REMIXING OPEN CONTENT +
PEDAGOGY WITH OERSCHEMA
How open and independent digital publishing of learning knowledge could transform society yet again.
Open Apereo 2017
#apereo17
Michael Collins
Assistant Professor of Art
Penn State University
@_mike_collins
Things we’ll discuss:
A brief and very incomplete history of publishing
Publishing: (a broad definition)
The dissemination of information using a common language that can be later recalled by another.
For a person to know something, the knowledge must first be cognitively organized, then recorded onto a medium.
Published knowledge can be recalled later from the medium on which it is recorded.
Before the invention of writing, stories were told around the campfire and relied on an auditory format to transmit knowledge from one person’s brain to another. The recording medium was the human brain.
When memory reached capacity, writing emerged (sort of) ~10k years ago in the form of clay tokens.
(Shout-out to the ancient goat herders of the Zagros Mountains!)
But publishing really came into its own when Gutenberg was told the wrong year for a trade fair. Instead of selling small mirrors to Pilgrims, he accidentally disrupted the monolithic governance of the Catholic Church by triggering DIY local governance. Turns out if a town could have their own printed Bible, they could also have their own local identity.
Korea had printing presses reproducing religious texts 200 years earlier than Europe, but the Yi Dynasty seemed to know something the Catholic Church didn’t – how independent publishing could tear down the ruling class of a given society.
Whoops!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
By 1500, there were over 20 million printed books.
The site of Ben Franklin’s print shop is located 8 minutes away by foot at 320 Market Street.
Directions: https://goo.gl/maps/sYb3wvkPrSJ2
Personal Computers (1980s) and the Public Internet (1990s) happened. Disruption of the book publishing monopolies followed with self publishing by everyone. Now you can publish from your phone. Some of you are doing it right now, possibly retweeting dissenting views about the reigning political class.
Each instance of disruption is supported when access to knowledge and technology by a person from the common class occurs.
We have access to knowledge via the Internet.
We have it at an intuitive level. People like teaching each other. Just search for “How to replace the chain on your chainsaw” on Youtube sometime. It’s baffling how excited people are to teach, even the most dull of topics.
What about access to pedagogy?
MOOCs asked what would happen if people had access to courses.
What if the average person had access to produce with sophisticated learning infrastructure?
Or maybe you don’t have to produce anything anymore. Could AI someday give you the coveted “Ah Hah!” moment with on the fly pedagogy?
“Every person with access to their own personal university” is the true disruptive scenario for education. The education monoliths in their current form won’t make sense.
Perhaps these are delusions of grandeur but I think it’s a matter of time.
Okay, we have glimpsed the future. It’s interesting (unsettling?) Now, how do we get there?
> Three easy steps!
Step 1: Make all education content open.
Step 2: Give teaching tools to everyone.
Step 3: Create teaching robots (we have a few years before this happens).
Step 1: Open Educational Resources (OER)
What is OER?
Any digital resource used for teaching that carries a licence for reuse and remix is OER. Something like a CC BY-SA 4.0 is typical.
Open licensing is fundamental to OER.
Faculty face many unknowns:
What tools should I use? Which license is the best option? Who owns the IP? Am I allowed to do this at my University? How do I get permission? Is this OER outdated? Does this affect my T&P? Will I be irrelevant after everyone has my lectures?
Most talk about OER as a way to lessen the cost burden of textbooks. That’s great, but can it do more?
We can access OER learning content freely. OER indexing sites like oercommons.org do a great job.
however…
Both using and authoring OER is hard.
Most faculty are not web developers or have knowledge of digital publishing.
There are no real standards for digital publishing of OER.
Most OER content is produced with different tools in different formats, with different visual treatments. It takes more work to evaluate and reuse OER than to start from scratch in some cases.
We need OER to be interoperable so we can perform remix.
What is Remix?
Remix is the process of combining and editing existing work to create derivatives. Music sampling in the hip-hop genre is the most obvious example, though all creative endeavors include remix to some degree.
Creative Commons licensing allows authors to express their permission to allow derivatives.
Step 2: Make content a creative medium
OER Schema is machine readable pedagogy expressed as structured information.
We intend to eventually help all published OER become interoperable through a shared vocabulary of descriptive metadata.
When all OER is interoperable, it becomes trivial for developers to build remix tools.
You don’t need to know how pedagogy works just as you don’t need to know how the Internet works to use it.
Go to Bryan Ollendyke’s session on LRN Components today at 2:30am and follow @elmsln on Twitter.
elmsln.org and learn.hibbittsdesign.org! <- OER Schema beta testers
Why didn’t we just call it “Pedagogy Schema?”
There is more than one ‘gogy’ out there. I personally don’t see a need for more than one, but what do I know?
OER-normative
We are biasing production of education materials towards OPEN.
As with OER, we are letting future knowledge workers know that open content is totally normal.
We have no interest in proprietary learning design. That already exists at every academic institution on the planet.
Future conversation:
“Why would you not openly license it? That’s so strange and not at all normal?” -Someone Awesome
OER Schema is designed to proliferate remixable OER. If it’s not openly licensed, it can’t be legally remixed. <- Some people care about this
Large institutions tend to adopt established frameworks, expensive tools, and known standards (So I’ve been told).
While a big university provides a fertile environment for experimentation, it suffers from the same ills as any other large institution.
We have to do it grassroots.
Author content in MARKDOWN w/ gitbook.com
GIT repository
HTML5
EPUB
LMS
Printed Book Edition
CENTRAL OER SOURCE
VERSATILE STANDARD FORMAT
SIMULTANEOUS PUBLISHING ENDPOINTS
CMS
DESCRIPTIVE VOCABULARY AND LICENSE/COPYRIGHT
Authoring: Gitbook.com
Repository: Github.com
LMS Endpoint: ELMS Learning Network
HTML Endpoint
EPUB Endpoint
What uses OER Schema now?
https://github.com/LRNWebComponents/oer-schema
https://github.com/open-curriculum/grav-plugin-oerschema
Works with HTML5 or an LMS
Gitbook Plugin (beta)
https://learn.hibbittsdesign.org/grav-gantry5-particles/oer-schema
Grav CMS plugin
http://oerschema.org/docs/
Write it manually into HTML
A demo with the SEED remix proof-of-concept tool.
http://seed.oerschema.org
Demo Tools:
Google Strutured Data Testing Tool: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/
SEED tool: http://seed.oerschema.org/
Demo test content:
Gitbook content source A: https://open-curriculum.gitbooks.io/oer-schema-test/content/the_bauhaus.html
Gitbook content source B: https://kat-wehr.gitbooks.io/psu-006-first-year-seminar/content/assignment_community_service.html
We already have powerful�digital publishing.
For a revolution in education technology, we need the OER remix tools. Coming soon.
How can you help?
Google will index learning content according to OER Schema vocabulary as soon as it becomes popular (their words, not mine). We won’t need independent OER indexing websites if this happens. Neat!
W3C group: https://www.w3.org/community/oerschema/
Twitter: @OerSchema