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Media and digital literacies in Canadian teacher educators’ open educational practices: A post-intentional phenomenology

FOSS - glossary item

Free and open source software (FOSS) is also named FLOSS by adding libre into the acronym to recognize the libre (free) nature of the materials. (Wikipedia, n.d.)

FOSS can include non-proprietary technologies and software that enable users to examine, work with, and engage in efforts to improve the software or technology to benefit end users.

The underlying codes for the software are "open for all and anyone is free to use, study and modify the code" (web search results).

FOSS are considered not fully free since there are often hidden and human costs for production.

Examples include software such as Linux operating systems, Apache open office, Python coding software, the Moodle learning management system, or GIMP graphics editor.

People who work with FOSS are organized within semi-structured and unstructured communities where the leadership roles are granted according to skills and abilities as much as length of time in the community. The community structures are reminiscent of affinity spaces as defined by Gee (2015/2017).

Reference
Free and open source software. (n.d.) [webpage]. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software

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Glossary 19 alphabetic listing of glossary items with links to notes that describe each item plain 2023-06-28T15:29:30+00:00
Here is an alphabetic listing of the glossary items included in this dissertation document. Each item is linked to a note where the item is defined, described, and/or examples provided. These glossary items are also embedded throughout the document as notes within pages, where they provide 'just in time' clarification for you, the reader.
- Actor Network Theory
- Affinity Spaces
- Alternative Dissertation
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Black Box technology
- Block Chain
- ChatGPT
- Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS)
- Creative Commons
- Cynefin framework
- Data Gathering
- Digital Rights Management (DRM)
- Educommunication
- Emirec
- Episteme / Phronesis
- Faculty of Education (FoE)
- #FemEdTech
- Free and Open Software (FOSS)
- Homo Faber
- Hupomnemata
- Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)
- Learning Management Systems (LMS)
- Makerspace
- Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)
- Media and Information Literacy (MIL)
- Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
- Open Educational Practices (OEPr)
- Paywall
- Platforms
- PDF
- Portable Graphics Network (PNG)
- Post-Intentional Phenomenology (P-IP)
- Practice - both noun and verb
- Research Ethics Board (REB)
- Safety, Security, Privacy, Permission (SSPP)
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada (SSHRC)
- Teacher Candidates (TCs)
- Teacher Educators (TEds)
- Teacher Educator Technology Competencies (TETCs)
- TPACK
- Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans
- UNESCO
- Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
- Universal Serial Bus (USB)
- Visitors / Residents
Data Analysis - Facet Two
Open educational practices - Origin Stories

“The essential thing … is this: hope, as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice” (Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 1992)

In this section of the data analysis I search through the gatherings for an answer to my research question – As a teacher educator in Canada, what is it like to be an open educator? I probe each participant’s lived experiences of OEPr and specifically ask them to identify essential tenets of their OEPr (see Appendix D for the interview protocol). For a clearer understanding of open educational practices, it may be helpful to review the literature for this concept before proceeding (insert link to lit review section on OEPr). The graphic rendering of my conception of OEPr may also be helpful (link to graphic of OEPr).

While not every aspect of the participants’ lived experiences with OEPr will be reflected here, the selected accounts generated from the data gatherings attempt to highlight facets of OEPr and may illuminate or reflect MDL in practice. From the participants responses, I selected three facets for scrutiny. These include access, choice, and connections. I begin this section by examining the origin stories and conclude with a summation of the generated themes and core elements of OEPr.
Origin stories
Lived experiences with OEPr have origin stories. Most origins in OEPr don’t begin with a cataclysmic event, but are emergent and fluid. As I share glimpses of these origin experiences these may help crystallize the facets I will share later in this section. For one participant, becoming an open teacher educator with a focus on student learning emerged from an early experience of teaching others how to canoe:
So I was instructing them how to hold the paddles and we were all standing on the dock because we’re all going to get into our own canoes. I explained, this is how you hold the paddle, and then I looked up and I remember seeing all the different ways that they were holding their paddles. And I’m thinking is this what learning is all about? Like I just told you, this is what you need to do. And yet you're like, we're not even in the water, you're not going to get anywhere. I remember that moment. And I think that open learning gave me that opportunity to let everyone paddle their own way. (RB)
OW reflected that
it didn’t even occur to me that I was engaged in open educational practices … I hadn’t realized that what I’d already been doing (blogging & engaging my students with online publishing) had a name and was, in fact, a burgeoning movement!
Some participants suggest that elements of OEPr are embedded in their philosophy and beliefs of how teaching should occur (AT, LL). For one participant the impetus that pulled them to “open education is the social justice side, the decolonization has been really important to me. So, moving away from Western perspectives” (RG).

For ER, CS, and RB the origin story of OEPr occurred through experiences of focusing their dissertations on open education related topics. For BC it was the experience of “sharing my dissertation online, while not very exotic today, given the plethora of digital repositories full of theses & dissertations, was a bit unusual when few dissertations were open access”. BC noted the impact of openness in their scholarly work:
You know, so I think that openness and trust, the peer review, I learned early in my career, early as a scholar, that scholarly community of inquiry, when held in the open raises the level and quality of the work, because people all of a sudden realize it matters; what I put out there and attach my name to matters.
CS, ER, RB, and UF reflected on experiences with free and open-source software (FOSS) and having worked with software development relating to education. For example:
I looked at open-source ideologies … so, my dissertation work was around the idea that, how do we apply these not only the methodologies, but also the ideologies around open-source practice into teacher communities … it was based on looking at open-source communities and seeing them as rich collaborative spaces (ER).
Another mentioned that their OEPr emerged, not from explicit institutional supports but from the influences and directions offered by colleagues or others in educational technology who “share their kind of reflections and questions about what it means for them to be a teacher or a professor” (NK). For FJ, the lived experience with open education is grounded in feelings of unconditional hospitality and ethical relationality:
… openness to ideas, and to listening to each other, to being attune to your intents of being there and impact so that when you’re there, you’re not trying to harm someone, like openness is not like open to being harmed. So, I think that the unconditional hospitality is to kind of recognize that when you’re a guest in someone else’s space, then there’s certain roles and responsibilities.
From these origin stories of participants’ lived experiences within OEPr comes this thought about negotiations within open practices, something that I notice since it appears to reverberate through many of the interview transcripts – the “open learning part of the negotiation is working with your current context, cultural context, current boundaries, current world and then negotiating that that’s part of the negotiation as well” (RB).

In an effort to gain clarity, the facets that are explored next are cleaved into subsections to better describe each element. Access is explored through notions of entry, intentionality, and language. Choice is examined through experiences with sharing, contributions, and agency. Connections are revealed through relationships, collaboration, and building on the learning of others.
Dimension 4.2
Criticality in examining boundaries
Since “space without boundaries is not space, it is a chaotic void, and in such a place no learning is likely to occur” (Koseoglu, 2017), the research findings exemplify the lived experiences of the participants’ teaching and learning environments that can best be described as being bounded yet open (Palmer, 2017). Boundaries are created through the participants' critical use of digital tools such as the LMS, FOSS, and open/closed proprietary educational technologies. One example relates to Orion's lived experiences and efforts to consistently create learning spaces outside of the LMS systems that most higher education environments use for student online learning. This bounded, yet open, description of learning spaces is also exemplified in Aquila’s use of Discord as the primary learning space for students in their courses.

Efforts by the TEds in this research to apply an intentional and critical lens to materials, processes, and technologies for teaching and learning can be clouded by a veil of protectionism. I notice how the participants’ stories reveal how they work within, yet push against the tensions between protection and permissions, as exemplified by Merak’s comments of the feelings of stress between their desire for students to share openly versus their need to ensure student safety. Participants in this research provide shared examples of how they negotiate with themselves and their students when making intentional decisions to share teaching and learning transparently and openly with each other. I notice that participants also consider intentional choices to share with wider audiences, as exemplified in Andromeda and Lyra’s open Pressbook publication created by students in their courses. This critical approach also recognizes the ongoing efforts participants make to break down barriers and confront ongoing issues that occur while infusing MDL into their OEPr. For example, Perseus states a commitment to push boundaries for scholarly works with a commitment to only publish in open access journals which exemplifies a recognition and awareness of the needs of opening boundaries to a broader audience. Sabik mentions a commitment to push boundaries of decolonization and amplifying marginalized voices, which exemplifies an MDL focusing on access and entry. Andromeda relates a commitment to designing options for open learning spaces within their course designs which exemplifies a stance toward knowledge building and sharing.

Criticality is also evident in the findings in how participants examine, impose, and push through boundaries as they construct and share their digital identity and in how they make decisions about circulating and sharing their own or student media productions and learning artifacts (Veletsianos & Stewart, 2016). Boundaries for the participants involve how, where, what, and when they disclose academic and personal information that shapes their identities (Belshaw, 2011; Cronin, 2017; Veletsianos & Stewart, 2016). Critical approaches for disclosure are selective and intentional, and are dependent on the networks or communities in which they are participating (Veletsianos & Stewart, 2016).

Although I prefer the term digital persona (Hinrichsen & Coombs, 2013) to describe an individual’s digital presence, participants in this research share stories of their strategic decisions to cross boundaries or stretch the boundaries within which their digital persona is shared. This includes specific approaches for the use of singular or multiple avatar images, both realistic and figurative, to shape their complex digital personas, thus applying flexible, multiple, and nuanced representations of self in digital spaces (Hildebrandt & Couros, 2016; Hinrichsen & Coombs, 2013; Veletsianos & Stewart, 2016).

The teacher educators in this research apply their media skills and fluencies to the production and creation of digital avatars, voices, and multimodal renderings of who they are becoming as teacher educators, scholars, and open education practitioners. This is seen for example in the images, audio recordings, and web curation work done by Vega or the web curated materials by Polaris, shared openly as part of their course content collections which are critically shaped and created to support student learning. The boundaries for transitional and evolving digital persona link to the notion of "being" and "becoming" as identified by Gee (2017), emphasizing this state of impermanence of digital personas. In this research becoming an open educator or becoming media and digitally literate shifts toward the liminality of these persona, whereby participant TEds are continually becoming by crossing personal and professional boundaries, both self-drawn and organizationally expected. Tur et al., (2020) posit that this process occurs through boundary crossing as a right-of-passage involving doing (experiences), sense making (knowledge) and identities (being) that are transformative, troublesome, and liminal.

Nascimbeni and Burgos (2016) suggest that an open educator aims to work “through an open online identity and relies on online social networking to enrich and implement his/her work, understanding that collaboration bears a responsibility towards the work of others” (p. 4). Beyond creating and communicating digital versions of themselves and course materials, the participants set boundaries in their personal and professional communications within intra- and inter- professional networks while they web-together learning opportunities for their students and themselves in ongoing and dynamic ways (Mentis et al., 2015; Veletsianos & Stewart, 2016). The integration of internet publication for circulating and sharing learning activities through blogging or other social media tools is sometimes integrated into course work for students, which in turn requires the participants themselves to model how to open boundaries safely and ethically when communicating to an unknown audience using multimedia productions. For example, Perseus ponders how to pay close attention and scaffold reflective, critical, open participation in order to discover boundaries between personal/professional and home/school for self and students. Critical media awareness is modelled through text selection, use of space on the ‘page’, integration of accessibility standards, use of non-text-based elements such as icons, images or video, an increasing awareness of Creative Commons licensing, and the application of a publication status ranging from private, unlisted, or publicly accessible communications as explored in teacher education by Paskevicius (2021). In this way, the participants indicate how they model efforts to critically analyse and push through organizational structures that close boundaries and negate student voice. Several participants mention having critical conversations with students about the safe and ethical circulation of media productions, particularly when issues arise.

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Affinity Spaces - glossary item