I’ve had the amazing opportunity to build open source software while working alongside teachers and administrators, and it has been transformational, both for the school and for myself. Collaborating on a daily basis to build meaningful tools, and having the freedom to share them with a global audience, has brought a whole new level of purpose to my job. I’ve discovered there’s incredible power in the intersection of open technology and open pedagogy, and it has become a personal mission to get this message out there. Many educators don’t know what open source is, or what value it can bring to education. This is my motivation to build a larger digital presence: to share what open source is, what opportunities it can create for education, and to build a network of educators and developers who collaborate, share ideas, and advocate for open source in education.
Developing this presence will require a shift in mindset. On a personal level, I haven’t been interested in using social media, and although I interact frequently with technology, I don’t share my personal voice through it. I’m content with this choice for my private life, however I recognize the need to reconsider this mindset with the aim to network professionally and get my open source message out there. In doing so, it’s important to me to cultivate a digital presence with an academic and professional tone, and maintain the distinction between my personal and professional identity.
With the goal of advocating for open source in mind, and the considerations for a professional approach, I aim to thoughtfully focus my efforts to develop a digital presence in three areas: Twitter, my MALAT blog, and my personal website.
- Search for and follow educators, developers and researchers involved in open source in education.
- Create a twitter list of these accounts and add it to TweetDeck to help filter their posts from the background noise of my twitter feed.
- Discover which hashtags are used by open source in education, including related areas, and follow them.
- Share open source articles and blog posts I find through twitter to signal boost their message.
MALAT Blog
- Embrace the opportunity to become a resident and develop my academic voice . A blog can be “as much an expression of identity as it is a discussion of particular ideas” (White & LeCornu, 2011).
- Through my assignments, focus on topics that can further my understanding of the research surrounding both open source and digital tools for learning.
- Through my research topics, begin curating a list of articles which support the topics of open source, collaboration in education technology, and school-led software development.
- Explore my work with Gibbon and open source through the lens of academic research and theoretical frameworks. Discover who is involved in researching this area.
Personal Website
- After the culmination of the MALAT program, I aim to curate and merge posts from my blog into my personal website.
- Curate resources that help explain what open source is.
References
White, D. S., & LeCornu, A. (2011). Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).
Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash