I have been thinking about openness and collaborative projects in Spanish lately. Another OERxDomains21 session about openness and collaborative spaces presented by Giovanna Carloni focused on “Digitally-enhanced collaborative international spaces for content and language learning” and provided some ideas of how other countries approached emergency remote learning. Carloni discussed how the course was structured and the use of the Community of Inquiry Framework. Carloni listed several tools they used in a language course for teachers, including Padlet, Mentimeter, and Kahoot. Post pandemic, they are developing a HyFlex course design with synchronous in-class and online components. Carloni mentioned that the course design is available and shared openly. Citing Moretti 2013, Carloni talked about distant reading and text mining using open educational resources to implement online learning activities. In a HyFlex course, students can analyze text before class and share findings through collaborative tasks during synchronous sessions. Carloni also described the use of Think-Pair-Share using collaborative activities and annotation using social annotations tools. Carloni also mentioned 1-2-3-4 all and digital mind maps to share thoughts and peer review work. Carloni concluded by mentioning that students can engage with content and each other in person or online while still providing flexibility and compassion.
Matt Smith, Tinne De Laet, and Howard Scott presented a OERxDomains session entitled “Interactive Courseware to Connect Discussion to Course Material: so what?” that also highlighted educational technology with the goal of co-creation and social learning. De Laet asked: “Can we combine asynchronous learning and social learning?” and used Next-Generation Textbooks. De Laet used Nextbook to demonstrate how learners can include notes and ask questions to the instructors! I love how annotation is becoming more common. Rich media allows users to include links and videos. I think the technologies exist and now the pedagogy will help us learn how to best implement social annotation tools to promote equity and meaningful engagement. I am really curious about how to use co-creation, open, and social annotation effectively in courses. De Laet polled the audience using PollEverywhere to discuss the affordances of social annotation and these interactive textbooks. The responses varied and revolved around interaction, personalized feedback, an engagement. De Laet discussed a case study: how they use Nextbook in their engineering course. They identified several advantages and the need for useful analytics. Howard Scott then asked the audience: what analytics would be useful to you as an instructor? The presenters then answered questions about the annotation capabilities and sharing of annotated notebooks after the course. I would love to have a textbook that is student-created and developed every time we offer the course. We tried that with Pressbooks and love the annotation capabilities with Hypothes.is. However, I still don’t have a solid foundation of content to share and build on. This presentation and the idea of what analytics would be helpful are intriguing. While the platforms may vary, I wonder if there are more reliable ways of engaging students with textbook/text annotation while respecting privacy and learner diversity.
