Group Admins
Description
This proposal addresses how mainstream K-12 education can transition to use and share open educational resources and play a part in the future direction of the open educational movement (Weller 2014). The presentation is based on practical experience of a one year OER project in 2016 with 230 students in K-12 education from both minority and dominant communities in the city of Stockholm.
The theme of the OER project is students local culture and historic environment, encouraging a pedagogical approach of examining a neighbourhood’s past, present and future. Digital technologies and media in the project are commons driven and under Creative Commons Attribution or Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike licenses. Three main platforms are involved – the national website platsr.se, run by the Swedish National Heritage Board, the free encyclopedia for children wikimini.se and the Swedish language version of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Incentives from participating teachers in outer city schools come from teaching students that their knowledge and expertise of their own neighbourhood counts, and how to take action to validate it and claim ownership of the historic environment and the diversity of traces it holds. This connects OER project with aspects of critical pedagogy (Farrow 2015) . Teachers also join the project for reasons embedded in digital literacy discourse. Shifting from a frequent tools approach to Wikipedia in the classroom to engaging with it as an online space, illustrates how mainstream education can benefit from OERs to develop students’ visitor mode of online engagement in institutional contexts (White & Cornu 2011).
Some of the key points and insights is how Wikipedia acts as an entry point to open culture for mainstream classrooms and that there is a strong pedagogical logic expressed by educators for how user generated OERs can unlock the classroom to an outside world. While this space may attract markets, the proposal suggests it should be harnessed by new collaboratives for education and learning where mission aligned institutions are crucial partners. OERs offer invitations for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) and Education to work together.
References:
Farrow, R. (2015): Open education and critical pedagogy, Learning, Media and Technology, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2016.1113991
Weller, M. (2014). Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bam
White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). doi:10.5210/fm.v16i9.3171
