#openscholarship

Esteban Morales et al. wrote an article called “How Faculty Define Quality, Prestige, and Impact of Academic Journals”. The article had some interesting views from faculty that were interviewed and asked for their input when it came to these three terms.

In my opinion I do think that quality is very important and I know that open educational resources are sometimes questioned when quality is involved because they are free and the same gets questioned when it comes to open scholarship. However, I feel like impact can be drastically improved with open scholarship because it can be far reaching when it is open. It seems like more people can be reached and impacted with open context, resources, and scholarship.

I have read David Wiley’s article called “Open Pedagogy: The Importance of Getting it in the Air” a couple times and I love the analogy he makes when he talks about the invention of motorized vehicles and how roads needed to be made so that vehicles didn’t ruin the countryside, but when planes were invented the law said that they needed to be driven on designated roads. This meant people couldn’t fly planes. Clearly the law needed to be adjusted as new inventions came along. 

The same holds true for copyright laws. As new technology comes to light the laws should be adjusted, and as open educational resources become available there needs to be specific adjustments for people to have access.

Open educational resources are fairly new, but the benefits already outweigh any negative effects. David Wiley compared it to using an airplane on the road when choosing to use copyright material in the classroom. 

https://edtechbooks.org/open_scholar/open_pedagogy_the_im/simple 

I read an article by David Heinemeier Hansson called “I Won’t Let You Pay Me For My Open Source” and I found the article quite interesting. But then I decided to look up more information on David and found that he is the creator of an open-source web framework called Ruby on Rails. From there I decided to check out Ruby on Rails, which it was not what I was expecting. So, it looks like it is a place for codes to be contributed and available for anyone to access. The website seemed fairly simple and had a video explaining how to use/access everything. It is not necessarily something that I would use a lot, but I do like when someone tries to make things easier to access for others. I have included a link to the Ruby on Rails website and I would recommend taking a look at it, just to see what it has to offer.

I recently read an article by Sherri Spelic entitled “Nobody’s Version of Dumb”. In this article she discusses prominent figures in social media claiming that the social media algorithm is making us dumb. Sherri then pushes back claiming that social media is a place of connections and expansion of knowledge. 

Of course, everyone is welcome to formulate their own opinion on this matter, but I stand firmly...in the middle. I do not feel that social media is making is dumb, but I do feel that the algorithm can narrow our field of vision. Potentially in an exponential manner because as we view what social media “decides” to show us our field of vision gets smaller and smaller because we are only selecting and see what the algorithm shows us.

However, I also agree with Sherri in the sense that social media keeps us connected in ways that we would’ve never imagined 20 years ago. We are the ones that decide who to connect with, and we have the option to discuss things with like-minded people around the world. This increases our reach and our expansion of knowledge.

Now, the decision is up to you, which side do you agree with, and were you the one who decided to view this blog post, or was it a social media algorithm??

I was disheartened when I found out that Open Education Resource (OER) research is weighted different than other research. This means that faculty could devote a portion of their career to OER research, then when promotion and/or tenure come up the committee counts the OER research different (with less value) than other research.

 I was glad to read that the Iowa Open Education Action Team is working on a way around this. They have compiled a matrix that is meant to advocate for equality when it comes to OER research involving tenure, promotion, and faculty evaluations.

I think the initial reason for the discrepancy was lack of knowledge about OER research. Most committees probably didn’t understand what goes into doing OER research, including the rigor involved. OER research is still in its infancy, but there is enough information now that committees can see how OER research has the same accuracy, rigor, and prestige as other research and should be weighted the same.

One of the articles I read this week was “Planning to Share Versus Just Sharing” By Scott Leslie. It was originally a blog post. The idea was that institutions will often start out strong with the idea of open scholarship or open education and they want to share information, but these motivations dwindle after a time. This is due to restrictions on how much to share and also having the task handed from one person to the next until things die down.

I read an article this week entitled “Seven Habits of Highly Connected People” By Stephen Downes which listed the following things for being highly connected:

1. Be Reactive

2. Go With the Flow

3. Connection Comes First

4. Share

5. RTFM (Read The Fine Manual)

6. Cooperate

7. Be Yourself

After reading through each one the two things that stuck out to me the most were 1) it is best to share without thinking what you could gain in return, that is not what being connected is about (that is also not what life it about) and 2) the thing that makes online communication work is remembering that on the other end of the lifeless terminal there is a living human being. In the article this last point was brought up to suggest letting others get to know you, but the thing that struck me was that sometimes people forget that there is a person on the other end and we are sometimes more willing to say and do things to someone online than we would to their face, in reality we are doing it to their face though, and we should always remember that.