Mixtape Pedagogy Workshop: Using OER Schema on Open Educational Resources

Description

Just as mixtapes helped people discover and share creative content by providing a standard medium and remix technology, the OER Schema project hopes to inspire the same type of remix culture with online teaching materials. By schematizing aspects of pedagogical approaches and sharing content as open educational resources (OER), interoperability of these materials can be achieved - enabling HTML as a sturdy medium for remix. This project questions, if anyone could access and create quality art and design education materials, regardless of their educational background, what might happen?

We explore the potential for communities to build around content agency, creative communities for teaching, the potential impacts for individuals accessing that content, the communities in which those individuals live, and the potential knock-on effects. We are currently living with the impact of the open web on journalism. Are there parallels to be drawn with open educational resources on academe?

One of the most fundamentally important and exciting aspects of OER is that as an object, it has not been concretely bounded, and therefore not stripped of its potential outside of what is already known. This workshop invites participants to think about remix culture and consider the ripple effects of putting creative instruction into the hands of any learner. The facilitators encourage critical reflection and feedback on the process, which will inform future work in the OER publishing space.

Timetable

1. Mixtape Pedagogy: A 10-minute introduction, to OER, its barriers to adoption, and how OER Schema can mitigate those barriers
2. "Paper Remix" Participants will create and share paper prototypes of remixed content as an analogy for how content is shared today.
3. "Digital Remix" Participants will make a mini-lesson to share or remix if technologically possible, and reflect critically on the process.
4. Closing discussion: What happens when anyone can create and share components of a course?

Interaction

Facilitators will circulate and encourage conversation and reflection as attendees participate in the Paper Remix activity, summarizing interesting points and bringing them back to the larger group after the activity is finished. Facilitators will lead participants through an open publishing workflow, allowing attendees to publish content. Attendees will be encouraged to share feedback and critical reflection on the process of publishing through the workflow during a discussion on future of OER in the creative disciplines. Some topics we will discuss include:

1. How does OER impact the creative disciplines in the near-future?
2. What current barriers can OER free us from?
3. How can we shape OER standards and vocabulary to be most useful to the discipline?

Takeaway

After this session, attendees will be able to:

• Summarize the open movement
• Evaluate how OER might impact the arts & design disciplines in the near future and in the next 100 years
• Publish content openly
• Discuss vocabulary and standards for arts & design in the OER landscape

Outcomes

Based on the outcomes of this session, we will:

• Create a community around OER and what it means for the creative disciplines.
• Use critical feedback and reflective comments to shape future iterations of our work on open publishing workflows.
• Incorporate standards and vocabulary suggestions into the workflow.

Abstract

The goal of this workshop is to encourage participants to think critically about the open movement and what it means in the creative disciplines and for education in general. While the lower cost and social justice benefits of OER are currently celebrated, we hope to facilitate a rich discussion around remix culture and potential ramifications of openly available instruction, such as consequences when a negative actor utilizes a resource for ill intentions. How do we balance the gains with the risks? The facilitators aim to engage the audience in a physical making activity (Paper Remix) to contextualize the invisible connections that digital open publishing workflows rely on.

Through this activity, we hope to obtain valuable feedback and critical insights into the process of open publishing and what it means for creative individuals to put there work into the world for anyone to access. We also hope to engage the audience in a conversation to generate standards and vocabulary to create a model for open content within the field while balancing the need for unique approaches to instruction in arts and design. This feedback will be utilized to inform future work on the publishing workflow and research around open publishing in higher education.