“A Textual Analysis of a Student-Created Open Licensing Book” was the title of a ten-minute Open Ed 2021 session by Pengtong Qu, Chaoran Wang, and Meina Zhu. I had watched another presentation by Qu and Wang about pre-service teachers yesterday and was curious about this session. Wang is at Colby College; Qu is at Indiana University Bloomington; and Zhu is located at Wayne State University. During the spring of 2021, they conducted research at a large public university in the midwest. Their course is for pre-service literacy teachers. The goals of this course include digital literacy and the development of professional identities. Qu mentioned that pre-service teachers and beginning teachers often struggle to form their professional identities. Qu cited Wiley & Hilton 2018 for OER-enabled pedagogy, listing the five Rs: retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. Their study used OER-enabled pedagogy in teacher training, explaining that learning by doing and knowledge sharing are important. Students produced blogs and created an open book. There were eight chapter contributors and two book editors, and students voluntarily signed up for roles. Qu and colleagues performed text analysis. Qu shared student images of annotated text they included in their chapters. The text analysis revealed differences in tone between blog postings and the final book chapter. Students reflected and created new knowledge as part of this course. Qu concluded that the open book project allowed learners to explore new knowledge areas and share their knowledge. The text analysis also revealed differences in tone that may indicate a need to build confidence to share critical perspectives, for example. I wonder what textual analysis of some of the OER assignments we have created could reveal!
