In Topic 3, Sharing Resources and Open Practices in Online & Open Learning, students were asked to complete a set of activities, including two I’ll discuss here:

  • Edit Wikipedia
  • Engage in a Twitter chat

In Wikipedia, our choice of activity was left quite open, and I chose to find a piece of information (an event that supposedly occurred on a Christmas Eve) that was tagged with a question (“which year?”). I researched the event described using sources such as a CBC article online, discovered that the event actually occurred on December 28, and corrected the error – while also adding the year, answering the question. I cited the CBC article as the source of my information.

On Twitter, our instructor posed a series of questions under the hashtag #edci339 for students to answer. We answered the questions with Tweets of our own, and then replied to each others’ answers. Though the instructor certainly provided the most individual feedback, we students did manage to take part in constructive dialogue, adding to each others’ ideas.

Both of these activities impressed on me something that has not been explicitly addressed in our readings – the heavy responsibility of being and open practitioner. Barbour (2019) refers to Wikipedia as “the Wild West of information”, but that can easily be broadened to include the Internet as a whole, and social media in particular. While Barbour is using the phrase to illustrate the need for a critical eye when reading such information, to me it emphasizes the need to be a careful contributor. Anything written on either Wikipedia or Twitter could be taken as fact. Any opinion presented as truth can colour readers’ perceptions and actions, as we’ve seen time and again in our so-called Post-Truth world.

Critically in the case of Twitter and other social media, ideas will inevitably be read, spread, amplified and combined with re-tweets, likes, and replies. The give and take that Bali (2017) describes as so important to open practice occurs without regard for the verifiability of data. The “empowering” nature of “open” (Bali, 2017) can serve to promote ideas based on anything. So it was that when I participated in a Twitter chat, I immediately felt the need to write with extraordinary care. Further, when I edited a Wikipedia article, I found myself profoundly unwilling to do more than I could (again, my edit was one very small fact correction and citation) with the time I had available and to the academic standards of sourcing that I know are crucial to a widely-read public source of knowledge.

On reflection, then, I believe that participating in open practices requires a commitment to presentation only of verifiable data, and the willingness to take the time and effort necessary to provide sources. On the one hand, students taking Barbour’s (2019) advice to be critical will have to spend more time independently verifying data they find on Wikipedia (as an example) if it does not include citation of sources. On the other, Bali’s (2019) empowering give and take of open practice can empower all the wrong things if falsehoods are presented as truth.

References

Barbour,B. (2019). Teaching Students How to Use Wikipedia Wisely. https://www.edutopia.org/article/teaching-students-how-use-wikipedia-wisely

Mali, B. (2017). Give & Take as Participation and empowerment #BeOpen. https://blog.mahabali.me/whyopen/give-take-as-participation-and-empowerment-beopen/