CCK11, this week being mobile

Being on vacation this week, and with little access to a computer and a monitor, my CCK11 involvement is pretty mobile- reading posts and materials on my iPhone and blogging from it as well. I've been using my phone for the same things in the past (email, RSS and PDF reading) so it's not such a change from the norm - with the exception that I am using this tiny screen in a more sustained matter than simply consuming small bites of info at a time.

The last couple of CCK11 topics, Power and Openness have been pretty interesting; Power was covered quite a few times in my Applied Linguistics curriculum (in one of the readings Freire mentioned one of my professors: Dr. Donaldo Macedo - pretty cool) so the readings were a nice adjunct to things I had already read. More on Power in a future post, this one is devoted to open educational resources and on one of my efforts.

Last semester, my last as a master's level student, I formed a small study group of applied linguistics students who were taking the comprehensive exam with me last December. We opted to use google docs to dissect each and every reading we did as part of have program and distill from these the essence of the readings, this way we could reference our google docs cheat-sheets (8 in total, one per class) while we met after work and on weekends to quiz each other on potential comp-exam questions.

The effort was pretty successful. We didn't get through all the readings- near the end we ran out of time and decided prune the remainder of our "to do" list and to focus in a few "über important" readings in a quick and dirty manner. Our group members all passed the exam (yay!) and we've got our diplomas.

This semester a new group of students are taking the comps and I thought that they would find the notes we created as a useful start. I shared those notes with all taking the exam (after being asked to share them) with the stipulation that they don't just rely on these for the exam (if they do, they will probably not do well on it) and that they contribute back tithe notes by improving on them and adding info on the readings that my group skipped (due to lack of time) or that we did a quick job of (again due to lack of time).

The comp exam is a couple of
Months away and I just checked my google docs account to see if there were any changes made to the docs I shared...nope! I am wondering if people haven't started studying yet (worrisome if you ask me) or if they opted to not contribute back to the project...or a third potential case is that they don't have anyone pushing people to take some assigned readings and verify hat they read with what's on the docs.

When I ran the group I felt like I kept pestering group members for their article summaries (in bullet-point format), but from some of the CCK11 materials I read it seems like someone needs to tale the helm in open educational resources.

So, have you started any open resources? How have they been met? Have people contributed? Stick? Carrot? Or neither?


-- Post From My iPhone

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