Looking after our educational legacy: curating the OER archive [1121] Members : #OER16

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Tue, Apr 19 2016, 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Authors: Inma Alvarez, and Tita Beaven

Room: Pentland (East)

Theme: Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education

Type: Presentation

Description

Teaching practices have often been private, shared only with students, and very occasionally with colleagues observing or co-teaching a lesson. Open Educational Practices (OEP) have changed the scene radically as they encourage the production, use and reuse of Open Educational Resources (OERs) which can now be shared and collected in unprecedented ways. This means that, for the first time in history, we have an abundance of multimodal records of educational practices that not only have a pedagogical impact but also a great historical relevance for the field.

In this presentation we will offer a conceptualisation of OERs as indexes or relics of pedagogical performance that can contribute to our cultural heritage in the education field; we also conceptualise the OER repository as the archive of both educational artefacts and time based practices. This conceptualisation draws on current debates in the art world, which is also grappling with a similar abundance. We argue that our role as open educational practitioners becomes akin to that of the art curator or, more specifically, to the emerging figure of the performance curator (Ferdman, 2014), in that we manage, preserve and study these resources, whilst at the same time making them available and visible to the public in deliberate ways. As Birchall (2015) has indicated, “[t]he meaning of curation in a networked culture is key to understanding the direction our culture is taking”.

We examine what the curation of contemporary art activities involves in order to explore the commonalities and tensions between the OER and the artwork, as well as between the OER repository and various curatorial formats such as the museum, collection or festival. Our intention is to shed light on our new role as curators of the open educational project. This theoretical investigation addresses an unexplored area of research that focuses on effective but also creative ways to look after our educational legacy.

References

Birchall, D., 2015. What curation means on the internet. The art and science of curation [webpage]. Available at: http://www.artandscienceofcuration.org.uk/what-curation-means-on-the-internet/

Ferdman, B., 2014. From Content to Context: The Emergence of the Performance Curator. Theatre, 44(2), Special Issue: Performance Curators, pp. 5-20. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/8601473/From_Content_to_Context_The_Emergence_of_the_Performance_Curator

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