The Catch: Issue #14

What’s happening in technology-enabled learning?

Photo by Andy Brunner on Unsplash.

The Cutting/Trailing Edge

Twitter is 12 years old. WordPress is 15. They must be ancient relics from days gone by, right? Put those two together to run an open and free conference and what you have is a truly cool, cutting-edge use of technology that has been around for quite a while.

On March 29th, the 2018 PressEd Conference occurred. Every presenter was given 15 minutes in the spotlight to tweet (usually) 15 tweets about what they’ve been doing and to take and respond to questions. Where did it take place? Well, part of it occurred from Terry Greene’s basement in Peterborough as he shared how Ontario Extend uses WordPress to connect Ontario educators to share their technology-enabled teaching and learning skills with each other. Jenni Hayman went meta from her living room in Guelph as she showed us how to use WordPress to create OER on OER. You can see all 45 abstracts here, many of them now including links to Twitter moments or blog posts that collect all the tweets that were presented. It was a very cool experience that has left us with some fascinating uses of WordPress in education. We’re still sifting through it all!

What’re you DoOOing?

DoOO is an acronym for Domain of One’s Own, which is the practice of teachers and students running their own web domains to collect and share their learning. It is a wonderful, holistic, and open way to learn and share. As mentioned above, Ontario Extend makes use of WordPress to harness some of the power of DoOO by syndicating various participant domains into groups so that we can all see each other’s work in one place. It’s quite empowering and fun. Have a look at the action of one such hub here on the Ontario Extend East Cohort, which is currently running its way through the Scholar Module together.

If seeing all of this excitement makes you want to join in, have no FOMO! We are kicking off the Extend West cohort on May 8th at Lambton College in Sarnia (and running an info Q&A about it on April 17th). Pop your name in at bit.ly/ExtendWest and we will send you details. And if you think you’re not eligible for Extend West because of your location, you’re wrong! You’ve got to be west of somewhere! If you can’t be in Sarnia on May 8th, joining online is the next best thing.

Network Connectivity

Is Toronto the centre of the known universe? The answer to that depends on if you live in Toronto (“Uhhh, there are other places?) or not (“&**#%^@?!”).

From April 13-15th, however, Toronto will truly be the centre of the sharing universe as it hosts the Creative Commons Global Summit! Will you be there? If so, you can attend the sessions of some of your Ontario colleagues like this one: Common Connections – Finding a Home on the Open Range, which features Ontario stalwarts Claire Coulter, Helen DeWaard, Jenni Hayman and Laura Killam. They were also nice enough to let an Open Education Hero from B.C. join them.

If you aren’t able to attend, you still have the chance to connect via the great volunteer work of Virtually Connecting. Check out the CC Summit post on their site for details on how to join one of their sessions. You can also follow along to the summit on Twitter with the hashtag #CCSummit.

Open Treasure

In honour of (or disservice to) National Poetry Month:

With bated breath, we’ve made you wait

Not sharing an arrival date.

Suspense ~ still not at an end,

But to you we do send

A list, costly education to upend

If you are not into poetry… here is a sampling of new, open textbooks (and other OER) created by your Ontario colleagues with support from eCampusOntario. These OER gems are receiving their final polish and making their way to eCampusOntario. eCampusOntario partners continue to customize their new home, which is why they will not be available immediately. They will, however, be worth the wait. Stay tuned for their release into the Open! After you whet your appetite on the baker’s dozen below, find a fulsome list here.

• Apprendre le français à travers les genres : le fait divers passé et le compte-rendu Effective Workplace Communication
• Inclusion and Consultation in Early Childhood Studies and Care
• Indigenous Studies: First Peoples’ Stories in Canada
• Intro History and Philosophy of Science
• Introduction to Heavy Civil Engineering Operations and Equipment Management Neuroscience – Canadian 1st edition
• Online Modules with Virtual Gaming Simulation:
The Essentials of Maternal and Newborn Assessment in Nursing
• Open Data Structures: Open-content textbook,Videos, and Online Exercises
• Pension Finance and Management
• The Open Digital Archaeology Textbook Environment: An Integrated Open Source
  Approach for Teaching Method and Practice in Digital Archaeology
• Write Here, Right Now: An Interactive Introduction to Academic Writing and
  Research

Sandbox Scoop

Baffled by badges and what they are? Basically they are a digital representation evidencing something amazing that you’ve done or know how to do. Our open badging sandbox has itself opened up a lot of questions about this and to help we have held monthly, hour-long open badging clinics for our sandbox partners and friends. Links to a bunch of the recordings are on this Google Doc (note all webinars were conducted in English).

A couple of clinic highlights featured guest speakers such as Brenton Wimmer, Assistant Director, Transformative Learning Assessment, University of Central Oklahoma talking about UCO’s Student Transformative Learning Record and Eric Rouselle from Discendum talking about Open Badge Factory’s new Endorsements feature.

Join us for one of our upcoming calls:

Thursday, April 12th @ 9:00 (featuring Kathleen Radionoff, Director, Digital Credential Institute, and “Digital Badges: Workforce Training and Continuing Education”

Thurs, May 10th @ 9:00

Thurs, June 7th @ 9:00

No registration necessary, just join in by Zoom: https://ecampusontario.zoom.us/j/416344645

The Catch is a regular blog post on ecampusontario.ca curated, created, and collaborated on by the eCampusOntario Program Managers: Terry Greene, Peg French, Joanne Kehoe, and Jenni Hayman. Other contributors include… you? Let us know if you have something that you think would fit nicely in here by emailing thecatch@ecampusontario.ca with the subject heading “Catch This!” or whichever subject heading you want to use, really.