Open scholarship, researching public activities and openness as a worldview

The first time I ever considered a person, myself, a “resource” was 4 or 5 years ago, just before I started teaching my first completely online class as a graduate instructor at the University of Minnesota. I had good experience in teaching adults and received tremendous support from the department in designing the course site and the syllabus, yet I felt nervous. Would I be able to teach/facilitate this class well? Would students enjoy their studies? When I shared my concerns with Angel, my teaching mentor at that time, without a pause, and with a smile on her face, she said “Suzan, I have no doubt that you will be a great resource for your students.” I still remember her comment clearly to this date, because–now an obvious fact–until that time, it had never occurred to me that someone could be an educational resource. It simply hadn’t been part of my teaching vocabulary.

Years later as I was concluding my graduate school journey, I found myself going back to, and re-discovering with others, the notion of self as educational resource again. I was doing my dissertation research on an open online course designed by the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and I was struck by how participants in my study had positioned themselves as learning resources in the course. Carol, for example, explained to me in an interview that she strived to be a good learning resource for VCU students in the course by strategically interacting with them through linking, tagging, annotating, and commenting. Mariana not only put a significant effort to nurture a welcoming and supporting online environment, she also wanted others to see herself as “an open educational resource.” Michael, another open participant in my study, published blog posts–a great synthesis of personal and professional experiences–as learning resources for others to use.

Yet, none of these people magically became a learning resource for their audiences, nor we can claim that each and every one of them wanted to be “public resources.” All the participants in my study, except one, repeatedly mentioned in the interviews how they were enculturated into openness through on-going practice and through their engagement with specific communities and networks. I said except one, because Michael (pseudonym) never responded to my attempts to connect with him. His posts were written as a potential learning resource for other teachers, but not for me – I wasn’t in his intended audience. But there I was, accessing, examining, writing about his participation in the course. (Please see my dissertation for a discussion on the ethics of adding Michael as a participant to my study.)

Thus, the historicity of openness and the tensions I personally experienced in open scholarship, made it clear to me that open processes, including research, is often times multi-layered, personal, shifting, and unpredictable. You are an open resource one day, the next day you are not. You are open in one course context, in another one not so much. You are this complex and messy human being living openness in a unique way, shaped by your own experiences–which includes stories of successes as well as failures–motivations, background, and future aspirations. In my conversations with Maha, this process of openness, the subjectivity of it, was something we often talked about. As we mention in our ProfHacker article:

While open scholarship can be planned, it can also be an everyday activity: unplanned, informal, arising out of relationships as much as personal motivations. It can be part of our identity.

I mostly talked about sharing openly in networked environments in this post. There is that; but there is also a whole other notion Maha and I will talk about in tomorrow’s GO-GN #FirstWednesdayoftheMonth webinar: openness as a state of being in the world. And I can’t think of better person than Maha to talk about that. If you are interested in learning more about open scholarship, researching public activities and openness as a worldview, please join the webinar – we would love to hear about your experiences and questions during the session.