This document summarizes a blog post about the author's experience with open educational practices (OEP) through a project called TOETOE International. The author discusses their work evaluating the reuse of open educational resources from Oxford University in English language teaching in several countries. They describe attending conferences on open education and participating in workshops and meetings with OER practitioners. The goal is to better understand the international open education movement and inform the design of open-source digital libraries for language learning.

1. Articles from TOETOE Technology for
Open English Toying with Open E-
resources (ˈtɔɪtɔɪ)
Love is a stranger in an open car to tempt you in and
drive you far away … toward OEP
2013-02-14 09:02:47 admin
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Love Is A Stranger by the
Eurythmics. Image via the
Eurythmics Sheet Music
Gallery
Happy Valentine’s Day!
This post is about how I came to be seduced by open educational practices (OEP).
TOETOE International blog series
After a period of radio silence, I have prepared a new series of blog posts on OEP in
ELT based on my TOETOE International project with the University of Oxford, the
UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Joint Information Systems Committee
(JISC). They will be released weekly from today leading up to my presentation at the
OER13 Conference in Nottingham in April, Stories from the Open Frontier of English

2. Language Education Resources. These posts are a version of the case study I have
prepared for this project, FLAX Weaving with Oxford Open Educational Resources,
which will be published by the HEA/JISC as an OER later this year.
I have assembled these posts into ethnographic accounts (LeCompte & Schensul
1999:17; Clifford 1990:51-52) to stop the clock as it were and to reorder the recent
past that has been observed and jotted down; to systematize, contextualize and
assemble the activity of the TOETOE International project across seven different
countries. They will be part narrative and part design dialectic, drawing on stories
and evaluations made by international stakeholders concerning the re-use of Oxford
content: Oxford-managed corpora (the British National Corpus aka BNC and the
British Academic Written English corpus aka BAWE) and Oxford-created OER
(podcast lectures and seminars, images, essays, ebooks) in combination with other
open English-medium content. Moreover, these evaluation narratives will continue to
inform the design of open source digital library software for developing flexible open
English language learning and teaching collections with the FLAX project (Flexible
Language Acquisition) at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.
Thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) will be presented from networked meetings,
workshops, conference presentations and interviews with OER and ELT
practitioners for arriving at better understandings of the social acts and symbols
connected with the international open education movement. As part of the reflexive
writing process, I have re-storied the stories of participating individuals and
institutions, placing them in chronological sequence and providing causal links
among ideas. Themes arising from the stories contain new metaphors for linking
unfamiliar phenomena from each country represented with familiar concepts for
understanding OER in the international context. Topics introduced by this TOETOE
International blog series include: emancipatory English, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) open
English language collections building, working OER into traditional ELT publications,
and long-range planning for embedding OER and OEP within sustainable English
language education.
What drives someone toward open educational practice?
The reasons will be numerous but the one that stands out for me is the capacity to
work across the international open education network, either in online or face-2-face
mode. Working across disciplinary, technological and geographical boundaries, my
current practice seems very distant from the practice I was trained in all those years
ago when I did the Cambridge Dip.TEFLA (now the DELTA) in Seoul, Korea.
Nonetheless, everything that I do now in my new open educational practice is very
much informed by my past teaching practice in traditional classroom-based
EFL/ESL and EAP.
There are vast changes happening across education globally and there is a growing
need for flexible and high quality open educational resources in English along with
an expanded open infrastructure to support research, teaching, training, learning
and curriculum development while English is the lingua franca in education,

3. research and publishing. Indeed, the position of English as international lingua
franca is wholly dependent on its use and ownership by non-native speakers of
English (Graddol, 2006). However, the reality of a rapidly expanding global higher
education industry (UNESCO 2008), where open and online distance education are
fast becoming major players because of affordances with educational technologies,
has yet to trickle down into the workflow of English language teaching practitioners
working in traditional classroom-based education.
In one of the learning technology forums I belong to someone was asking after
recommended PhD programmes; someone else replied that whatever area you do
your PhD in you’d better be prepared to live and breathe your chosen PhD topic area
for many years to come if not your whole career. With my PhD I have begun
identifying flexible pathways for open educational resources and practices to be
shared across traditional classroom-based and open online English language
education, but I expect that I will be continuing with this inquiry for quite some time to
come.
Somewhere OvER the Rainbow – the myth about OER quality in language
resources
I was only at the Open Education 2012 Conference in Vancouver for the first day,
presenting The Great Beyond in English language resources, as I was flying out to
Beijing the day after to catch the Global Local Computer Assisted Language
Learning (GLoCALL) Conference. Before attending these conferences I had been
working on a detailed TOETOE project blog post, Radio Ga Ga: Corpus-based
resources, you’ve yet to have your finest hour, which outlined the beginning of this
OER International project with Oxford for the development and promotion of open
corpus-based resources and practices in ELT.
Not surprisingly, I was assigned to the Libraries and Languages presentation slot at
OpenEd 2012 where the conference theme was Beyond Content. The presenters
from the other project in this session, Developing Foreign Language Courses for the
Open Library Project, seemed to be fairly new to OER and raised issues around
OER quality, stating that they needed to work with professional resource developers
and publishers to produce what appeared to me to be fairly ordinary audio
recordings for target language items to be used in their project resources.
Put simply, publishing language resources with a reputable publishing house does
not always guarantee quality in the same way that publishing with an open license
does not always guarantee quality. The difference being that if you buy a course
book and it turns out to be a lemon then you’re stuck with it – you either leave it on
the shelf or you spend hours developing supplementary resources to ‘fix’ it.
However, if you subscribe to an open educational practice model for materials
development you can:
Re-use an OER and if it doesn’t work for you then you’re free to:

4. Re-vise / re-purpose;
Re-mix with other open (and proprietary content which you have cleared for use)
and;
Re-distribute through a variety of open and proprietary channels.
These are the four Rs of OER (Wiley, 2009). A far cry from the materials
development method I learned on the Cambridge CELTA and DipTEFLA modules
which was to Select, Adapt, Reject and Supplement (SARS) course book materials
from leading ELT publishers (Graves, 2003).
In addition to raising the point about quality with the other presenters in my Open
Educationa 2012 session in the Q&A, during the lunch break I discussed the on-
going myth about OER quality with one of my SCORE colleagues from the UK,
Chris Pegler. I have been a big fan of her Resource Reuse Card Game (embedded
below in Slideshare) from the ORIOLE project (Open Resources: Influence on
Learners and Educators) to look at issues surrounding educational resource re-use,
including the issue of quality. It turns out that I would be re-using her card game in
workshops in Korea, New Zealand and Vietnam as part of this project, and I will be
including more findings from these interactions with the re-use card game in
upcoming posts.
ORIOLE is currently fielding survey responses to Investigating Sharing and Use of
Open Resources and is particularly keen to hear from non-UK respondents.
Resource reuse card game from orioleproject

5. Reinforcement of the myth surrounding OER quality was not what I was expecting
to encounter at an open education conference but I do come across this a lot in the
work I do with teacher training at ELT events. I have noticed a discernible pattern
whereby a handful of language teachers will say that their role at their institution is to
develop resources (often single-handedly) for their programme(s), and where many
more teachers will openly declare that they do not consider themselves to be
supported or encouraged to develop materials to share across their community of
practice. Common claims for not developing and sharing resources beyond
classroom handouts include a deficit in technology training and a reliance on in-
house materials or proprietary course books that have been selected and or
developed by programme managers. These are all valid reasons considering these
are all common practices.
In many ways we are trained to consume and not to create resources, and at most
we permit ourselves to adapt and supplement often irrespective of intellectual
property rights, making it difficult to share beyond institutional and virtual learning
environment walls. But can language practitioners and the training and professional
bodies that promote current ELT practice continue to shy away from an era of
ubiquitous digital content and self-publishing platforms? Going through the motions
with course books is a killer so how are we going to support our creative license if all
that’s required of us is to consume and regurgitate ready-made ELT skills meals in
the form of generic course books? Hopefully the question of bringing language
teachers to the realization of their central role as materials developers will be one of
the topics on the table at the Materials Development Association (MATSDA)
University of Liverpool Conference which I will be attending in April directly after the
IATEFL Conference Liverpool 2013.
Less yak and more hack! : rapid prototyping of resources
…it became clear to me that every technology is based upon what I call
the orchestration of phenomena, natural effects working together. If you
look at any new technology as a whole symphony orchestra of working
phenomena, it becomes a huge wonder. I have a sense of wonder far,
far greater than I had before. As human beings, we’re using these
things unthinkingly every day—it’s like having magic carpets at our
disposal, and we have no idea how they fly. Let me add one last thing.
I’m an enthusiast about technology, but I am also suspicious of it and
what it’s doing to us. It intrudes in our lives, it causes us problems such
as climate change, and it’s taken away a lot of our deep connection with
nature. But at the same time it’s an incredible wonder. (Interview with
W. Brian Arthur, author of The Nature of Technology)
Unless you know what’s at your disposal technologically-speaking and unless you
know how to bring resources together, mindful of their affordances and their
limitations, then to the untrained eye technological innovation can seem like pure
genius. But it’s probably more the case of working through problem solving

6. scenarios step by step, pulling together an ever increasing swag bag of tech
goodies to create solutions for the moment until the next thing comes along….and
so the cycle continues. This can feel very overwhelming to the individual teacher
who would like to be better at using technology and this is why Russell Stannard’s
Teacher Training Videos (TTV) is such a big hit among language teachers with
bringing what’s out there from the wide world of web-based language resources to
teachers.
We now have the technology to flip the course book, the classroom and even higher
education with the massive explosion in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)
entering the traditional university world with for-profit providers such as Udacity,
Coursera and FutureLearn. However, the point I would like to add to this is that
resource developers such as those whose web-based language technologies are
featured on TTV need feedback on what does and does not work in practice. This is
where language teachers can come squarely into the technology equation and learn
far more from evaluating and contributing to the development of resources than they
would ever pick up at any teacher training continuing professional development
session on technology. It dawned on me during my Masters in Edtech and ELT at
Manchester University that I wasn’t going to learn much from talking about
technology; instead I ended up going directly to the source itself by working with
open source software (OSS) developers at the FLAX project.
Hackfests with OSS developers and OER book sprints (see an example of a maths
book sprint here) with educators are two rapid prototyping methods for creating
code and educational resources. There is no time for hesitancy or hierarchy, you
simply work and learn with others to devise shared goals and to bring all that you
can to the creation process; to come up with rapid prototypes to share back to the
wider community to re-use, re-purpose, re-mix and re-distribute as OER. By
attending two Mozilla Drumbeat festivals in Barcelona and London I got to observe
and participate in early discussions for the rapid prototyping of Open Badges for
educational assessment and Mozilla Popcorn for creating interactive online videos.
Mozilla Drumbeat Festivals since
2010 – Learning, Freedom and the
Web via Flickr

7. The Mozilla Drumbeat Hackfest in
Barcelona 2010 via Flickr
While back in New Zealand late last year with the FLAX project team at the
Greenstone digital library lab at Waikato, every week I would participate in developer
meetings with the computer scientists behind the project and one other English
language teacher from the Chinese Open University who is also basing her PhD
research on the FLAX project. Well-versed in natural language processing and
research on current web-based search behaviour, the computer scientists behind
the interface designs of the FLAX collections and activities were adept at exploiting
available linguistic resources for the development of simple-to-use language
learning collections and OSS text analysis tools. I soon picked up what the
limitations of the different technologies and resources were. The focus of these
meetings was to develop rapid prototype resources for envisioning and discussing
how they could work across different language learning scenarios. I was able to
observe and contribute to many iterations of the resources currently under
development and I will be bringing these resources to the fore of future blog posts in
this series.

8. Networking Open Tertiary Writing Resources from Alannah Fitzgerald
I also had a chance to present my work at the Tertiary Writers Network Colloquium
which was hosted by the Department of Education at Waikato. This was a great
opportunity to share open practices in EAP with a non UK-based audience working
mainly in Australasia and in the US. I highlighted some of the OEP going on with the
EAP community online using social networking technologies such as Twitter, blogs,
Slideshare, YouTube and so on for reflection on the different types of networks we
are and are not plugging into. EFL/ESL has been employing these technologies for
longer for sharing ideas and resources in general ELT but there is more that could
be done with connecting teachers to resources development projects, either through
the OSS community or through working with traditional ELT publishers for creating
more effective resource evaluation channels that would help teachers learn more
about technology.
This would involve the development of resources to engage potential end-users,
namely language teachers and students, in the research and development cycle of
technology for ELT. In the field of educational technology we refer to this approach
as design-based research which Terry Anderson, professor and Canada research
chair in distance education, has referred to as action research on steroids (2007).
Anderson’s analogy is a useful one as most language teachers are familiar with
action research, which shares many of the same principles as design-based
research.
Pragmatism is central to both approaches, often employing mixed methods of
inquiry to arrive at tangible solutions to educational problems. Normally within action

9. research cycles it is individual teaching practitioners who carry out classroom
teaching interventions to observe, record and reflect on the impact of these
interventions over time with the aim of informing and improving teaching practice
(Reason & Bradbury, 2007). However, within design-based research cycles,
emphasis is more commonly placed on educational practitioners working in
collaboration with research and design teams (Anderson & Shuttuck, 2012).
Returning to EAP the question remains as to how much can we learn about EAP by
talking about it? Quite a bit and I’m all for sharing views about what EAP is as it tries
to define itself. What I would like to see beyond yak and competency frameworks
like the one from BALEAP that came out in 2008, however, is more in the way of
teaching and learning resources from EAP practitioners and evaluations on what
works. At this point in time, we’re not yet collaborating with resources development
practices across our EAP contexts in any sustainable way. It would be great if we
could clone more Andy Gillettes of the Using English for Academic Purposes
(UEfAP) website, successfully bringing together genre and corpus-based
approaches to EAP resources development. However, it would be even better if
instead of creating EAP resources that are open gratis (free to access like UEfAP)
we were developing EAP resources that are open libre (free to re-use, re-vise, re-
mix and re-distribute), for scaling collaborative open educational resources and
practices in EAP as well as in the wider ELT community.
References
Anderson, T. & Shattuck, J. (2012) Design-Based Research: A Decade of Progress in
Education Research. Educational Researcher, Vol 41(1): 16-25
Clifford, J. (1990). Notes on (field)notes. In R. Sanjek (ed.), Fieldnotes: The makings of
anthropology (pp. 47–70). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Fitzgerald, A. (In press). FLAX Weaving with Oxford Open Educational Resources. Open
Educational Resources International Case Study. Commissioned by the Higher Education
Academy (HEA) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), United Kingdom.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic Books.
Graddol. D. (2006). English Next – why English as a global language may mean the end of
‘English as a Foreign Language’. The British Council: The English Company.
Graves, K, 2003. “Coursebooks.” In D. Nunan (Ed.) Practical English Language Teaching. New
York: McGraw-Hill.
LeCompte, M. & Schensul, J. (1999). Analyzing and interpreting ethnographic data. California:
AltaMira Press.
Reason, P. & Bradbury, H. (2007) Handbook of Action Research, 2nd Edition. London: Sage.
Ross, G. (no date). An Interview with W. Brian Arthur. In American Scientist, On the
Bookshelf. Retrieved from http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/an-interview-with-w-
brian-arthur

10. Wiley, D. & Gurrell, S. (2009). A decade of development…Open Learning: The Journal of
Open, Distance and e-Learning. Vol 24 (1), pp.11-21.
UNESCO (2008). Education For All. Global Monitoring Report 2008. United Nations Education
Scientific Cultural Organisation. Retrieved from www.efareport.unesco.org
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The Love is a stranger in an open car to tempt you in and drive you far away …
toward OEP by Alannah Fitzgerald, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions
beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.alannahfitzgerald.org.