1. Wikieducator.org
OER Online Community
An Online Community Ethnography
Contributing to the Edupunks, DIY U,
and the Free Culture Movement
The whole presentation can be seen at: http://z.umn.edu/wikieducator

2. Why Wikieducator?

3. Personal Reasons / Bias
• Social Reproduction – Family, Conditions, Opportunity
• North / South – Digital Divide
• Means of Production / Progress
• What We Learned From The Past
• Desire From Marginalized Voices To Be Heard
- (Part of my biases were included in the first letter of
invitation to participants) – Response rate was lower

4. Attended OERU
Planning Meeting – Feb 23rd

5. Tower and the Cloud (Katz)

6. Leapfrogging Futures!

7. Wikieducator.org

8. Wikieducator.org
• Founded by Wayne Mackintosh
• Opened – in August 2006
• Slogan – “To turn the digital divide into digital
dividends using free content and open
networks”
For CI 5323 – Online Learning Communities Course,
we had to pick an online community and interact with
it weekly.

9. Technology and Education
Innovation Scholar Commented
on its Possibility
Blackboard 1841
Motion Picture 1940
Television 1957
Computers 1967

10. Arguments for it
• Many kids who will not be going to schools
– SS Africa – 76 will not have the privilege to attend
the last 3 years of secondary education
– We do not have enough money, we need to find a
better way to increase access to secondary
education and higher education

11. Technology and Social Links
• Importance of the Guttenberg Press on
spreading knowledge between the elite
• But need for social connections (at an
individual level)
• Find a mechanism that enshrines education as
a common global good.
• “Wiki technology combined with the right
license meets these two requirements”

12. WikiEducator Mission
• 2015 – A free curriculum for all sectors
– “Working collaboratively with educators
around the world we aim to develop free
content resources in support of all national
curricula”
– Not replacing closed content. There are
motivated producers in both the open and
close curriculum projects

13. Tragedy of Commons
• “Digital Knowledge is infinitely scalable and
will not suffer the tragedy of commons”

14. What Will be The Future of These Sites?

15. Some Initiatives
• VUSSC - Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth
– Network of 30 countries - OER
• UNESCO/COL Computer Navigator's Certificate
– Free computer and Software training for developing countries
• FLOSS4Edu
– Address the absence of Free content in African Schools
• Learning4Content and Scalability
– Scale up the development of OER
– Native American proverb - "Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I may
not remember, involve me, and I'll understand"

16. OER – Open Education Resources
Photo by Social Secrets

17. What are OER?
• “open educational resources are digitised materials
offered freely and openly for educators, students and
self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning
and research”
• Term was first coined at a UNESCO meeting – 2002
• OECD - the concept of “open educational resources”
is both broad and vague. (As noticed through this
research)

18. Brief Background OER
• The Internet and Free Data (Berners-Lee)
• Free Culture Movement (Lessig)
• Open Source Software Movement (Stallman)
• Open Licensing (Lessig)
• Open Access Journals
• Open Education Resources (UNESCO, Wiley)
• Open-Source Economics (Benkler)

19. Creative Commons

20. GNU – GNU is Not Unix
Richard Stallman

21. OCW Consortium

22. Freedoms
• Freedom 0 – Freedom to use
• Freedom 1 – Freedom to adapt to your needs
• Freedom 2 – Freedom to help your neighbor (copies)
• Freedom 3 – Freedom to help your community

23. Conceptual Map

24. Research Project
• Mini Ethnography – Hoping to expand it into a
9 month to a year project.

25. Triangulation
Participant
Observation
Literature Review Interviews
Discourse Analysis
of Forum Data

26. Literature Review
• OECD
• UNESCO
• Wiley
• Downes
• Johnstone
• Kamenetz
• Etc…

27. Tweet Word Cloud + Chapter Title

28. ReMIx! – CC (Importance of no ND)

29. Participant Observation
• Became a member of Wikieducator.org
• Became a member of SCOPE – BC Campus
• Attended the February 23, 2011 OERU Planning
Meeting
• Began developing my own OER
• Became a member of the OCW Online
Communities
• Became a member of the OERU Google Group
• Became a member of the WSIS – OER and OERU
Groups

30. Attended – OLC4Ed
OPEN CONTENT LICENSING FOR EDUCATORS COURSE
Units (Complete a Unit a Day)
1- Why does open matter in education?
2- What constitutes an open education
resource?
3- What can educators legally copy in an online
world?
4- How can educators refine their copyright for
sharing knowledge?

31. Saved OCL4Ed

32. Responses OCL4Ed (Day 3)
• With the case study itself, I wondered if there could be multiple
case studies made available for future iterations (through
hyperlinks?). I accessed the link to the P2P - copyright for educators
the page provided and it was helpful for finding other examples, but
I felt that more case studies could be made available and help one
to further your understand of Creative Commons.
• One possibility could be to include a case study that mentions the
implications of a YouTube video. In the school I used to work at
teachers primarily used YouTube videos and Netflix when including
audio visuals in their classrooms. Perhaps an additional case study
could address this murkier subject, instead of analyzing a formal
source such as a BBC video, YouTube.com or another video sharing
website could be explored. This argument is particularly linked to
question four.

33. Sites Visited: SCoPE

34. Google Group – OER U

35. WSIS – Platform of Communities

36. Interviews
• Took the open list of participants to the OERU
Planning Meeting
• Made an Microsoft Access Database
– Included Name, Job Description, Email, Blog,
Institutional Website
• Tried to send personalized emails from Access
• Decided to try TimeTrade
– (24/7 Availability)

37. Time Trade

38. TimeTrade

39. TimeTrade

40. TimeTrade

41. Individuals That Have Been
Interviewed
Abel Caine Replied Interviewed
Pheo Martin Replied Interviewed
Sean Linton Replied Interviewed
Joan Garfield Replied Interviewed
Steve Foerster Replied Interviewed
Joyce McKnight Replied Interviewed
David Porter Replied Interviewed
Cable Green Replied Interviewed
Simon Yalams Replied Interviewed

42. Semi-Structured
Most Asked Questions
• How and when did you first become involved with OER? How has your involvement with OER changed over time?
What attracts you the most about OER?
• What are some of the greatest obstacles facing OER? Should every country participate in the development of
OER?
• How important is strong support from the university administration for the development of OER?
• What are some obstacles that limit you from spending a greater amount of time developing OER?
• What leads a person to become more active in the community? How does the community strengthen itself?
• Should the term OER be a household or commonly known term? Have you taught your children about OER? Are
your family and friends supportive of OER?
• Are most of your friends aware of what OER are and are they supportive of the idea?
• Have you met people within Wikieducator.org? Have these relationships extended between the online
community? What has been the nature of these relationships?
• If you do not mind me asking, how do you identify yourself; political conservative, liberal, independent?
• Which OER sites do you frequently visit? How did the OERU idea develop? What has been your level of
involvement with the OERU initiative?
• What do you think is the greatest barrier for other universities when considering whether or not to join the OER
movement?
• What has the OER community done to increase awareness of OER? What other steps need to be taken?
• What to you is the ultimate goal of OER? Are OERs sustainable? Why or why not?
• Please explain your work within OER and what led you to choose this approach when developing education
resources? What is your average day like? Have you recently participated in OER courses?

43. Question Development
- Wrote them, edited by my wife - Ellie Lewis
- MA in Latin American Studies / UMN Law Student
- Showed them to Joanna
- Joanna helped select the most important ones
- Questions were also sent to Dr. Cassie Sharber
- She sent suggestions which will be consider for the
next iteration
- Respondents were asked for feedback
- Questions will be reevaluated at the end of this
stage

44. Hidden Questions
- How open are these communities to
researchers?
- How receptive are they to criticism?
- What does it take to be an insider?
- What do they think open is?
- What is their opinion of me as a researcher
from a closed institution?

45. Transcribing!
• Had 3 different audio / video recordings of
each interview
– Digital Recorder
– Audacity (Ubuntu)
– Desktop Screen Recorder (Ubuntu)
• Uploaded them to Youtube (Try free
transcription) – Failed horribly
• Transcribing word by word (I need a pedal)

46. Dr. Cable Green

47. Interview with Steve Forester
(Wikieducator)

48. Steve Forester
• “I think a lot of people who would like to develop
open educational resources are constrained by
other responsibilities that's why one of the
initiatives that Wayne Mackintosh put together is
to encourage universities to devote the equivalent
of a full-time person to the development of open
educational resources because with that sort of
institutional commitment, it would really help
individuals who are affiliated with those
institutions and are interested in participating, as it
would allow them to have the time that they need
to do so.”

49. Interview with Abel Caine (UNESCO)

50. Abel Caine (UNESCO)
• “The third part of your question is that OER are
very very slowly moving into developing
countries. The rate of adoption in developing
countries is extremely slow. This is where
UNESCO sees its competitive advantage. It will
be here in the developing countries where we
will need the greatest amount of technological
transfers or expertise. This is where UNESCO’s
CI sector, which is working on a platform, feels
that a lot of the software products that were
developed by the US institutions are not 100
percent relevant for developing countries, you
can’t just take Curriki and transplant it in the
middle of Ghana, it just will not work”.

51. Dr. Pheo Martin

52. Dr. Pheo Martin
• “The involvement has definitely grown because I
believe very strongly that Open Educational
Resources need to bring about the freedom from
oppressive book prices. I believe in open
educational resources because they are far more
accessible to students in digital form where they
don't have to buy these books. I advocate and
promote these resources through our institute
Realizing Education's Potential Institute.”

53. Dr. Pheo Martin

54. Comments – Other Interviews
Sean Liston Met Wayne Mackintosh through his social network in New Zealand.
Trying to spend more time developing OER
Joan Garfield Believes OER will mainly help the for-profit industry to lower its cost
or improve its services. Started working for them 2 yrs ago.
Joyce McKnight Looking forward to the first Open University to develop in the USA.
Sees the OER Community as substantially homogeneous
David Porter Argues that most of the OER supporters are similar philosophically
and that its supporters need to pass of the torch to others
Cable Green Explained how OERs would help Community Colleges. Sent messages
to other OER supporters so that I could meet with them in the future.
Simon Yalams It is important for the materials to be contextualized, but more
importantly there needs to be financial support for their development

55. Conclusions (From Interviews)
• Different Motivations
– From needed a job to promoting free textbooks to wanting
to make education free for all
• Different locations
– OER is increasing its transnational appeal – UNESCO / NET
• Looking for that critical mass – tipping point
– Different perspectives on how and when this will happen
• Resources are primarily developed in English
• The community seemed open and receptive
considering it was an email invite
• Quality and support of OER were widespread concerns

56. Conclusions (Research Framework)
• Refine interview questions
– Ask more details – such as what is their main
interest, or what they see as most important
• Need for additional interviews
• Need for help and for a OER research
component within CIDE
• It is difficult to immerse oneself within an
online community