Thems the Breaks

Check the O.L. with Anne-Marie Scott and Terry Greene. Liner Notes from Groundbreaking Online Learning

It took today’s release of the Praxis Pedagogy Podcast’s newest episode to realize I hadn’t blogged about something big yet! Anne-Marie Scott and I were interviewed by host Tim Carson about a project that we are calling Check The O.L. in which she and I aim to get the stories behind how some of the most ground breaking online learning experiences have come to be.

If you happened to read an earlier post of mine entitled Let’s Get Explicit, in where I attempt to liken the potential of open educational practices to the constantly innovating and groundbreaking world of hip hop, you’ll see in this post that I’ve not only gone deep down this rabbit hole, I’ve also dragged Anne-Marie down there with me. Thanks for helping me dig, Anne-Marie!

Let me break it down with a list of revelations that slowly came to me as this project was formed:

  1. (June 2020): When you’re just sitting there, building courses all summer, your ears have a lot of free time to hear things. Like music!
  2. (Same time frame): If that music is hip hop, it puts me right into the flow I need to in to be quite productive.
  3. (July 2020): I want to know more about hip hop. I really loved it when I was little, but I seemed to forget about it for a good while and I need to get caught up! Maybe there is a book.
  4. (July 2020): There is a book! Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip Hop Junkies, By Brian Coleman. This book is dope. I love learning the stories about how these groundbreaking, innovative hip hop albums came to be. There are so many ways to make great hip hop.
  5. (Late July 2020): Oooh there is a sequel! I should read that, too!
  6. (Early August 2020): Hmmm. I kind of think that hip hop and open, online learning have some things in common.
  7. (Mid August 2020) I wish there was a book just like this but for innovative, groundbreaking, probably open online learning.
  8. (Also Mid August 2020) Hmm. Could I make that book? I should see if anyone else thinks this is a good idea.
  9. (Still Mid August 2020) Anne-Marie Scott thinks it’s a good idea so it must be. And she’s willing to help. LET’S DO THIS! LET’S MAKE A BOOK!
  10. (Late August 2020) I really dig how Martin Weller’s 25 Years of Ed-Tech is planning an audio version and a podcast about the book. We should do that too when we get to that point.
  11. (Still Late August 2020): We should do that first! Podcast our way into a book. LET’S DO THIS! LET’S MAKE A PODCAST AND THEN MAKE IT A BOOK!

And if we fast-forward to today, you’ll see that we’ve made some pretty good headway. We have a juicy list of online courses/ communities/ experiences to cover and we’ve released 5 episodes of the podcast, which have included Laura Gibbs’ (THE Online Course Lady) Indian Epics & Myth folklore , Bonnie Stewart’s #Antigonish2, Mia Zamora and Alan Levine’s #NetNarr, and Whitney Kilgore’s #HumanMOOC. Anne-Marie sees these things more clearly and easier than me, but I can assure you that some interesting common threads are beginning to reveal themselves as we go.

Next up is the release of our chat with Al Filreis on the long running MOOC known as #ModPo (Modern Poetry). This course was one of the most recommended to us, and we sure as heck found out why when Al blew our minds with meta-pedagogical delights. Stay tuned for that to be released late next week!

Grab the feed to the podcast here, keep them suggestions for courses to cover coming, and let us know what you think!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

css.php