On June 5, 2014 I participated in a terrific session moderated by Christina Hendricks of the UBC Department of Philosophy. It was part of the annual “CTLT Institute” put on by the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Prof. Hendricks Wiki page on the session can be found by clicking on the image below.
What is worth briefly ruminating on is the fact that I keep on being invited to sessions like this to talk about the website for Video Game Law. When this started happening, I was just stunned and it was difficult to get my head around why this was occuring. Now that with the passage of time I must accept the reality of the situation, I have moved from perplexed to mildly disturbed.
What’s the problem you may justifiably wonder?
It never ocurred to me that having an open website for a course was any big deal. It seems obvious. After all education (at least in Canada) is publicly funded. The goal of education is to benefit the world. Law itself honours and encourages openness and transparency. So forgive me for failing to understand why this course website is anything special. Bottom line: it shouldn’t be – it should be a dime a dozen, one of hundreds of thousands like it. Inevitably it will be when a sense of congruence around education, openness and law is fully established.
All of which just makes me appreciate all the more UBC CTLT and the UBC Faculty of Law for encouraging this experiment.
jon
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Yes, exactly. It’s really too bad that things like this are a “thing” at all. But you know, until a couple of years ago I didn’t even know that creating my own open site was possible and in fact really easy. I just did what the university gave me: a closed, “learning management system,” because that’s what they gave me and told me how to use. Things are slowly changing, I hope, and then we won’t need special workshops on open education because, well, it’ll just be the norm. Until then…thanks so much for being willing to talk to people about what you’re doing and how easy/valuable it is!
I’m looking forward to that day when we start with the question of “why not open?” rather than the one of “why open?” I agree things are improving – and that change is a result of instructors like you and Christina who are not just teaching in the open but also advocating and promoting the practice as well. It was a great session and I only wish more people had been there to see it.