Hi, I am Jeannette, one of facilitators. It’s great that so many of you have signed up for the course, and I look forward to learning from all of you. I wrote a blog post on what open means to me here http://jeannettemarianne.com/what-does-open-mean-to-me-whyopen/ . I will try to comment on a couple blog posts. In the second week, I will facilitate a twitter chat using #WhyOpen.
If I figure out how to delete my other post (the one in the wrong place) and copy it over here, I will. In the meantime, I have (at least) two other blog posts elsewhere to catch.
In the words of the Terminator, “I’ll be back”
Thinking specifically the way bicycle cooperatives works as repositories for access to hardware and also a place to find answers. I been part of bicycle cooperatives all through my undergraduate years. The work I did there in the South Side of Chicago was among the most rewarding I was involved with in college. Being able to teach a neighborhood kid to build their own bike was transformative. It gave them a mobility, yes, but also self-confidence to learn something and become part of a group that served this community of bike knowledge. I want to do this with e-waste, not just computers. I was surprised that in my internet searches I could only find one grouop that has attempted this sort of project. The CCC have been at work for the last ten years not in Seatle or Silicon Valley, but in Cincinnati. http://cincinnaticomputercooperative.org/
Hmmm…I don’t know how to delete the other thread. I just tried to test out deleting one of the threads I created and I can’t do it. Or rather, I can’t figure out how to do it even if it is possible. I do know someone who can, though, so if you want us to delete it we can. After you copy and paste it over here, of course!
That should work by copying the text like you would on some other web page and pasting it here? As in: on a Mac, you select the text and use command-c to copy, then command-v to paste. Not sure how to do it on Windows.
I already copied and saved the text to Notepad (txt) file I keep on on desktop.
Odd though that one’s replies/comments can be deleted (toolbar under the reply) but not a starter topic.
It seemed odd that I couldn’t uses my P2PU login and needed another one for this area. The P2PU discussion area for #rhizo 14 (which we didn’t use) was different and built into the course page.
Vanessa
I’m a retired educator, community, education and advocacy blogger and social media whatever, living in an isolated rural community in Central New Mexico (US) as long as independent living remains feasible.
I’m never quite sure what to call whatever it is that I or how to describe myself. What about “recovering casual faculty addicted to digital ankle biting”?
Why am here, now, in this course? I believe in open, this net mindset as home ground for and nurturing a natural gift economy and connectivist projects. I’ve been thinking a lot about the many and often nuanced meanings of open, especially in the context of changes facing education. This seems like a good to listen, discuss and share ideas.
Neither I nor good intentions can guarantee my not getting sidetracked part way through – and the precarious faculty information / advocacy network I run has first call on my time and energy. I’ll do my best though.
Vanessa Vaile
Mountainair NM 87035
waves at Ashley - good to see you here
waves to Vanessa - good to see you here
@clhendricksbc Due to the open participatory culture of Wikipedia, we expect a healthy (i.e. diverse) representation in the editors’ community, and yet - only about 9 % of editors are women. This is deeply problematic to the community and to readers (about 50/50 male/female), who are left with systematically biased encyclopedic content. It seems, Wikipedia is open to anyone and yet NOT. I now look at Wikipedia and all I see is this mass of unheard voices, and I need to understand how it relates to open (participation).
A good resource can be found on the Wikimedia Meta-wiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_gap
One of many insightful posts on the topic by (late) Wikipedian feminist Adrianne Wadewitz: [Wikipedia’s gender gap and the complicated reality of systemic gender bias][1]
( -Thanks for asking about this, I feel it might turn into a more elaborated post on my blog…)
[1]: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/wadewitz/2013/07/26/wikipedias-gender-gap-and-complicated-reality-systemic-gender-bias
1 Like
Hi,
My name is Paul-Olivier Dehaye. I am a mathematician. I have been a big adopter and practicionner of open practices in research for a long time: for instance, I use the ArXiv to submit preprints of my papers, contribute to open source software in my research and teaching (Open edX, LMFDB, sage), and generally release my educational/lecture material under permissive licenses.
For this course, I would be interested in exploring the new boundaries of openness that are shaping up: open infrastructure, open data, open science, etc. I am also eager to discuss with others how this trend towards openness aligns with trends reshaping civil society by decentralising some of the most traditional institutions of Western society. Bitcoin would be an example of this.
Welcome to the group Paul 
thanks, hope to learn a lot all together.
Hello people,
I’m Aristarik Hubert Maro, A member of CC Tanzania and SOO, from the Open University of Tanzania, currently working with Inter-University Council for East Africa as Information and Communication Officer of Lake Victoria Research Initiative (VicRes), interested on Open Access issues as am planning to register my PhD on the same area.
I have registered to the training as I want to have more knowledge about Open Access and other related issues on open Access. Would like to understand the power of Open Access or “openness” in knowledge transfer in the world, specifically in Africa.
Looking forward to learn a lot from you.
Thanks
1 Like
Very cool! It’s great to see so many people from around the globe!
Sounds interesting (your work). I work closely with CC, OER, and OEC but would love to add badges this next year.
I know it’s rather a pain to have to create new accounts for things. There is a discussion area on the P2PU course itself, and we used that last year, but Discourse (this page) is much more powerful. You can more easily track what you haven’t read yet, you can click on someone’s name to see their profile, which has all their posts, we can have all the discussions for all the p2pu courses in one place but organized by course, and more. We and another course are right now testing what it’s like to use this platform for P2PU courses. I don’t know if it’s even possible to integrate it more into the P2PU platform so there doesn’t have to be an extra signon. I it would be great if P2PU had a platform where multiple things can easily be in one place, like this discussion area, collaborative documents, etc., so people don’t have to have multiple accounts. But it’s a long process to get there I think.
I would also like to bolster my arguments, which is one of the reasons why I’m so excited to be helping with this course. I am going to set up a collaborative document soon for the course, on which people can write their ideas about “why open”–what arguments can we use to support it? What downsides might there be and how could we address them? I hope this can be a useful resource for many of us after the course is finished.
2 Likes
I agree. It was a little off-putting in the beginning to be asked to create another account (given that these are both P2PU and there should be some integration), but I do agree, discourse is much more powerful than disq.us (the software used in the other part of P2PU). Now if only it had the ability to view things as threaded discussions 
Discourse does have this ability, in a way, but you have to click on the grey button that indicates how many replies there are to the message, on the bottom left of the message. You can also click on the area on the top right of the message that says who it’s a reply to, and you can see the earlier message(s) that are being replied to. But you have to force the issue by clicking, and the replies still show up in the long post stream. I’m not enamoured of that, as I pointed out here! How replies work on Discourse
Late as per usual. I’m Sylvia Riessner and I wanted to participate in this course to test out the P2PU environment, to see if I can keep up with the participatory aspects of this course (I tend to get disconnected from big open courses too easily - maybe having to do something each week will help keep me connected?) and because I’ve been a supporter of openness for a long time. I signed up for the first open online course that David Wiley opened to the world in 2007 (?) and then participated in the first couple of Canadian collaborative MOOCs facilitated by Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Alec Couros, etc.
I’ve always been curious at how the idea of openness in higher education has persisted despite the perceived threats and despite the often undiscussed costs of producing and sharing open materials, teaching openly, learning openly.
Looking forward to hearing how others are engaging in openness and what it means in different contexts.
Hopefully I can catch up and stay on course …