Author: Alan Levine

An early 1990s builder of the web and a blogging advocate, Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling, photography, bending WordPress, and exploring the serendipity of the infinite internet river.

Open Education Week: Share An Inspiring OpenETC Site

by Alan Levine

On February 28, 2021

In OpenETC, Ways to Contribute, What's New?

Monday starts Open Education Week, a celebration and showcase including more than 165 activities and events taking place around the world. The schedule is always reflecting your local time. Share what you are doing or experiencing in social media frequently during this week using the #OEweek tag.

BCcampus Activities for Open Education Week

BCcampus has a full slate of activities worth tuning into- we highly recommend the Open Education Challenge series –

This series is a fun way to get a taste of Open Education Practices (OEP) – over the course of 5 days, we will release 2 challenges per day. A challenge is a micro activity that you can do in 10 minutes or less that will cover a small aspect of open education.

The challenge series is open to anyone but has been designed for educators who are new to open education. You might have heard about OER, open textbooks, and perhaps even open pedagogy but if you don’t know where to find them or how to use or create them, then this is for you. This isn’t a bootcamp or a crash course in open education, it’s more of a tasting buffet of appetizers, designed to allow even the most time-constrained educators to participate.

(listed here as part of Open Education Week)

And take note- the Open Challenge site comes to you right from the OpenETC! https://oechallenge.opened.ca/ Maybe that site is… inspiring?

An OpenETC Activity (for this week and beyond)

The OpenETC is launching here an ongoing activity for Open Education Week . Let’s celebrate and recognize the wealth of open educational practice amongst more than 2500 WordPress sites housed in our co-op.

We provide yet another means of small but valuable ways of contributing back to our co-op. The ask is that you nominate someone else’s opened.ca site that somehow speaks to you, inspires you.

Meet OpenETC Inspire

The ask here is to share not your own site, but someone else’s at the OpenETC. All that you need to do is (a) find an inspiring site; (b) Make a screenshot and copy the web address; and (c) share that information into the Inspire site.

As examples, see the ones we seeded for this launch or see what happens when you pick one at random.

How do you find a site to share? Currently the sidebar of the main OpenETC site displays the 20 newest sites just started here. We are at work to build a dynamic directory, but for now we have a mega list of over 2100 OpenETC WordPress sites. Explore a few and find one that speaks to you. If you are teaching with an OpenETC blog, you could share a student’s site (or students could share their course sites or peer sites).

The only rule is that anything submitted must reflect a site hosted at opened.ca.

Think of what we might build if we take on this bite sized Open Education Week challenge. And as a bonus, this site is built on a SPLOT WordPress theme that is available for OpenETC members to clone as their own.

Inspire Was Inspired

In the spirit of reuse, remix, the idea for the OpenETC Inspire (and we name it honor of the original) came from a project in the DS106 open digital storytelling course. In 2012, for their final project, two students proposed what they named inSPIRE as a place to honor and share the work of other ds106 participants. It became an ongoing activity in future ds106 courses and demonstrates a valuable, connective characteristic of open communities.

The original ds106 inSPIRE site (still available) https://inspire.ds106.us/

The spirit of ds106 inSPIRE site is as relevant or more nine years later.

A key part of the ds106 community is the connections between all of the pioneers. We have knitted together an intimate community that is not only participating in its structure but also creating it. The in[SPIRE] project wants to build a narrative of these connections in an ever-growing diagram. Be a part of the project and submit works that have inspired you and watch the diagram grow!
ds106 INSPIRE SITE Description

We invite anyone to find an inspirational OpenETC site and share it in the Inspire collection. More than that, we hope you get a chance to partake of some of the many activities of Open Education Week.

Featured Image: Unsplash image by Ave Calvar modified by placing the OpenETC chicken logo behind the phone.

Asking As Contributing

by Alan Levine

On February 23, 2021

In OpenETC, Ways to Contribute, What's New?

As alluded into my hello post one key way to contribute something to the OpenETC is to ask a question. Doing this is a double win– when answered, it hopefully helps you, but doing so in public helps others.

Still, I sense often there is a reluctance to ask something in public, due to that inner voice that may whisper “you are an idiot! everyone knows how to do that.” That voice is a liar. And to reiterate my ability to mess up in public, when tweeted I misspelled my own blog post title.

And thank you @BCOpenText for making my role possible — and now, it is time for "Hellp Co-op" https://t.co/PSH4NhQYAA
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) February 18, 2021

Yet there is another wonderful aspect about asking questions in public. Educators are eager to help answer! It feels good to do. It’s great medicine in anytime, but especially in pandemic times. I usually like to teach in networked spaces where my students can answer each other’s questions before I can. And no, I am not trying to get out of work — it creates more of community feel when the answers come from each other.

And that’s why the openETC Mattermost channels are a prime place to contribute by asking questions, answering, offering resources, encouragement, and yes, the every helpful reactionary GIF (I leave it to the reader to imagine one below). We have an ideal set up in the OpenETC “Team” for anything, the generic Town Hall channel is a good starting spot, but we have specific places to ask about Mattermost, WordPress, and the Sandstorm / Web Apps.

List of the OpenETC public channels in Mattermost including "Mattermost", "Off-Topic", "Tech Help", "Web Apps", and "WordPress"

And it need not just be technical things to ask about here.

There is also a pending plan to set up something to curate “asks” and “answers”, and no, it’s not an FAQ. A Frequently Asked Question page always sounds ideal, but perhaps it is me, but I almost never find the Q I have much less the A.

Step into the channels and ask and answer each other. That’s the smallest big way to be a part of and give back to the openETC.

Featured Image: From one of the Asks and Offers activities led by the community building champion Nancy White…

Hello Co-op

by Alan Levine

On February 18, 2021

In What's New?

I am ungraciously late in responding to the Welcome to the OpenETC post written a month ago by Tannis Morgan, but as we know, Pandemic Time is warped. Thanks for the warm welcome to my role here as OpenETC Community Coordinator.

In blogging, I never start until I have a title and image in mind, this is a riff on the default post in most WordPress installations, itself a nod to an old tradition in computer programming.

I’m not writing here to talk much about myself, Tannis said a lot, and Google has the rest, but I will toss my calling card site with maybe the most ideal domain name (that’s a long story) at http://cog.dog – that is a WordPress site used in a non-blog post format, and I hope to relay more that there are many many more ways to use WordPress than a series of reverse chronologically ordered posts.

I have had long running collaborations with BC educators, in fact that was my first experience as a young, green instructional technologist maybe in 1996 when I was invited with a colleague to do a workshop at Douglas College and two laters got an invite back for the provincial organization that was the predecessor to BCcampus.

All of this just says I am old.

I was fortunate to have spend 5 months as an Open Learning Fellow at Thompson Rivers University, thanks to folks like Brian Lamb and Irwin Devries who made that possible. That was the egg laying for these SPLOT things you may hear me yammer about.

But being colleagues with Brian and Gran Potter and Tannis got me a backdoor into the OpenETC and access to these platforms. I should say this is a fantastic opportunity for any teacher or student in BC to have access to these platforms, free from the commercial ties that you sell some of your soul to use similar hosted platforms.

When Tannis approached me with an offer to take on this role, it took nanoseconds to say yes. In our initial conversation I had an insight, that mat or may not be meaningful to you (whomever you are reading this). The WordPress service offered here is technically no different from the “free” service at WordPress.com, and the functionality of Mattermost is similar to what you can get at Slack.com.

But this was a difference that popped into my head. At these free commercial sites, you actually have no awareness or even think about who your “neighbors” are on the shared service. But at the OpenETC, even if you never give it a thought, you might take into account the other few thousand WordPress sites here are all people interested in education, learning, art. Even if you do not interact, there is an affinity amongst people who use OpenETC services.

One of the reasons I did not leap out of the gate is that when I teach media, like audio/video/image editing, before they start creating media, I want my students to spend time reading/listening to a range of examples so they can get a sense of what is possible.

Similarly, on becoming this “OpenETC Community Coordinator” I’ve been rummaging around the blogs, the Mattermost Spaces, the Web Apps, just wandering and taking in the place.

I do have ideas of some things to start/introduce here, but I take my lead from what folks here want and need. A big part of my work is going to be championing the idea here of “Contributions Not Contracts.” This means spreading the spirit that there are small things everyone here can do to contribute, not in cash or technical magic, but ones that can help other.

This quasi-planned startegy means encouraging more participating in, asking/answering questions, sharing ideas in the Mattermost space. This is the best place to ask for help. I regularly here directly from people who ask a question but do not want to ask in public “so I will not sound stupid.”

Here is some truth I learned long ago. If you have a question, I bet there are 10,100 times as many people with the same question, all of them not asking because of this fear.

So I will be publically “stupid” often just to break the ice 😉

Mattermost is great for help when you need it, but the answers float quickly away downstream. So we have some thoughts about the ways OpenETC members can contribute by helping curate those useful tips, and ideas. And we are also going to open up some new ways to shine light on the excellent work we see happening here.

I was going to build a new WordPress site for sharing the “OpenETC Community Coordinator” coordinating, but it makes the most sense to do it right here. We will share these newsy and blabby posts around, and soon will add a signup form to get updates.

You see, I rather like blogging, and while many have giving it, I see it as more vital and important now than ever to be publically writing. When I teach, it’s always part of my approach to have students reflect (openly or privately, it’s the writing that matters).

Okay, what’s next? I have that one ready– shortly I am going to reveal a first low barrier way to contribute something valuable here.

You should also know that I firmly believe that all of this edtech work should have a sense of fun, joy, and often whimsy to it. There’s enough seriousness happening around us, and while we should not ignore it, we should also not let it steal away from our humanness to be joyful creatures.

So reply here with comments, ring me in mattermost or in twitter or send me a postcard in the mail. I want to know more about what everybody is interested in, what you want to do with these platforms (heck also what they cannot do).

One more caveat. My position here is funded by BCcampus (if there is any value in this, please thank them, if not tell them to kick me to the curb). But it’s only for 1 day a week or my time, so I am split in many projects.

And I am the only one here getting a paycheck. All of the people who keep the lights on here- the leadership group of Tannis Morgan, Grant Potter, Clint Lalonde, Brian Lamb, Anne-Marie Scott are all doing this volunteer basis. And do not forget that Troy Welch, who fixes the leaky server and tends to all the updates and bugs, is also a volunteer. They are a great group to be roosting around here in the Co-op Coop with.

Stay tuned here for more stuff.