Gina Bennett

Hi Janet & fellow SCoPE-ers

My business card tells me I'm an 'eLearning Specialist' at College of the Rockies in BC, Canada. I support all types of distance learning & also curriculum development at our small postsecondary institution.

Like several others, I expect I'll be mostly lurking in this discussion since I am not actively involved in formal research requiring live online interviews. However, I have been both the conductor & the conductee in several online interviews & I am curious to know how it might have gone better. I know enough about interviewing to understand how important it is to develop a sense of trust before you attempt to collect any data & that's not always easy to do in an online environment in which at least one of the participants lacks confidence.

In terms of research, I'm currently looking into ways to assess intercultural competence for individuals, institutions, & communities.

Looking forward!
Gina

Hi Nellie,

I've been involved in some effective collaborations too. When I reflect about what made them effective, I can think of a few points:

• we started out with clear tasks and a very tight timeline
• we all had had past experience working in a team
• consequently, we knew to jump right in & get to work
• we didn't spend hours or agonize over who would do what; everybody picked something to do & set a time to report back
• we communicated FREQUENTLY
• we were always polite with each other, even when the time got very tight or if someone forgot to do something
• when reporting out, we took credit (& accepted blame) as a team rather than as individuals.

When I think about it, some of my most satisfying teamwork experiences have been with virtual teams in which I never met the participants in person. I think there are some advantages to NOT knowing each other's detailed histories. But I can certainly vouch for the fact that practice makes for improvement when it comes to teamwork & collaboration.

Gina

Hi everybody. I'm joining this discussion rather late but feel motivated to jump in after attending the Open Education conference last week.

Sylvia asked "why collaborate?" Some of us accept it as an automatic Good -- a 'motherhood' issue -- but I think it's a question that really needs to be considered directly. Faculty set up assignments that encourage students to collaborate but unless there are some clearly-stated benefits for collaboration, many students resent it (I heard this comment mentioned from someone at the OpenEd conference as well). Some people focus on the economic benefits of collaboration but I'm feeling more & more leery about that justification; I think it's a far too insular & shortsighted view. So if you don't accept collaboration as an automatic good nor a financial investment, why collaborate?

I think the biggest change that technology has brought to education (maybe to the world) is a smudging of the boundaries & borders between us. The new incredible powers of communication make it painfully obvious that we do not exist in a vacuum; we can't maintain our little educational or cultural kingdoms. Even our tiny college, tucked away in a narrow valley within the Rocky Mountains, is vitally affected by what happens in other colleges in the province, by universities in the province next door, by the politics of our neighbour country to the south. If we don't communicate/collaborate often & well, we will disappear.

I, too, was very interested in Catherine Ngugi's keynote talk at OpenEd. I was fascinated especially by her description of how they use various open education strategies to help their medical students acquire patient experience. I realized how useful these strategies (& arguments) would be for a remote science lab project I'm involved in. In this case, we Canadians would be the 'developing nation' partner seeking to learn from the more 'developed' educational practices of our sub-Saharan partner.

Maybe being so small helps keep us humble

Gina Bennett
College of the Rockies

Great participation, great moderation -- great discussion!

Thanks Scott & thank you EVERYBODY.

Gina

We've had 2 days of quietness on this topic & of course that's to be expected as a scheduled discussion draws to a close. Part of it too, I suspect, is because we are sort of preaching to the choir. SCoPE is a very open community & none of us would be here if we were hyper-concerned about copyrighting every word we write. But we also know that not everybody feels the same way; progress towards openness seems glacial at times. What can we personally do to speed things up?

What, specifically, can *I* do? I can rant, of course, but I already do that & I have to be careful with that compulsion. I can be concientious about using CC licencing or copylefting what I produce. But for change to occur, to push us over the tipping point with OERs & openness in general, we'll need more & wider strategies. There's a range of strategies already out there, from the guerilla-like tactics of gpirate all the way to the friendly reminder from BCcampus to use at least a BC Commons licence on provincially-funded online development.

I suspect the next Big Step will take place at the institutional and regional/provincial levels. Institutions can declare their commitment to openness, as Capilano University did when it became the first institution in BC to join the OpenCourseWare initiative. In BC, we have the requirement for provincially-funded educational resources to be published semi-openly in our repository (SOL*R). In terms of providing incentive for publishing OERs, this cover the 'stick' approach. But maybe we would benefit from some additional 'carrot' approaches: some showy publicity for the institution which publishes the most OERs in the most open format, maybe a special funding envelope for curriculum developed with existing OERs, perhaps a targetted innovation award for the team that has done something really exciting with openness.

Somehow I think we have to increase the porosity of our institutions, of The Academy overall. Educational openness in general & OERs specifically have to be tied in with our strategic plans and vision statements & talked about as contributing to the positive future we're all hoping for.