Domains21: “My OER Journey through Domains”

Ed Nagelhaut is a repeat offender for the Domains conference, and an absolute joy of a human. So him narrate his journey through OER viz-a-viz domains was a personal highlight of OERxDomains21. Honest, authentic, and empathetic, Ed really highlights the potential loneliness of a long distance open education advocate. The riches in the Domains21 track just keep on coming, below the video is the abstract he sumbitted for this presentation.

This reflective practice presentation will examine how open educational resources led me inexorably through Domains. Since this journey has been a primary pedagogical influence on my more than 30 years of teaching literate practices at the university level, the presentation will reflect critically through a lens of open pedagogy as outlined by Bronwyn Hegarty (2015). The goals of the presentation, ultimately, are to offer suggestions for developing an open mindset and recommendations for effectively applying OER and Domains in courses using open pedagogical practices.

This presentation will begin by briefly describing my OER journey through Domains and how that has shaped my open mindset. From student-generated reading lists rather than textbooks to working out-loud rather than in isolation, my journey has been sometimes lonely, sometimes rocky, but always rewarding.

Next, this presentation will introduce Hegarty’s Eight Attributes of Open Pedagogy as a critical lens for understanding project and course design using open educational resources and domains. As a framework, these attributes will establish the parameters for my critical review.

Finally, this presentation will offer a critical review of a sample literacy project sequence grounded in open practices like OER and Domains that can be adapted easily to any course on campus. Open project sequences are student-centered, flexible, and inquiry-based.

For me, 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 the results of the complex interactions among writer(s), readers, texts, and contexts (Brandt, 2011; Selber, 2004). And since literate practices are both cognitive and social (Cushman, Kintgen, Kroll, & Rose, 2001), we can easily create classroom spaces that encourage project sequences that are personalized, rhetorical, and contextualized. Open educational resources and Domains, as this presentation will show, have consistently helped me to meet these pedagogical goals throughout my teaching career.