Step 5: Doug Pete also chats about this post, with Stephen Hurley, on his radio show of the same name on the VoicEd.ca radio station which chats about education in Canada 24/7. Colour me extra flattered.
Step 6: Stephen Hurley from aforementioned VoicEd.ca has me on his own radio show “In Conversation with Stephen Hurley”. I am now painted a nice, deep red flattered colour.
Step 7: (not yet completed) Stephen Hurley offers me the opportunity to have some time on the station to do a thing… A show? A… what? A weekly chat about Open Education? Sharing student projects? I don’t know yet! What would you do with the air time if you were me? Comment below if you have any brilliant ideas or want to go on air with me at some point.
“Baguettes” flickr photo by SteveR- https://flickr.com/photos/git/200262036 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
How did I become involved in things open? Funny you should ask because I’ve been asked to contribute to www.101openstories.org to tell my Open Education origin story. I’ll be on a live video call on that site on July 27th telling this story. If my past video experience can predict the outcome of this one, it should be funny for you and embarrassing for me. Luckily for me I haven’t been in the open game long, so I seem to still have access to most of the memories. I’ll tell you the story here, too. Spoiler alert if you want to watch the video!
It was a dark and stormy night way back in the fall of 2015. And by dark and stormy night, I believe it was actually quite mild and the middle of the day. I was in the office of Judith Limkilde, then the Dean of General Arts and Science of Fleming College, for my performance review. As any good boss would do, Judith asked me what I would like to do for professional development over the next year. I knew this question would be coming and I had prepared an in depth answer that was probably something like: “Umm, I’d like to brush up on some, like, digital skills and stuff.” I had come across some weird, free thing that was called ds106 that promised to show you a thing or two about digital storytelling. I wanted to do it, but I wasn’t sure exactly why at the time. Judith said okay, go right ahead.
I know what it was that drew me in now. I wasnt looking for “open” or “free” or anything. Just some online learning. There’s a lot of learning stuff on the Internet: Coursera, Udacity, Lynda, whatever. It all looks slick and umm… what’s the word? Lifeless. ds106 was different though. It wasn’t all that polished looking, but here’s a lesson for all the other slicker than snot venture capital funded bore-o-systems: You could see the work of the students everywhere. What? I get to see what the other people do with these instructions? I can take their ideas and build off them? I could add my ideas for how to participate in the course? I might see my own stuff on this site? That was my fire for open all lit up right there.
I’ve been opening up ever since.
Since then, and directly or indirectly from participating in ds106, I have been able to:
Grow a pretty darn good professional learning network on Twitter where I can actually ask questions of and get response from superheroes in Open Education. You can, too.
Volunteer with Virtually Connecting, where I get to be involved with and help others get access to educational conferences all over the world that we would not otherwise have access to. Another chance to connect with and have access to open thinkers around the world.
Participate and practice regular, reflective and creative open practice through a few different domains. These include one for my own personal professional learning banter (this one), a weekly professional learning blog for Fleming College faculty which adds about 500% more fun to my day job (The Teaching Hub) and The Open Faculty Patchbook. (More about that one in the next bullet point.)
Help create a how-to-teach manual for higher ed pedagogy called the Open Faculty Patchbook in which faculty from all over tell us how they deploy specific pedagogical skills. What we’ve collected so far is being published into the first iteration of the manual. You can see it on its Pressbook site here. All of the patches are wonderful tales of the trials and tribulations from people in the thick of higher ed teaching and learning. It’s a testament to the wonderful character of the people of open that these 21 people took the time to write a chapter of our book and share it openly with everyone for no incentive other than the desire to contribute.
Use and contribute to the Creative Commons by openly licensing my work and using the openly licensed work available. For those of you out there who openly license your photos, my blog posts and slide decks thank you dearly for the added panache!
Be added to the roster of Ontario’s Open Education Rangers by eCampusOntario. I believe this means I am able to deputize people into the movement.
Become known in certain open circles as the #crapbadge hander-outer. I wrote a reflective blog post after attending the Open Ed conference in Fall 2016: An Opening Move. In it I awarded a very poorly drawn badge to someone whom I thought did a great presentation. I now use my sub-par artistic skills and the Snipping Tool to award crap-badges for simple but awesome deeds on request. Sometimes on demand. Here’s my latest, awarded to Chuck Pearson for his amazing patch of the Open Faculty Patchbook. You can just see the artistry oozing out of it:
Oh and, to me, the ultimate sign of making it as a member of ds106 culture and open in general; look up and to your right and see that I am an Official Talky Tina character of the Internet. This fact will be on my gravestone or urn or whatever I end up in.
It’s been a pretty great time opening up so far. Join in! You can find me in twitter @greeneterry
“Open the door” flickr photo by hernanpba https://flickr.com/photos/hernanpc/15475728248 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license
Blogs or any writing from Alan Levine, Maha Bali, Amy Collier, Jim Groom, Adam Croom, Martin Weller, Gardner Campbell and on and on!
I also hope to read a bunch of blogs from Fleming faculty about what they’re thinking of doing this fall in their teaching. You can see some on the RSS feed sidebar on this page
By the way, Summer’s Killing Us is a song from that other Tragically Hip. The second one. The one we all thought wasn’t as good. The one I think I realize now is better than the first. They didn’t give us more of the same. They kept changing. Kept not being what we thought of them. I’m happy to realize it now because now I have all this great stuff to re-discover. It’s going to do me like the dishes.
Daily Create #1990 Inspired by Men Without Hats. What else could be without and still be a band?
I guess I didn’t quite do it right. Instead of what something is without, this band isn’t even. This band is not the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Not even at all. This band is just regular red peppers. Chili peppers are too spicy for them. If they are feeling crazy, they will maybe pick up some medium salsa on the way home.
Also, RNCP has 100% less funk than RHCP. Just listen to their late 90s return to form album North Dakotication.
Fleming College SUNY Creativity Trainees 2017 (and BYODers, and Mobile Summiteers, and Advancing Learningers!) are getting together to make their own WordPress domains in which to grow forth together as innovative and creative educators. Good on ya!
So why am I sharing these instructions on my own personal domain? One reason is for you to see one of the WordPress sites you are about to make in action. Another reason is that I want you to know my domain and I want to know yours so we will be familiar with each other’s as we begin to connect and share our ideas and plans.
Here’s a quick intro video to WordPress. All I had to do to embed the video in this page was to paste the link to the YouTube into the editing area and it embeds itself. It’s super slick.
Below we have provided a set of instructions for getting set up in WordPress.
These instructions, however, were created for COMM 201 students, not SUNY Fleming Creativity Thingy Trainees et al. That means, we also have instructions for the instructions! In other words, amendments. Amendments are great. People are always talking about them in movies and stuff.
So, without further ado, here is a link to the PowerPoint instructions that George Fogarasi created for the COMM 201 students. Click the link to download it and either view them in PowerPoint or print them off for your reference: WordPress Instructions 2017
Once you have those ready, also be ready to tinker a little bit with them through these amendments:
1st amendment– to slide 2 of the PowerPoint: You will not be graded, only judged… positively!
2nd amendment– to slide 5: Ignore ‘do NOT pick another theme’ PICK WHATEVER THEME YOU WANT
3rd amendment– to slide 6: Instead of ‘pick a FAKE name’, Pick an AWESOME name.
4th amendment– to slide 13: Instead of ‘This I Believe’, make the page ‘About This Space’
5th amendment– to slide 17-24: Instead of adding pages called ‘profile and reflection’, DON’T DO THIS PART AT ALL! INSTEAD, ADD A POST (NOT A PAGE) CALLED “SUNY PLANS” OR “SUNY REFLECTIONS” OR “SOMETHING LIKE THAT” and then go ahead and write that post in which you describe a bit about what you’ve learned and what your initial plans are for using it in your teaching.
6th amendment– to slide 30: Menu items won’t be the same. make a menu item for ‘About This Space’ and a category menu item for ‘SUNY’ or ‘Reflections’. Don’t be afraid to ask for help with this.
Questions to know the answers to:
What’s the difference between a post and a page?
What’s the difference between the types of menu items?
Have I sent the URL to LDSTeam@flemingcollege.ca?
Is my menu looking goooooooood?
Do I know how to create a post? Find pictures that I can use? Add those pictures? Add links?
Did I just generally play around with adding, editing and formatting things in my posts?
Did I try to embed a YouTube video, just by pasting the URL into my WordPress editor?
Do I know how to get URLs for posts/pages to tweet them out/share them?
Have I ‘tagged’ my posts with HASHTAG_TBD?
Did I know how to Tweet out my post URL with HASHTAG_TBD?
featured image: “Toilet Use instructions” flickr photo by Tobyotter https://flickr.com/photos/78428166@N00/8235827496 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
image credit “Tinker Toys” flickr photo by ninahale https://flickr.com/photos/94693506@N00/264170934 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Think of one of your favorite bands. Think of who influenced them and whom they in turn influenced further. Think of the bands that they toured with or were ‘competing with’ at the time. They all relied on each other to be what they were and are. They all knew what the other bands were doing with their craft. That’s what we can have if we share our teaching and learning more. Much more.
Music is not quite open like education can be. Musicians mostly retain their copyright and want to make money off of it. But it is open as in we mostly have access to hearing it. Whether it’s on the radio, online sharing or even actually buying music, we mostly all can pretty much hear what’s out there.
Not so much in education. Not enough anyway.
We wouldn’t have the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin without the blues. We wouldn’t have Kendrick Lamar without Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. We wouldn’t have much anything without The Beatles. Heck, Canada wouldn’t have The Tragically Hip without the Rolling Stones. This would make Canada sad.
We wouldn’t have lots of things without being able to hear about lots of other things. Look at how many sub-genres of “Rock” there are on the Free Music Archive
What would music be like if the only time you could ever hear The Clash was inside the one classroom where Joe Strummer was teaching his Writing the Future class? It would be crap, I tells ya.
Here’s what we can have a lot more of if our educational practices were shared as openly as music:
We can have “influences”
I am influenced in my thinking about teaching and learning by Maha Bali, Alan Levine, Gardner Campbell, Audrey Watters and Robin DeRosa among a whole bunch of others. Good thing they are all super open, or I wouldn’t know who the heck they are. More sharing so I can have more influences, please.
We can have “scenes”
Did you hear that the Indie Ed-Tech scene in Oklahoma is so hot right now? Well, you can hear about it, because open. Let’s have Seattle Grunge, Montreal Indie Rock, and Chicago Hip Hop-like scenes for education.
We can have “new genres”
I for one want to be associated with the Trailing Cutting Edge genre in which we don’t think ed-tech is cool until it’s like ten years old at least. We’re weirdos.
How will this happen?
Not much to it but to get yourself writing about your teaching. And sharing that. On a blog, probably. And tweet it out, too. Tweet it to me (@greeneterry). I’ll check it out.
featured image: “Showcase @ Diablo • Dia 3 • 10/05/2017” flickr photo by Festival Bananada 2017 https://flickr.com/photos/bananada2017/34428700640 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license
I want to share just one activity we went through in which I inadvertently Huck Finnified education. Now to be fair, all I really remember about Huck Finn is him + raft + river = freedom. That seems like a good direction for some (lots) of education to go.
The activity was a story-boarding exercise that is meant to help you to plan for reaching your goals. You get a 6 or 8 panel sheet and start by drawing your starting point in panel one and your end point in the last panel. You then fill in the blanks in between, making them up as you go. It being a creativity workshop you were free to be free thinking, so somehow mine involved a gondola and Huckleberry Finn. Despite (or maybe because of) those silly bits, I was able to maybe see some stepping stones to a less silly goal.
Here is the legend for what you are about to witness
…and here is the sheet, pre-‘art’
The beginning: a class with PowerPoint stinking onto students. PowerPoint really is the Nickelback of ed-tech, isn’t it?
The end goal: learning whilst floating down a river on a raft like Huck Finn
How do we get there? I don’t know! Maybe this is step one: Screen share from devices to screens on the side of the room.
And then what? I don’t know! Maybe this is the next step. Why even those side screens. Step 2 was silly. Let’s just share device to device. Also less walls now somehow.
What is even the next step? Who knows! Maybe this ridiculous step. We can just share device to device now so we can take the imaginary gondola down to the river. How come gondolas aren’t used as public transit options by the way?
And then what? This is so ridiculous now does it even matter? Oh yeah! We’re at the river. Let’s get on these rafts. Huck Finn time.
Now we can go full Ed-Huck Finn.
The whole silly affair.
You may be able to use this story-boarding activity to actual good use yourself. try it out!
**Sing in your brain to the tune of The Traveling Wilburys “Tweeter And The Monkey Man”**
Tweeter and Melancholy Man were okay for cash
They slept through the night after watching some M*A*S*H*
His underwriter boss had a brother named Dan
For reasons quite explained he loved his brother Dan
Tweeter was an undergrad and once went to Vietnam
And found out the easy way how to order Banh
Yesterday bought tickets to see the Jersey Boys
So they hopped onto a local bus called the number 9
And the drapes came down, all the way to here
Never saw them when they were open
But now I see them them when they’re closed
The underwriter boss kind of liked Melancholy Man
Even back in childhood didn’t mind seeing him now and then
Dan got married at forty to racket salesman Bill
He made business calls to Melancholy Man from an office down the hall.
It was out on Daisy road – Tweeter at the wheel
They pulled into Denny’s – they could hear them tummies growl
The underwriter boss pulled up and said “Breakfast’s on me
If you don’t order extra sausage now you’ll pay for it yourself.”
And the drapes came down, all the way to here
Never saw them when they were open
But now I see them them when they’re closed
A Dodge Caravan rolled up, station wagon close behind
Tweeter took his kleenex out and wiped off his hands
The underwriter boss was left to get in his sedan
Near the empty lot by that other piece of land
Next day the underwriter boss he had a belly ache
tummy taking the whole thing personal, didn’t care about the toots
Dan had told him many times it was you to me who said
In Denny’s everything’s lethal man even their salad
And the drapes came down, all the way to here
Never saw them when they were open
But now I see them them when they’re closed.
“Boring.” flickr photo by chrismurf https://flickr.com/photos/chrismurf/192377530 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license
Now available at low, low prices from my as-yet-unnamed ed-tech startup: a physical Learning Management System. The physicaLMS. It’s real life. Outside of the Internet. It’s in your hands. For reals.
Here’s the assignment dropbox in action..
Simulation of receiving assignment instructions for PhysicaLMS dropboxExporting work from PhysicaLMS to put into the drop box
Here’s the quiz tool in action.
Submitting a quizReceiving graded quiz
Here’s the grades tool in action.
Searching through physicaLMS for grades. It allows you to add up your scores yourself.
Here is the content tool in action.
physicaLMS allows you to add the content that you want.
Here is the workspace tool in action: Not entirely sure if this one really exists in a traditional online LMS. I guess it sort of does here and there.
Take work out of physicaLMS if you want. Put it back in if you want. Do work in it or out of it if you want.
What physicaLMS can do that your traditional online LMS can’t:
Learner choice of what’s in it and how it’s structured.
Learner choice of what comes out of it.
Learner security of not being surveiled at any time.
What physicaLMS can’t do that a traditional LMS can:
Ummmm can’t like do a discussion board, I guess.
Can’t add up grades for me. I’d have to do that myself.
Can’t decide for me which content I should see.
Can’t let a bunch of people look into my ‘behaviours’.
Here’s how to share your work in physicaLMS
Take your work out to share it.
Here’s what happens to your work in physicaLMS at the end of semester.
Here’s what happens to your work in the traditional LMS at the end of the semester
Oh and physical LMS comes in 3 sizes:
TallGrandeVenti
Stay tuned for our next product! It does all the things that the physicaLMS does only online! Like an online binder!
featured image credit:”pen and paper” flickr photo by mlpdesign https://flickr.com/photos/mlpdesign/23643416 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
GIFs of physicaLMS in action source: https://www.youtube.com/w-goSoxUfzE
What is even the next step? Who knows! Maybe this ridiculous step. We can just share device to device now so we can take the imaginary gondola down to the river. How come gondolas aren’t used as public transit options by the way?
