The last couple of years I’ve been a keen follower of #PressEdConf, @pgogy and @nlafferty‘s Twitter-based conference on WordPress in Education. I haven’t been able to present in the previous two editions because they have taken place on a day that I have been travelling for an Easter visit to my parents. This year the the date changed, so I was able to present. I’ve been thinking about technologies for OER recently, partly prompted by Risquez et al paper “Towards a Devolved Model of Management of OER? The Case of the Irish Higher Education Sector” (see my thoughts here) and further stimulated by being asked to write a little about why open book publishing is important, so I thought I would take a look at WordPress as technology for OER through the lens of David Wiley’s ALMS framework.
The Tweets
#WordPress as a technology for Open educational resources (#OER). OER are freely accessible, openly licensed content that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessment. I want to talk about WordPress as a means of creating, managing and distributing OER.#PressEdConf20 1/15 pic.twitter.com/nhNgMectO7
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
(@philbarker) 2/15 I am Phil Barker https://t.co/wW69BnoVSv . I have worked to encourage the sharing of online educational resources for over 20 years; I have used WordPress for this for over ten. This presentation will include already existing examples, and some ideas #PressEdConf20 pic.twitter.com/DpyZPq5GE3
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
3/15 David Wiley wrote a seminal post “Defining the ‘Open’ in Open Content and Open Educational Resources” in which he introduced the well-known 5Rs, the rights to Retain, Revise, Reuse, Remix, Redistribute content. https://t.co/O1F8NbBlXl #PressEdConf20 pic.twitter.com/VeACXnrBmi
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
4/15 In the same post Wiley proposed the ALMS Framework for technical choices, the gist of which is that “poor technical choices make open content less open”. ALMS stands for Access to editing tools; Level of expertise required; Meaningfully editable; Self-sourced #PressEdConf20 pic.twitter.com/FbJh79fjtb
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
5/15 How does WordPress fare against ALMS? Access to editing tools is about cost and availability. WordPress does well, (even paid-for extensions reasonably priced). But be careful: specialized themes & plugins may limit access through hosted WordPress. #PressEdConf20 pic.twitter.com/8MtU7fRAEO
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
6/15 Level of Expertise Required for WordPress is reasonably low, though there are caveats. Obviously it depends on what you’re doing, writing a post or a plugin, but I have found the learning curve from the former to the latter to be reasonable … #PressEdConf20 pic.twitter.com/z24eyFTFF7
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
7/15 …however Gutenberg seems to be making plugins & themes harder to write. Writing posts and installing themes & plugins to customize the look and add functionality all remain relatively easy compared to working on some other platforms #PressEdConf20 pic.twitter.com/TBU38DXf8b
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
8/15 “Meaningfully editable” is about how the content is published. WordPress syndication through RSS is significant here, as are plugins like FeedWordPress which facilitate content syndication and allow workflows built on that, as does the export/import tool #PressEdConf20 pic.twitter.com/PIP2Eq1L3l
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
9/15 Self Sourced is about access to the source code of content in the content, and as HTML content produced through WordPress is self sourced & so easy to revise and remix–but be careful about images and diagrams produced in editing packages. #PressEdConf20 pic.twitter.com/FviIixqhdz
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
9b/15 [aside] WordPress itself is self-sourced, in PHP & meaningfully editable through themes and plugins #PressEdConf20
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
10/15 What does ALMS mean in practice? Look at @PressBooks: readily available & easy shared authoring of books. When a book is published you can clone it for local modification https://t.co/D2yKXT6Ptc or export as ePub #PressEdConf20
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
10b/15 [aside] ePub is self-sourced–it’s HTML in a zip file–and you can import ePub into @PressBooks to edit it, see https://t.co/DMWP6Z2dfi #PressEdConf20 pic.twitter.com/9zbZ8BqQhE
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
11/15 Look at @H5PTechnology: readily available and easy shared authoring of interactive content. Think about how through WordPress’s access control H5P authoring can be shared and the and products disseminated https://t.co/lhxikiU0eB #PressEdConf20 pic.twitter.com/1UMhSbVVUC
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
12/15 @lisajscott82 presented here in 2018 https://t.co/Y6XiA4ESKi about her use of WordPress and H5P to create, edit, manage and disseminate OERs at Heriot Watt University https://t.co/ezj8sTPCPF #PressEdConf20 pic.twitter.com/pzZhiOSudF
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
13/15 It’s worth thinking more widely about WordPress as a content management system (as a platform that is meaningfully editable and self-sourced) & how it can be used to create, manage, disseminate & interact with OER more widely. #PressEdConf20 pic.twitter.com/JsUMR0qGlj
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
14/15 Imagine WordPress, maybe Multisite, one site per department, with plugins for metadata; syndication to other sites through RSS; interactions through comments (e.g. @hypothes_is), and perhaps you have a space for collaborative OER creation, #PressEdConf20
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
14a/15 [aside] @pgogy and I call this idea #RockHopper when we talk about it, a place to store things that rock, and, you know, penguins pic.twitter.com/uPxXxf4QPo
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
15/15 Final thought: for me the important thing that ALMS enables by making content more open is not just access to use the content, but that it allows you to share the effort of creating & improving content #OEP #PressEdConf20 Thank you; any questions? Comments? pic.twitter.com/JFjhH6YMqd
— Phil Barker
(@philbarker) March 26, 2020
Thoughts
I wish I knew a way to create a thread and schedule each tweet separately. I used tweetdeck’s scheduler, which reduced the stress of getting the tweets out (once I saw it working) but couldn’t thread those tweets.
Writing a presentation in 15 tweets is an interesting challenge. It’s not easy to distil what you want to say into ~15 statements and then to make each of those statement in 280 characters. Then you realise that people expect relevant gifs or engaging images of cats… whatever, I hope my holiday snaps were not too distracting.
With that in mind, thank you to all the other presenters.
It’s really rewarding to take part in this conference. Thanks to all those nice people that I interacted with during my presentation and others.
Huge thanks and respect to Pat at pgogy for running the conference. There have been a lot of comments about how the format was so opportune in this time of physical isolation, but I also know how Pat has faced extra stress and how he has responded like a hero.
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