Find the Jokers: The wild card, the magic card – that might be anything or nothing – or might become what we make it.
Is it what it seems?
Where will it lead?
Where will you take it?
Some of you will have come to this just by chance and others will have followed this QR code that was on the back of that joker card at the OER16 conference at the presentation about the Open Source Learning Foundation. The idea of the Jokers came from David Preston, who used them to ask his students about their big questions here in 2012. This time it isn’t specifically an invitation to students or to anyone in a class… This QR code brought you here.
It is a challenge and invitation to you – to make more, talk about it, dream about it – not just something about learning for the students, but something extends beyond the learning and becomes personal to them and to those around them, that has value, that becomes their story and your story.
It begins with asking you to ask questions. In education we don’t often (enough) openly reflect and ask one another, as professionals, for advice, input, and genuinely look to help one another learn. Everyone knows that networks are invaluable, and the unseen underlying network that connects us all through the ether is so valuable.
This is an invitation to join in the conversation in two different ways
1. Blog Post: Put a name on it.
Many of us are already doing things in a way that resonates Open Source Learning but it is not always articulated or externalised in a formal sense. Thinking of your own teaching, how is it
- Inclusive
- Transparent
- Productive
and how does it encourage creating value? If you do blog – please tag it #OSL and paste a link into the comments below.
We are our own best resources and explaining and expressing can be so helpful to ourselves and to others. If you can’t put your finger on a specific example – dream. What would you like to do? What would you need?
2. Join in the discussion on an existing project: Connecting Classes
Connecting Classes is a project initiated by Jonathan Worth that initially involved a handful of HE educators in the UK and already it has spread to be a global initiative. We used Jonathan’s ‘teaching with twitter’ methodology for engaging students, growing the conversation around a topic, reaching out, and opening up. Each teacher had a different class, different specialism, and different experience. Join us to watch, tweet, contribute to the webinar where the teachers get together and publicly discuss – How was the learning? Our learning? Our students learning? What happened when they opened the door, went down the rabbit hole, took off the lid?
That reflection process and discussion of methods and experiences can be so rich and useful to really take an idea further. The invitation to you is one way to reach out, and open source the project and the experience – because especially in learning, it’s important to leave the door open. I don’t know where it will take us, and I am sure I can learn from you.
You can tweet with the #cclasses hashtag or contact Jonathan Worth to get involved.