Hi Chris

Finalamente! as they say in Portugal here is my open practice story - Cheers John

its also over on the ALTO blog as well at:

http://blogs.arts.ac.uk/alto/2012/06/25/open-practice-stories-no-1-understanding-closed-education/

Open Practice Stories No. 1 – Understanding Closed Education

Chris Follows, my UAL colleague who is managing the DIAL digital literacy project and the initiator of the Process.Arts site is also coming to the end of his SCORE fellowship and has asked folk to reflect on how Process.Arts and Open Educational Practice (OEP) has helped develop my ideas. So here goes:

Point 1: Process.Arts kind of helped me to ‘prove’ a dissident concept that had been rolling around in part of the e-learning scene for quite some time. Namely that the creation and installation of specialist digital repositories for learning resources was not a solution to increasing the sharing and reuse of those learning resources – and driving the attendant cultural changes that are required . This may come as a suprise to those readers outside the e-learning scene, but for quite a long time there a kind of techno-fetish dominating the field of designing, developing and sharing of learning resources (it still does in many ways) – resulting in some truly awful software and a lot of public money being flushed down the drain. Remember the UK e-U? We do need a place to store  and manage learning resources but without a social space like Process.Arts to discuss and work on those resources. Without such a space a repository becomes a graveyard that no one ever visits this was a point that the UNESCO chair in e-learning at Barcelona recently made in an EU workshop in Dublin recently. As Patrick Lambe has pointed out, to do this means switching from an info management paradigm to a knowledge paradigm and that in turn means librarians and techies having to go outside their comfort zones and relinquish control. You can find a fuller discussion of these factors in a recent paper some of the  the ALTO UK advisory board helped me to write called ONCE (Open Networks for Culture and Education) that was delivered at a workshop in Florence – see http://alto.arts.ac.uk/943/

Point 2: This is the big one and is about OpenEd in general. It gives us (potentially) access to the tools to understand, critique and improve existing educational systems. I say potentially as it also requires a conceptual shift to a more critical appraisal of the status quo which the existence of an open alternative provides. When you have seen how open education is actually being used it makes large parts of the existing education system seem, well, a bit wanting and even irrational and give us a language to express this. So, to borrow a phrase from tech land OpenEd is a powerful disruptor in the education market, interesting times indeed!

Hi Chris

My interest in Blogging and VLE's and OER's can be traced back to the early 90's before the internet was even on my radar. I was managing a small team of crafts people and engineers manufacturing intricate items to very high standards. It became a regular problem that machine set-ups, processes and tooling would be forgotten and had to be reinvented when needed again. I began photographing these set-ups but is soon became obvious that this was not the way forward. By the time the roll of film was empty and back from the developers the processes and set ups were history and the photos a vague reminder. They got jumbled out of sequence easily, had no notes or measurements attached to them, missed essential info out of shot or were out of focus. In short, the idea was dropped as a waste of time and money.

Nevertheless, the problem had not gone away and to make matters worse, the workshop was getting busier. Good diary management was essential and I began including 'key' information that I thought might just speed a job up; what polishing soap was used, how fast the machine was running etc. Within a couple of months we were referring to the diary to use the events around the time as a memory jogger and the notes to get processes started on the right track. Others would then add extra notes in the diary which worked fine until after about a year the diary was a mess. We spent some time unpicking the old diary and compiling a journal with simple diagrams, we still did not use a camera as it couldn't contribute fast enough. Every new process, no matter how long or short, had two pages spare when finished so that it could be added to legibly. These journals so valuable they were called 'bibles' and the information within a source of pride for anyone who contributed.

From that time until this day, on I have always recorded challenging or successful events, methods or processes, even as a freelance art educator working in schools.

When I began working as Senior Theatre Metalwork Technician at WCA I was excited by the potential of Blackboard and created an account within weeks of starting; WCA Theatre Technicians. I wanted it to be inclusive of others so handed on the password and 'how to' info but it never took off. It became clear that students had never heard of Blackboard or if they had did not know why they needed it or what to use it for. After about a year or so the college enforced Blackboard as the way to communicate rather than personal emails, for me it still never presented any opportunities to communicate. It appeared to be a place to store info no one really accessed.

Around about the same time I heard of Process Arts, I was keen to contribute and posted a document about a student making a turntable and then a post about silver soldering. However, when I spoke to others it was clear the project was in its infancy as little was known about it and I was unclear how it would be useful to me so backed away in order to let it develop and consider how I could use it in future. I continued to journal via 'inboxjournal' (really useful for my PRA highly recommend it) and produce hand-outs and other printed docs to support learning.

Then I started my UAL blog, I felt that students were producing work in the workshop that would be great for others to see and a photo journal with captions took little time to produce. More and more often I would refer students to relevant blog posts as a precursor to starting a similar project. Recently a student came to the workshop wanting to make a ball and socket joints for an armature for a stop motion animation, I had seen other 'how-to' videos and blogs online and none of them were that impressive. I felt that I could make a definitive 'ball and socket' blog post on the subject. Over two weeks we compiled the photos and captions as the students work progressed. Shortly after posting Chris picked up on it and posted it on Process Arts. I returned to Process and took a look around, there was a distinct difference between this and my blog and I felt an opportunity not to journal but to present technical information to support learning. I posted 'Will it Bend' as this was relevant to some work being made in the workshop. It incorporated content and links from web resources and forums and I was keen to understand more about creative commons and used the collaborative nature of this drive my understanding forward.

If you are in any doubt about the value of VLE's check out the Khan Academy and Sal Kahn talking at TED Talks. I'm sure process arts will continue to develop, at the moment I feel it's in its 'cluttered diary stage' the search function addresses some of this but there is more that can be done to enable it to become the central collective resource of creative processes.

I have a new role and one that takes me away from workshops and making to one much more managerial. I am sure I will continue to journal for my own PPD and continue to explore the potential of Process Arts, blogs, forums etc and how these can be of benefit to students.

Steve