open access as pedagogy. | info-mational

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-07-31

Summary:

"I’ve long preached the message of open access publication/sharing of student work via platforms like OA institutional repositories and Wikipedia as an unparalleled means to engage students and turn the 'banking' model of higher education on its head. I do so because have witnessed firsthand in many learning scenarios the effect that public readership can have on the research/writing process particularly among undergraduates, and I advocate for this practice whenever possible as an application of critical and feminist pedagogy in information literacy (IL).  As many in libraryland well know, OA publication of student work can be a hard sell among some faculty and administrators – case in point the recent (misguided and retrogressive, IMO) American Historical Association recommendation that History PhDs embargo their dissertations for a staggering six years. AHA’s decision is largely tenure-based, claiming damaging effects of OA dissertations on subsequent monographic publication through university or other presses – I’m not going to go into the AHA issue in depth in this venue, but a recent NYT article provides a good overview of AHA’s rationale and reactions from SPARC and others who argue against restrictive ETD sharing.  When applied to undergraduate work, the OA conversation is subtly different, and often settles on issues of questionable rigor and the validity of ‘expertise’ contributed publicly before an advanced degree is sought. I do not mean to downplay legitimate quality issues in some student output and/or concerns about premature publication of ongoing labwork, nor fail to acknowledge (largely exaggerated) fears about diminished potential of post publication that many faculty raise. In fact, these are all necessary and important conversations to have when seeking movement on the issue – the AHA decision and other reactive stances to OA as a legitimate and desirable form of  practice (let alone pedagogy) in higher education are the only way we will have a conversation large enough to shift the tide scholarship irrevocably toward open.  Moreover, reasoned and well-informed debate on OA issues is the best means to make invaluable faculty allies in the effort to open scholarship, which sets the background for the real purpose of this post – to share the most ringing faculty endorsement of the pedagogical value of OA student work I have ever heard. This comes in the form of a recent keynote address I had the privilege of attending at the USETDA conference by Char Miller, W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College and a close collaborator. Char, myself, and CCL colleagues Sean Stone and Allegra Swift have worked together over the past three years to tweak and re-develop Pomona’s senior EA thesis seminar to become focused around mandatory inclusion of theses in Scholarship @ Claremont as a backdrop for IL instruction. Char’s talk in its entirety follows at the end of this post, but first a bit more background on our OA/IL collaboration.  In the EA thesis seminar and in our interactions with EA seniors, we approach OA-as-pedagogy from multiple angles, such as using the concept of ‘information privilege’ (the best conceptual phrasing I’ve come up with to make clear the distinction between working behind and outside the institutional paywall), encouraging appropriate attribution and permissions practices, and exhorting students to understand their own voices as valuable contributions to an ongoing interdisciplinary discourse. I will share more on this collaboration in the future, but suffice to say that the quality of student work has improved so noticeably in the EA seminar that grades have actually gone down (Char’s speech gives insight into this apparent paradox).  If you work with undergrads on any and all things information literacy, if you are involved in advocating for scholarly communications, OA, and/or institutional repositories, then Char’s talk below is required reading. His effect on the crowd of OA pundits at USETDA was galvanizing – if ever a room full of librarians was electric, this was it. I could tell you more about how he approached the issue(s), but he does so masterful a job of it there is little room for embellishment. The text of his talk is also available in PDF through 

Link:

http://infomational.wordpress.com/2013/07/29/open-access-as-pedagogy/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.mandates oa.green oa.societies oa.libraries oa.ir oa.impact oa.students oa.prestige oa.librarians oa.sparc oa.education oa.embargoes oa.history oa.aha oa.pedagogy oa.claremont.u oa.etds oa.repositories oa.policies oa.humanities oa.ssh

Date tagged:

07/31/2013, 08:25

Date published:

07/31/2013, 04:25