Hi @feb21-cohort! I hope you are all having a good start to your Open Education Week!
I’m very excited for us to kick off our programming tomorrow, at 10am ET/ 9am CT. We will:
Introduce ourselves and our projects
Learn about the program’s goals, structure, and how Rebus’ approach is unique
Watch a demonstration of the tools we will be using in our year together
Every week, I will post a link to the resources I reference during our sessions, in the form of a set of slides and a handout. These are all licensed CC BY, and can be used for your reference. Take a look at this week’s resources:
Hi everyone, I’m following up with the chat transcript from our session today. Please see my quick recap below.
Today’s main focus was to get to know one another, understand how our sessions will be structure, and learn about Rebus’ tools and approaches. We asked each other to share some information about our projects and aspirations. Over this week, please:
Respond below with your introduction, including your role on the project and the dream goal you have for it.
We also spent a bit of time discussing Rebus’ collaborative approach to publishing, and how a larger community around a resource can not only make it stronger, but also help maintain it down the line. Our approach hinges on thinking about marketing, accessibility, formatting, and more at each stage to really harness the global potential of OER and what it can do. And these stages can be flexible, and play out in different ways on your projects — that’s what the model is built to do! We also discussed how being transparent about the process of creation can invite others to contribute and be involved in projects, whether in big ways or small. The project homepage is a great way to be public and reduce duplication of work and instead lets us combine our efforts.
The remainder of the session covered the Rebus platform and the different areas that you will likely spend your time, namely, the cohort discussion space and your project home. @stacy.katz, @mcdougallc, Mary, please feel free to connect with me if you’d like to arrange an introduction to this space for those in your teams who couldn’t make today’s session.
We also talked about the cohort tag (@feb21-cohort) and how this can be used to notify everyone in the cohort, and looked at the Direct Messaging functionality on the platform. We briefly discussed tools like Pressbooks, Hypothesis, and Now Comment (thanks @harriet.fayne for the recommendation!). We ended our discussion with questions on the platform, including project homepages.
Let me know if there’s anything I missed. I want to thank you all for joining today, and for sharing your introductions!
Hi, @feb21-cohort - It was great to meet you all! I’m Jenna Sheffield and am the project manager for the textbook, Writing and Publishing in Digital Environments. This is a brand new project, and one of my goals is to learn how to develop quality OER and build a community around that OER so that @misbell and I can train faculty for our grant that she mentioned yesterday. In addition, I want to develop this textbook for a course I developed a few years ago because it’s always seemed odd to have students read a print textbook about writing in digital environments! I want a textbook grounded in rhetorical theory, and I want students to contribute to the textbook to get a felt sense of writing and publishing for digital environments. I hope this will enhance student engagement and learning in my own courses and beyond!
Hi there! It was great meeting all of you Tuesday. I’m Kaitlin Schilling and am acting as support on the regionalized adaptation of the Pulling Together: A Guide for Indigenization of Post-Secondary Institutions Foundations Guide. I am really excited to be working on this project, as I am confident that the uses for the adaptation are limitless. While it is targeting towards Post-Secondary Education, I hope to see it be used to influence further conversations about decolonization and Indigenization across many sectors including public policy.
Looking forward to learning more about everyone’s projects!
Hello @feb21-cohort!
I am thrilled to be a part of this program and to meet so many like-minded folks. I am a Writing Skills Specialist and part of the faculty at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada. Like @schillingk, @woodcockd, and @mcdougallc, I am working with a group on creating an adapted version of an open resource called Pulling Together. I am the primary writer on the project, but I am adapting and synthesizing much of the content. The objective of the guide is to introduce post-secondary faculty and staff to Indigenous people and the true history of their treatment by the Canadian government. There are further manuals aimed at specific sectors within post-secondary education. I chose to do this project as the focus of my sabbatical work. I am a non-Indigenous person with tremendous privilege and I have studied non-Indigenous allies of Indigenous Peoples. I want to leverage the privilege that I have to do work towards decolonization and reconciliation. My dream goal for this project would be twofold. First, I’d like to help create something that the community I am working with is proud of–especially the Knowledge Keepers and Elders. Secondly, I would like to see the manual in broad use within the prairie region. Okay, I have a third goal–to see someone in another area take the manual and adapt it for their own use, keeping the open resource accessible and adaptable!
As an aside, our second grandchild is due next week!
Thank you for this update, @apurva! My name is Mary Isbell and I’m so excited to have the grant funding to participate in this! I have been very interested in open educational resources for some time, and have experimented a good bit. @jsheffield and I are co-directing The Open Pedagogy project at the University of New Haven and developing our own projects with this cohort–to almost immediately begin sharing the resources and strategies with our first cohort of open pedagogy fellows. I’ve always thought that the best way to learn is to teach, though, so I think we’ll be in good shape. My first goal is to improve the publication workflow for Writer to Writer: The Guide to Academic Writing Community. It had grown a bit unwieldy and I want to simplify so it can be sustainable for the new director of the Writing Center. I then want to begin building the infrastructure for an Open Anthology of Transformative Texts, which will be built for and with students in core curriculum courses at our university. I would like to give students opportunities to propose texts for inclusion, write editorial introductions to texts, and prepare annotations. My goal is to create a community of faculty members on our campus who use and contribute (with their students) to a project that will never be finished.
Good morning, all: Looking forward to session two today. I’m working with @mcdougallc,@joangarbutt, and @kaitlin on the above-mentioned Pulling Together adaptation, providing mostly back-end/Pressbooks support. It is exciting to be part of a multidisciplinary team that has united through a common goal, to make education more reflective of the realities of Indigenous people in Canada/Manitoba. I hope this work opens up new doors for faculty, providing the encouragement they need to engage with their own open education processes for the betterment of teaching and learning.
Hello and good morning everyone! I also wanted to share a brief introduction: I’m Apurva Ashok, your facilitator for this program. My background is in English Literature, Marketing, and Publishing and I have accrued a lot of experience with open publishing projects during my time at Rebus. I’ve authored guides on collaborative publishing and co-creating OER with students. I’ve also shared lessons learned from my hands-on work with OER projects into this program and other webinars or openly licensed resources. In addition to teaching this program, I also facilitate Office Hours with the Open Education Network and lead the Rebus Community initiative. I hope to give you all a solid introduction to collaborative open publishing, give you the skills needed to move your projects along, and help you pass on this knowledge to others. My goal is to empower you all as future leaders in open education!
Hi All! I am here to learn more about OER and support @jsheffield and @misbell in the work with their Open Pedagogy grant project. Looking forward to learning more about all your interesting projects!
I want to thank you all for joining today, and for sharing your introductions!