From the blog TOETOE (ˈtɔɪtɔɪ): Technology for Open English - Toying with Open E-resources http://www.alannahfitzgerald.org/280/

1. Articles from TOETOE Technology for
Open English Toying with Open E-
resources (ˈtɔɪtɔɪ)
The Experimenters
2012-03-22 14:03:25 admin
“I mean somebody with the wit and the
guts to go and do and create. And, that
I believe is what education is all about”
– Gordon Pask, 1974
This post is dedicated to the memory of Gary Boyd who taught me about and
inspired me with systems thinking and cybernetics for educational practice. He and
Gordon Pask, the guy in the Youtube clip above who on another clip someone
commented that he’d make a great Dr. Who character, began the Educational
Technology programme at Concordia University in Montreal, the oldest EdTech
programme in North America where I am now a student.

2. IATEFL Conference 2012,
Glasgow
This week I’ve been to some very encouraging talks and presentations at this year’s
IATEFL conference in Glasgow. A key theme that I’ve found running through all of
the sessions I’ve attended thus far is that of experimentation; in learning design, in
research, in educational leadership, and but not at all least, in teaching.
Adrian Underhill kicked things off with his opening keynote, Mess and Progress,
based on systems thinking for leadership, emphasizing the need for post-heroic
leadership and flat hierarchies in the many educational contexts around the world.
This notion of experimental leadership at the policy, institutional and individual level
was effectively carried forward in the following presentation on Tuesday, ELT in
Action, by the international A.S.Hornby Educational Trust Scholars, including
speakers from Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sudan, Sri Lanka, India, Venezuela, Mexico,
Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Yemen. [Find out more about the Hornby
scholars in an interview with three participating scholars at this IATEFL conference].
Systems thinking is very closely connected to cybernetics and Gordon Pask in the
televised broadcast above was a leading cyberneticist and educational technologist
experimenting with processes in education, arriving at his famous conversation
theory which the second IATEFL keynote speaker, Diana Laurillard, draws upon in
her renowned book, Rethinking University Teaching – A Conversational Framework
for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies.
Laurillard’s new book, Teaching as a Design Science – Building Pedagogical
Patterns for Learning and Technology sold out at the conference. The book along
with the tool she introduced in her talk, the Learning Design Support Environment
(LDSE), which you can download for free from the LDSE project website,
encourages sharing and collaboration between educators to lead, experiment and
innovate with learning technologies and to build collective knowledge in this
important area. In order to succeed, this collaborative effort will require openness.
On Diana Laurillard’s slides she mentions OER – Open Educational Resources – in
several places, but perhaps she needed to gloss OER and open practice more
overtly to the 2000+ audience at the IATEFL conference because only one person
who came to my session on open corpora and OER for ELT had ever heard of the
term before. This is despite the popularity of Russell Stannard’s work with free
Teacher Training Videos (TTV) which are OER for teacher and learner training with
technology in ELT.
Addressing the Training Resource Deficit

3. Utilizing Open Corpora and OER
View more presentations from Alannah Fitzgerald
Flat Hierarchy
Flat hierarchy is the model followed by and experimented with by open education
practitioners who choose to embody openness in their everyday practices for
reducing barriers to and increasing access to education for all. Openness promotes
“communal management by distributed stakeholders (users/producers/contributors)
rather than a centralized authority (owners, experts, boards of directors, etc.)”
(definition via Wikipedia on Openness). The term OER was coined ten years ago by
UNESCO and this year OER stakeholders will convene virtually and in person in
June 2012 to establish further international goals for the open education movement.
Watch this space.
Returning to Adrian Underhill’s Mess and Progress, he ended his talk on a high note
by performing his song, The Reflective Practice Blues, singing the need “…to reflect
and not to neglect to try out something different everyday…” Basically, we can’t
afford to continue to work in silos as it’s far too costly, both in the sense of wasting
resources through the duplication of effort in creating similar copyrighted resources,
and also in the sense of wasting potential opportunities for what could be if we would
only open up to sharing what we do and the outputs of what we create so we can

4. experiment with and improve upon these things. Underhill captured this ethos in his
keynote with the following awareness-raising activity:
“Talk to the people sitting next to you to identify if you work somewhere where…
1. it’s easy to get people to listen to an experiment with new ideas and
suggestions
2. when one person learns something new, everyone hears about it
3. making mistakes is part of learning, you can be open about it and it’s not
career limiting
4. staff members of all ranks give each other plenty of quality feedback from
above, below, and sideways
5. everyone is involved in discussing school policies before adoption
6. one department knows what people in another department are thinking and
they help each other” (Underhill, A. Opening keynote address, IATEFL
Conference 2012, Glasgow)
Is this reminiscent of your workplace and who you are in your working practice?
Would you consider yourself to be an Open Educational Resource? If not yet or not
completely, how can you become an experimenter in your practice to help open
things up for yourself and others?
The The Experimenters by Alannah Fitzgerald, unless otherwise expressly stated, is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Terms and
conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at
www.alannahfitzgerald.org.