportunities do you foresee?
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= Week 3 Google Hangout = Link to sign-up for Google Chat: http://www.doodle.com/gp7zhynr2bbrvmh2 (poll closed)
Tuesday, August 20, 17:00-18:00 UTC / 1:00-2:00 PM EDT / 8:00-9:00 PM EAT / 5:00-6:00 AM NZST / 10:00-11:00 AM PDT
Facilitated by Jeannette Lee https://plus.google.com/u/0/111220581392281074120/posts
Participants (RSVP here). We will invite the first 9 people who RSVP to the Google hangout at the time specified.
We had technical difficulties with this hangout, and decided to move it to a Twitter chat instead!
Recording of Twitter Chat: http://storify.com/jeannettemelee/archive-of-week-3-why-open-google-hangout-twitter
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= Week 4 Google Hangout (day/time TBA) =
Thursday, Aug. 29, 19:00 UTC (12:00 Pacific Daylight Time, 15:00 Eastern Daylight Time, 22:00 East Africa Time, 21:00 Central European Summer time, 7am Aug. 30 New Zealand Time)
Facilitated by Jane Park
Poll to choose a day/time for this hangout: http://doodle.com/ykx54fvh5uvw6548 (now closed)
Participants (RSVP here). We will invite the first 9 people who RSVP to the Google hangout at the time specified.
We ended up cancelling this one as no participants signed up (beyond Christina, one of the course facilitators!)
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= Week 5 Google Hangout =
Facilitated by Christina Hendricks
Thursday, Sept. 5 at noon Pacific Daylight time (N. America), 19:00 UTC, 21:00 CEST, 22:00 East Africa time, 7:00 Friday Sept. 6 in New Zealand.
Poll to choose day/time for this hangout: http://www.doodle.com/wyqzywc4wfch9g3d
Participants (RSVP here). We will invite the first 9 people who RSVP to the Google hangout at the time specified.
Here's the recording of our Week 5 hangout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPNThvjyoqU
We ended up talking about potential pitfalls/problems with openness in this hangout, including:
-- This article: https://chronicle.com/article/A-MOOC-Star-Defects-at-Least/141331/, which talks about a professor who had taught a very popular course for Coursera, who decided to not allow materials from it to be franchised to another university to be used for for-credit courses. His concern was that this sort of business model (where Coursera gets a cut of the revenue from the fee-paying students at the other university using the course materials) could potentially be a way for governments to argue for reducing public funds for schools, and he didn't want to contribute to that. He and others have other concerns about this practice as well, but that is one of the main ones noted in the article. We talked a bit about whether having more and more online courses openly available, and open educational resources available, could potentially lead to reductions in teachers/faculty--basically whether we might inadvertentlly be moving towards putting people out of work in making teaching materials available online.
-- This blog post: http://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/2013/04/creative-commons-has-failed-me-and-my-heart-is-breaking/, and a followup: http://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/2013/05/the-day-after-cc-by-fail-cc-infinity/, plus the comments on those posts. Here the issue is that putting teaching materials up on the web with an open license can lead to them being used by websites as "link bait," to try to draw others in to the site, mostly for the sake of getting views for ads on the site (if I'm understanding this correctly). So the original teaching materials get lost in the "noise," and parts are taken out of context when they should be linked together to make sense. There may also have been a problem with not attributing correctly, but that would not be an issue with openness itself.
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4. TWITTER CHAT TIMES
We'll have a Twitter chat each week; the time/day to be determined by web polls. The polls for the first two weeks' Twitter chats were sent out via email, and should be filled out by Tuesday night, August 6 (time in the Americas), at the latest.. Here are the links to those polls:
first week: http://www.doodle.com/pdyqc9r4brh46u2s (now closed)
second week: http://www.doodle.com/456349kpq4msef6g (Now Closed)
Week 3 Twitter poll: http://doodle.com/k2tuxxc99rv8wxm5 (now closed)
Week 4 Twitter poll: http://doodle.com/n6knbrsq2w2nwz32 (now closed
You don't need to sign up for the Twitter chats, because there isn't a limit on the number of participants we can have! Just watch the #whyopen hashtag at the time noted below and start discussing with us using that hashtag!
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= Week 1 Twitter chat (use #whyopen hashtag) =
Hosted by Christina Hendricks
Thursday, Aug. 8, 12pm (noon) PDT/3pm EDT/9pm CEST/10pm EAT/7am (Aug. 9) NZST
Here is the record of our first Twitter chat, on Storify! http://storify.com/clhendricksbc/whyopen-twitter-chat-aug-8-2013
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= Week 2 Twitter chat (use #whyopen hashtag) =
Hosted by Jeannette Lee
Tuesday Aug. 13, 13:00-14:00 Pacific Time (N. America)/20:00 UTC/6:00 Eastern Australia Time/8:00 NZST
Here is a record of our second Twitter chat on Storify! http://storify.com/jeannettemelee/archive-of-week-2-why-open-twitter-chat
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= Week 3 Twitter chat (use #whyopen hashtag) =
Hosted by Jeannette Lee
Friday, August 23, 19:00-20:00 UTC / 3:00-4:00 PM EDT / 10:00-11:00 PM EAT / 7:00-8:00 AM NZST / 12:00 NOON-1:00 PM PDT
Here is a record of our third Twitter chat on Storify! http://storify.com/jeannettemelee/archive-of-why-open-week-3-twitter-chat
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= Week 4 Twitter chat (use #whyopen hashtag) =
Hosted by Christina Hendricks (@clhendricksbc)
Tuesday, Aug. 27, 18:00 UTC (11:00am Pacific Daylight Time, 14:00 Eastern Daylight Time, 21:00 East Africa Time, 20:00 Central European Summer time, 6am Aug. 30 New Zealand Time).
Here is the record of the week 4 Twitter chat on Storify: http://storify.com/clhendricksbc/whyopen-twitter-chat-for-week-4-aug-27-2013
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= Week 5 Twitter chat (at the end of our week 4 chat, some wanted one more) =
Thursday, Sept. 5, 14:00 Pacific Daylight time, 21:00 UTC, 00:00 East Africa Time, 9:00 (Fri Sept. 6) NZ time
This Twitter chat, like the Google Hangout this week (see above), also talked about potential problems with openness. Here is the Storify record of this chat: http://storify.com/clhendricksbc/why-open-tweet-chat-on-sept-5-2013
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5. YOUR COMMENTS/SUGGESTIONS
Is there anything you'd like to see us do differently in the course? Other comments that might be helpful while the course is running? Please put them here!
* Skip the discussion forums (Disqus on the course website)
Not much is happening on there: the discussions mostly happen in blogs and during synchronous sessions.
Laila: I agree with this. There are enough spaces for discussion on blogs, Twitter, pads etc. The course website serves as a reference point but has so far not been used much as a discussion forum. Let's see if this changes in the coming weeks though.
* Call for volunteers to help out adding in blog URLs to the blog hub manually...
...instead of having one person spend a lot of time on this. This way, we wouldn’t have to cap enrollment.
+1
* Less directive tasks: encourage learners to take their own paths
This course is fairly structured–we have specific tasks to do each week, that don’t necessarily encourage people to do their own things with the material. That’s a tough balance; some structure is needed, but too much becomes problematic.
Laila: I like that we have weekly discussion themes and I don't feel constrained by the suggested tasks.
The one thing I would change is the focus on blogs as the preferred medium of participation. I happen to be well disposed towards writing but it may not be the case for everyone. What if someone is more keen on photography, collage, video, drawing, as a mode of expression? Sure, they could stick that in a blog but how do we integrate and value their work as part of our discussion? We could more explicitly encourage various forms of expression.
I'd make the list of suggested readings open to student participation.
* Allow participants to award each other badges
and/or
* Participants collaborating on designing badges and what they should be for, then being able to give them out, rather than facilitatros doing that all beforehand.
* suggestion
can we work on an article or a journal that clearly states what we have done or studied throughout this course
[Christina]: That's a great suggestion! We have tried to start doing something like this by doing a couple of collaborative documents. Scroll up to #2 on this page to see the links to those. Do you have an idea for another document topic we might do as well?
* Tech hotline for participants who don't feel comfortable with all the web tools: ahead of the course, request for volunteers to come forward to help others get familiar with tools such as Twitter, Google Hangouts, etherpad etc.