Author: wmcross

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Open Education Section Editor

We’re thrilled to share the news that Lillian Hogendoorn is joining our forthcoming (2020) ACRL open book on scholarly communication librarianship as the Open Education Section Editor. Lillian is the Digital Access and OER Lead at eCampusOntario, where she supports open and technology-enabled learning at Ontario’s 45 colleges and universities. Prior to her current role, Lillian worked as a Research and Scholarly Communications Librarian at Western University Libraries, and as a cross-appointed Librarian/Fellow at North Carolina State University Libraries in the Copyright & Digital Scholarship Center and User Experience Department. Her research and practice centres on the intersection of Open with critical issues, such as privacy, information privilege, and accessibility.

Lillian is imminently qualified and we’re deeply grateful that she’s sharing her time and knowledge with us as the lead on the OER Section of the book. She generously agreed to the following post about her involvement in our collaboration. In the coming weeks, look for additional posts about our growing editorial team.

Hello, everyone! I am so excited to join some of my amazing colleagues to work on a forthcoming open textbook on Scholarly Communication librarianship. I will be joining as the editor of the open education section, and I can’t wait to get started.

This project will be a much-needed introductory text for anyone interested in learning about the many facets of scholarly communication librarianship.  When Maria, Will, and Josh reached out to me, I couldn’t help but think back on my time working in eReserves as a graduate student, feeling proud to save students money on course materials. I remembered hearing about open access in a six week workshop course, and wondering if there was anything like that for textbooks. I remembered feeling simultaneously excited by the amazing possibilities of OER and frustrated by the lack of opportunities to explore these possibilities in the classroom. So naturally, I jumped at the chance to be a part of this project.

Over the past month, I’ve been working closely with the OER + ScholComm team to understand the vision for this project, and starting to shape the open education section of the text. I’m looking to create a comprehensive overview of the Open Education landscape as well as a practical overview of what open education work looks like for librarians. Much like Brianna Marshall, open data section editor, I would love to hear your ideas on what to include in this section.

If you do OER work in libraries, what does OER work look like for you? What do you wish you had learned in graduate school?

If you are a student, or just learning about open education, what are your burning questions? What would make you feel more prepared to work in open education?

You can reach me on Twitter at @l_hogendoorn or by email at lillian.hogendoorn [at] gmail.com. I can’t wait to hear from you all!

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Building an “Empowering, Collaborative, and Just Architecture for Learning” with the Scholarly Communication Notebook

We are thrilled to share the news that IMLS has funded our proposal for the Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN), “the locus for an active, inclusive, empowered community of practice for teaching scholarly communications to emerging librarians.” We believe that this project is a natural outgrowth of our work over the past two years on LIS+OER as well as a way to more fully embody our values of openness and open-enabled pedagogy.

As we continue to develop an open textbook with ACRL, we have worked hard to continue to bring in diverse voices and perspectives – more on that front soon! – but we recognize that any static text is necessary hierarchical and limited. Throughout our work we have continued to wrestle with the question of how to introduce the diverse and transformative potential of scholarly communication. The most exciting aspects of the field aren’t just about open licenses and removing paywalls, they are about revisiting core questions about the purpose and value of scholarship, the relationship between teachers and students, and the ways we aspire to, but often fall short of, the values of equity and inclusion.

We hope that this project can open a door to the multiplicity of approaches and perspectives in the field as well as centering the dynamic and ongoing work of scholarly communication. To do this, we have borrowed an approach from Robin DeRosa and Rajiv Jhangiani’s Open Pedagogy Notebook. Like OPN, the Scholarly Communication Notebook will host community-designed examples of teaching and doing scholarly communication that we hope will be regularly refreshed by librarians from across the field as well as LIS faculty and students completing coursework on these topics.

Several faculty members have already agreed to pilot this resource and invite their students to do coursework that culminates in contributions that center their own voices and experiences. We’re also planning to offer financial support to three rounds of contributors with an eye to recruiting the stories and experiences of scholcommies from a broad range of institutions and intersectional identities, particularly emphasizing marginalized and underrepresented perspectives.

We’re really excited about this opportunity to use open pedagogy to build a more active and inclusive community around teaching and practicing scholarly communication. We hope that the open textbook can provide a foundation that, paired with the SCN, can offer what DeRosa and Jhangiani describe as an “empowering, collaborative, and just architecture for learning.”

You can read more about the project and see all of our proposal materials on our OSF site. We’re so excited to see this project move forward and hope you’ll consider sharing your own stories, methods, and experiences.

-Will, Maria, and Josh