Open Pedagogy and Sharing

 This week's readings included:

1. Planning to Share Versus Just Sharing

2. Open Pedagogy: The Importance of Getting It In the Air

The point of these articles was that sharing is necessary, and not just to share, but to design what you are doing with the end goal of sharing these materials in mind.  These articles are both a little older, so I would be curious to see how things have changes over the last several years. Is it still necessary to go about creating teaching materials for the purpose of sharing these materials? It is impossible to say. I don't know how things were puiblished differently when these were written, but the perception of faculty and adminiistrators at that time seems very similar to those of faculty and administrators now overall. But what of the formats in which we are sharing our information? What of the rules that govern our sharing?

    It seems much more popular now than it did 20 years ago to post pre-publiction articles on venues such as Research Gate or a blog. This allows the information to be spread and used in practice while it is not available to use to further research without the copy that is available throgu the piblisher.  I appreciate advantages that this gives to our practitioner friends who may be unable to access the large volumes of research that are only available through subscription and especially to become familiar with the work of particular researchers. For ecample, if I were interested in the work of one of my advisor's colleagues, I could see what she or he has availableon their blog or Research Gate in order to use that in the K-12 classroom.

    For this reason, I don't konw that we really have to be creating something with the purpose of sharing it openly. It is useful just to have the information and the context in which it was used.  In so doing, we are enabling those who have built up their competencies to the poitn of understanding to grow their understanding through the work that we publish in public places.

    However, the point is made that in order to make an open community effective, we need to set out to do so. There needs to be a directory of some kind to facilitate the creation of a learning community.  I am not aware of a tool like this existing at present, but it would be very valuable and yet, very difficult to create. There aer so many areas of study and so many people researching in those areas. Once you get down into the smaller distinctions in an area, you may only have a few  people doing research, but do they get their own database? Their own section in the database? Or do they just get listed as people who are contributing to open researouces?