During #openeducationwk 2017 Penny (Australia), Vivianne (Brazil), Judith (Kenya), Jenni (Canada), Sujata (India) and I launched together the #101openstories project. We hope by the end of this year to collect and curate 101 such stories which show how individuals have become open learners, open practitioners or open researchers. The Open Education Working Group and especially Javiera, kindly offered to help us create an open book from #101openstories.
Stories have always fascinated me. As a passionate reader of novels, translator of novels and children’s stories, writer of children’s stories, but also teacher of modern foreign languages, teacher educator and academic developer. The Open Facilitator project with Carol Yeager (@couki1), whom I met in 2011 when I engaged passionately in the Creativity and Multicultural Communication (CMC11) MOOC she developed, and in collaboration with the Open Education Working Group and the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Manchester Metropolitan University, is a collection of stories and brought insights into the facilitation experience that were of value for all of us. We hope others will use the collection to carry out further research in this area. Maybe I should also consider this myself after I have completed my PhD studies.
Another story-related project, the storyboxHE with Ellie (@ehannan14) aims to collect practitioner stories around learning and teaching that can be used in academic development situations and help academics to engage with these and reflect on their own practice through dialogue and collaborative problem-finding and problem solving. I am also using stories in academic development courses and FDOL and FOS that followed based on this, are such an example.
Stories are a powerful way to share experiences, ideas and create links between the story and our own life experiences and learn from each other. We hope that many individuals from around the world will contribute their story to the #101openstories collection.
Today, I would like to share my open story.
The key questions I asked myself are the following:
- How did it all start?
- Were did it lead me?
Mmm… it is difficult to pinpoint the exact start. I suspect that my personal life journey in three different countries helped me recognise from early on the importance of sharing and collaborating as well as valuing diversity to survive and thrive.
Sheila, in her open story talks about the usefulness of a timeline… her post reminded me of one I created a while ago as an Excel spreadsheet when I was making another set of timelines for my PhD research. I thought it would be useful and linked to my prologue in the thesis in which I make reference to my path towards openness but as it is part of my PhD I am not sure I can just copy and past it here… so I didn’t read it but started from scratch here…. Creating the timeline helped me visualise some of the connections and see my path into the world of open, all on one sheet, at least the digital dimension. I suspect another layer that captures the non-digital dimension would be equally useful as this was my actual starting point into openness and perhaps I need to add this dimension too after I finish writing this post.
Professionally, I think I could locate my first baby steps towards openness when I started creating learning resources while I was teaching German in Athens. That was before 1990 and I used WordPerfect and a PC that took up a lot of room and hard hardly any brain and used these things called floppy discs which were really floppy. Life as an undergraduate student was challenging… only phone calls, word processing and email or fax for remote communication. No VLE or social media. And I was working full-time in Athens while studying full-time on Corfu… I know, hard to believe. Later, after I had left the Navy (yes, I was in the Navy for 5 years) in 1996 I had the opportunity to stay for a whole academic year in Germersheim at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in Germany to carry out research into translating children’s literature where I also had the opportunity to teach in the department. I remember sitting in front of a computer screen there and was told that this was the internet… while I had been using emails for some years, also worked in a computer centre for five years, and was involved in localising cd-roms as a translator, the internet was alien to me… at that point in time… My expectations were that it would be something much more dynamic than the university site I was looking at. Believe it or not, I asked somebody for help to understand what this was all about… while still in Germersheim, I managed to find my mum’s best friend via the internet who she had lost many years ago… the rest is history.
As a translator I often struggled to find specific terms and I remember in one case calling a casino on Syros island when I was translating Hermann Hesse’s book Der Kurgast for Kastaniotis publications. Would you consider this as open practice? There was no network and especially when the author was no longer alive, books, reference guides and encyclopaedias did not always have the answer, as answers often are within people and the conversations with them, this is what I have found.
When I become familiar with navigating the web, and social media arrived, I found the freely available SEBRAN software and volunteered to translate this into Greek in 2005. I was living in the UK by then and was teaching again languages. Also I had an interest in coding I attended a 10-week html could thanks to which I was able to create my own website and activities for my students who were learning Greek. My prior work as a computer programmer in the Greek Navy did help a tiny bit. I was hooked and soon had created 300 Greek language learning activities and made them freely and openly available. I had used many different freely available software tools that I had found online. This activity all started in 2004. Often people contacted me, not just my own students but also others who found the site and used the activities.this site no longer exists as it was build on a free freeserve ftp space. I still have all the activities offline and would love to find a place for them online to share again and use in combination with an open course perhaps.
Many other open activities followed. From wikis for audio feedback in 2008 to collaborative learning and development spaces in the same year using Ning. It was free at the time and I created a whole a teacher development course into it and anybody could access and join us. Earlier when I was still teaching languages, I used the ning platform for language learning combined with cookery lessons. A wide range of projects followed also thanks to the MSc in Blended and Online Education I did at Edinburgh Napier University. I started using the creative commons licenses and integrated open educational resources in courses and materials I used and created. Furthermore, open licenses were also added to the courses I (co-)developed as I feel that this would encourage re-use and adaptation. PhD research in open academic development (I developed a cross-boundary collaborative open learning framework) followed and will hopefully be completed this year. Very quickly, the open projects became collaborative ones as I felt that while I can plant seeds, ideas only grow when they are shared and there is mutual and sustained commitment and trust among collaborators and the focus is above all on the collective interest…
My curiosity has led me to explore possibilities to maximise learning and development through making, practice and research based on open sharing. Through these activities and the communities these have developed around them, I have had the privilege to get to know and work with diverse individuals from different parts of the world. These relationships continue to expand my horizons with perspectives and ideas I could never have imagined before.
Thank you all.
The open journey continues…
Chrissi