Emily Durham Bradshaw

Academic echo chambers “Twitter makes smart people dumb,” tweeted George Siemens.  Siemens is reflecting on the fact that algorithms based on retweets make our networks more and more homogenous, and our language is limited to 140 characters and conversation bytes.  He is also throwing out argument bait to elicit counter-discourse, in my opinion. Or he is just privileged and arrogant calling his colleagues dumb, some of whom find a voice and self-positioning with social media that they would not find otherwise.  Sherrie Spelic took the bait, indicating that she was annoyed by both his baiting and his apparent arrogance.  She replied on her blog that Twitter does not have that kind of control over us, and that she is “nobody’s version of dumb.”  Spelic is making the point that with some amount of effort and a general mindset of growth, we need not dismiss the forum altogether.  An article from Science in conjunction with Facebook shows that users actually cu...

"Sunrise Acrobatics"  by  Zach Dischner  is licensed under  CC BY-SA 2.0 I was sitting in Zoom class with OER-expert Dr. David Wiley, who teaches one class every other year in the Master’s program I am enrolled in, along with eight other students, when I got caught up in OER-phoria.  The realization that copyright was straight jacketing contemporary culture and creativity and that open licenses could democratize education globally was mind-blowing.  Now, David Wiley was in no way encouraging any band-wagon hopping. There were no drums, but I felt ready to march.  There was no flag, but I was ready to wave one high in the air.  In fact, I may or may not have handed in a creative assignment where I wrote a song about the benefits and challenges of OER through the years set to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”  Though it was meant to be funny, I had forgotten during the pandemic that I was not a gifted singer.  I fear it registered ...

Scholars writing about Open Educational Resources (OER), including myself, use expansive vocabulary about the potential for the democratization of learning.  For instance, this "lockbox" statement from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (2013) regarding the OER movement provides an example of such liberal democratic sentiment:   "These digital materials have the potential to give people everywhere equal access to our collective knowledge and provide many more people around the world with access to quality education by making lectures, books, and curricula widely available on the Internet for little or no cost. By enabling virtually anyone to tap into, translate, and tailor educational materials previously reserved only for students at elite universities, OER has the potential to jump start careers and economic development in communities that lag behind. Millions worldwide have already opened this educational lockbox, but if OER is going to democratize learning and ...