Luke Waltzer, Matthew Gold, Laurie Hurson, and Robin Miller talked about the CUNY OER open infrastructure as part of day 2 of OERxDomains21. Gold talked about how large CUNY is with over twenty campuses and a growing open infrastructure by creating platforms. Manifold is their new project that looks amazing and enables publishing and collaboration. Waltzer talked about how CUNY invested in open educational technologists and built on platforms to truly promote initiatives to support faculty and graduate students building on these platforms. Hurson described how the CUNY Academic Commons was redeveloped to help users create groups and sites on the Commons. They also created a Courses Directory that allowed searching for campus or discipline. Examples of courses and student projects were shown, and all of this work is shared publicly. Miller then described Manifold, a digital publishing platform that I have heard about and now would love to use! It is an amazing way to share knowledge and texts! I am intrigued by the Manifold publishing process and how others use it to publish books and resources for both students and the academic educator community. The group discussed the challenges of open infrastructure and practices in higher education. I was struck by the first chapter in the Manifold book on Socially Conscious Pedagogy. I believe wholeheartedly in everything that is mentioned on that first page. How can we bring this infrastructure (Manifold) and more socially conscious pedagogy to our teaching?
Another session featured the GO-GN Picture Book Team. Several presenters: Chrissi Nerantzi, Hélène Pulker, Paola Corti, Verena Roberts, Penny Bentley, Gino Fransman, Bryan Mathers, and Ody Frank were involved from several parts of the globe! They came together to create a collaborative open picture book about the values of open education. The team started asking people about their perceptions of openness. Their data gathering efforts included surveys, conferences, workshop participants, and included representation from all five continents. The team collected data and searched for a metaphor to use. It seems they used a river to symbolize open sharing! They wrote, summarized, and translated the work. The team collaborated asynchronously to continue working on the book design, illustration, and translating. The team split into team A and B at one point to accomplish these tasks. They also used Urban’s model for teamwork (1991) and reflected by writing a series of blog posts. The team joked that they are still friends and continue to collaborate and translate! The audience loved the river metaphor for open education. I was excited by how energized the team felt working together, sharing, and creating resources learners and educators could use.
