 Generally dry day on Wednesday. Welcome to another session of Domains 21 and in this community you need privilege to have the return offender with the offender for the Domains conference and you've been to at least I think all three yes all three welcome and make a lot thanks for coming to the move once again even this is a particularly different one this year but I'm very interested as I'm sure everyone watching is to hear about your OER journey through domains so without any further ado take it away. Thanks Jim and this is my presentation my OER journey through domains a critical reflection on literacy instruction so let's begin. As I continue to age as I see retirement easing up on the near horizon much of my recent work contains a good bit of reflection looking back and looking forward and much of this reflection tends towards stories albeit academic stories about the modest successes and larger shortcomings of the work that I've done. This reflective practice presentation offers a set of stories describing how open educational resources has led me inexorably through domains. Since this journey has been a primary pedagogical influence I reflect critically on my more than 30 years of teaching literate practices at the university level from student-generating reading lists rather than textbooks to working out loud rather than isolation. The early parts of my journey were sometimes lonely when I felt like the only open practitioner on campus. I think I have felt this way in the past mostly because I consider myself an early adopter. I don't really consider myself an innovator incorporating instead the tools that innovators offer. Basically I think I fit right here including the highs of peak of inflated expectations to the lows of the trough of disillusionment although that's much less the case for me personally because I am a plotter who just keeps plugging away and adapting where necessary. And to tell my stories I'm going to use a simple definition for the structure of a story from Aaron Morgenstern. Something was then something changed and reflecting on this has helped me see the ways that open educational resources have served as a catalyst for change and led to my five big knots of teaching. For me these five knots are five key pedagogical areas that we must account for in the design and use of open educational resources. The first is that knowledge is not simply content. I learned early on that I was not interested in the tyranny of knowledge which too often leads to rote memorization and regurgitation. Knowledge is much more complex and contextual than that. Second is a textbook is not the only perspective. Over the years more and more I have tried my best to avoid exceeding to the authority of a textbook. A single perspective denies engagement. Third is a course is not an isolated context. Personally I find it hard to allow that a course is even a single node in a network but that's a story for a different day. Fourth is that the teacher is not the sole authority in the classroom. A point for me that can never be said too loudly or too often and which ties directly to the fifth area. Students are not empty vessels. As a student myself I learned in paradigms that were the opposite of these knots and I always felt uncomfortable. Something was then something changed. For me these knots represent the change. I realized that teaching was not telling, that teaching was about learning and if teaching is about learning then the learner needs to have some primacy, some agency in the learning. And while my anti-authoritarian thinking about pedagogy has shaped my own practices, the academic stories that I want to tell in other venues like conferences often require the use of external authority. So my proposal offered Hegerty's eight attributes of open pedagogy as a critical lens for understanding project and course design using open educational resources and domains. For me these eight attributes align with my five knots in a variety of ways. The most important of which is a student centered approach to project design and project delivery in a learning environment. In other words open is always student centered rather than top down and the rest of this presentation will focus on that key idea. Before I reflect on my project design through this lens I want to offer a brief definition of both OER and domains. For me they are a larger part, a larger open pedagogical umbrella, defined for me as text, tools, applications and platforms in the public domain or licensed to retain, revise, remix, reuse and redistribute. With domains providing a platform for housing a suite of open source tools such as those listed here. Remains therefore can function as a professional hub for work, for coursework, research, portfolio material, social media, film and video archives and civic engagement resources. Like my pedagogical thinking OER was attractive to me because as Robin de Rosa points out it provides an impetus for thinking about how course and program design can be adapted to make access more broadly rid of priority. While cost savings is an important factor for access especially at my university I also interpret access as a factor for learning and for constructing our courses and programs in a more student centered way. My work with OERs began in the late 1990s and has for the most part been a fairly lonely journey especially in the English departments that I called home. But I have always kept my eyes open for new open applications and I had been following the exploits of an innovator named Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington. Luckily for me my OER work led me to the digital learning resource network conference at Stanford in 2015 and I got to meet Jim face to face for the first time to discuss how we might bring domains to UNLV. I started pitching it on campus soon after because as I said earlier I found the potential for bringing open tools for students to use in a variety of ways from a variety of perspectives exciting. But we haven't got the buy in that I had hoped from the proposal that I'd been pitching all over campus for the past three years and this latest survey might explain it. They are aware of these tools but are not really ready to think about how to adopt them. In any case I'm not here to complain about my colleagues but to reflect on a project process that I use to enhance the use of OER in different forms in the classroom. As I have argued in numerous venues, pedagogical goals and classroom practices at all levels of education must encourage greater collaboration, privilege informal and situated learning and promote decision making, student self monitoring and lifelong learning. Literacy is never simply reading or writing but instead better understood as a result of the complex interactions among writers, readers, texts and context. Since literate practices are both cognitive and social, we can easily create classroom spaces that encourage project sequences that are personalized, rhetorical and contextualized. Open educational resources and domains have consistently helped me to meet my open pedagogical goals throughout my teaching career. As I said, project design should begin with students. How can project design give them agency and empower their learning? Since I'm a writing guy, I think of project design in the same kinds of ways. Planning section of the project, drafting, revising, editing section of the project and a reflection section of the project. This works for any kind of project even if there is no writing component to it. The key, no matter the deliverable, is building in time for students to work, to play, to make mistakes, to share, to collaborate. This to me is a definition of learning. As my discussion works its way through the primary components of my project design, I'll point out the ways that it does or does not meet the expectations outlined by Hegerty. In general, I think they meet them all, but I'll do my best to be critical. More in general, the project design treats student learning as developmental and recursive, not linear. Learners move back and forth among the stages as they work towards submission of project deliverables. This is why time is such an important factor in the design. The first and last part of the design mirror each other with students engaging with the class, sharing knowledge and asking questions, in short, being sensitive to their own learning needs while at the same time contributing to the larger ongoing conversations. In other words, these two elements represent early student activity in the project. They are gathering resources for understanding concepts more fully and for completing the work. They are exploring and reviewing uses of different software or apps that will help them construct more effective deliverables, and they are sharing their findings with the rest of the class. The teacher's job in many respects is as curator, organizing and suggesting. For some or many students, this approach might feel like they are being thrown into the void, asked to travel down paths that only lead to darkness. Instead, with time, they will see that the paths lead to a cornucopia of knowledge that is organized in ways that they can move effectively in, out, and through. This for me allows students to personalize their experience with the project to develop from where they are at currently in their thinking and skill levels. And while the design encourages students to look inward for their learning goals, it also requires outward participation. This open atmosphere ideally helps students learn about and learn how to choose and use a wide range of strategies that will aid in their critical learning and reflective practices. This part of the project alone hits all the attributes for open pedagogy by allowing students to explore and share. The early stages ask students to explore sources and resources in order to help them establish a context for the project. And it is from this understanding that students begin to discuss how their work should be evaluated and help develop the evaluation criteria as a class. Whether the final deliverable is a paper, a website or an exam, I think that students should help develop their criteria by which their work will be evaluated. And then as part of their reflection, they can more accurately reflect on the ways that they met the criteria relative to their own learning goals for the project. Again, for me, student work, no matter the deliverable, should go through multiple drafts with time set aside for peer review and teacher review before they submit their final work for evaluation. The goal here is to model recursivity, to model collaboration, to encourage trust in multiple perspectives, to allow for the time necessary to submit their best work. And at no time should students feel isolated. The most important thing in project design for me is that our projects be purposeful, that they have meaning for students so that the students engage with the work, so that students feel like they are accomplishing the things that they need to support their learning in ways that are important to them. In this way, I believe my open project design is student centered, flexible and inquiry based. And when it is grounded in open practices like OER and domains, it can be adapted easily to any course on campus. As I come to the end of this particular academic story, I can honestly say that I have learned in writing this story. Something was then something changed. My hope is, as always, is that hoping and the adoption of open practices will be more commonplace in the future. Thank you. And if we have any questions, please let me know. I really enjoyed the way in which you framed the larger majority of OER as a professor and what that's meant for your teaching. And I'm just wondering why do you think the adoption of OER, despite its popularity, is still flat? I mean, it's interesting. I think part of it is that, like on our campus, for the first time this year, we have an actual group who is in faculty development that are offering support for helping faculty adopt OERs. And I think for the most part, when faculty don't have the support, the kinds of support that will allow them, again, like with student projects, if they don't have the time, if they feel pressured, they're going to take the path of least resistance. And I think OER requires an extra amount of effort and time. I used to have arguments in my department all the time when they would say, oh, well, Student Center, that just makes it easier on you. When I have to do lectures, I have to spend time preparing these lectures. But in reality, I'm trying to explain to them, when you do Student Center, do you have to adapt all the kinds of learning that students want to do and figure out the best ways to provide the resources or suggest resources that they can go out and find. And that is, in many ways, much more time consuming than just ordering a textbook online. And, you know, I would still, I would also say that OER even seems to focus a lot on textbooks, open textbooks. And again, you kind of fall into that same trap where the professor is the one who is dictating what students read rather than giving topics an initial starting point for students and then having them go out and do the research and find what kinds of work and reading they might find that will help their learning in the ways that they find most important. That's excellent. And I really appreciate the way you narrated your journey for us and framed it out so brilliantly and well executed. So thank you once again for participating in Domain 21 and making it what it is. Well, and thank you for everything that you do. I mean, I said that you were an innovator that I had been kind of stalking a little bit, tracking with your work at Mary Washington. And so when I got in contact with you and found out you're going to be at Stanford that in 2015, I was, you know, can we please have some time to meet? It was great. It's funny. I remember the conversation. Well, it was you, me and Mike Caulfield. He just finished talking about the garden and the stream. Yes, framing that and we went to a cafeteria, I think, and Stanford and we started to have a great conversation. Yeah, that's great. Well, that's what it's all about, right? I mean, you frame it beautifully with, you know, it's that picture of the woman who's doing the it's kind of anime and she's doing the art and she's got the Wacom and to me, that's the experience and it's not alienating and isolating. It's a whole context of creation through these new tools. That is a communal project, even if we happen to be alone when we're doing it. Right. And, you know, if you see on the screen, she's actually drawing a picture of herself. And so, yeah, and so there's all these layers of reflection and thinking and presenting. Yeah, I love that. And I love your open window. Your open window image was awesome. That's what I felt like a lot. Well, thanks again, Ed. We really appreciate you coming and presenting. Alright, thank you, Jim. Thanks for having me. Great. And now you get to see my favorite outro. I love this. Ready? Go.