Bonni: [00:00:00] Today on episode number 125 of Teaching in Higher Ed, Dr. John Stewart talks open educational resources.

Production Credit: [00:00:12] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:22] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. This is Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase our personal productivity so that we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:49] I’m so happy to be welcoming to the show today Dr. John Stewart. He coordinates the development and management of courses for the A in the University of Oklahoma History Institute a joint initiative between the University of Oklahoma and the History Channel. John is interested in developing digital learning environments to promote digital literacy and opportunities for undergraduate research.

Bonni: [00:01:18] John is the assistant director for digital learning in the center for teaching excellence at the University of Oklahoma before joining the center John lectured on History of Science at the University of Oklahoma and Missouri University of Science and Technology. He earned his Ph.D. in the history of science from the University of Oklahoma. And John, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

John: [00:01:45] Thanks for having me.

Bonni: [00:01:46] Before we started recording I told you that I tend to try not to look too foolish on these episodes. And you said I won’t look too foolish if I tell you that I was really never heard of anyone that had your particular discipline in your research interest areas would you share a little bit with the audience about what it is that you study.

John: [00:02:07] Yes I’m a historian of science and I got a Ph.D. in history of science from the University of Oklahoma. And here it’s it’s own department separate from history. So in most places you might have a historian of science or two within a history department.

John: [00:02:20] But here we have 12 historians of science in our own department I study history of chemistry particularly in the 18th century in the Scottish Enlightenment.

John: [00:02:27] And so I looked at the discovery of elements. So when did we go from understanding everything is being made out of Earth Water Fire and Air to carbon nitrogen oxygen hydrogen and then how is that discovery made and what does it mean. So the history of science is sort of a niche field but I found it really interesting.

Bonni: [00:02:48] And there are a couple of projects that you talk about on your Web site which I’ll be linking to in the show notes Could you share a bit about your situating chemistry and in light and chemistry projects?

John: [00:03:02] Sure. So chemistry is an older project for me and it was a classroom project. And so what happened was that in my research I was looking at how chemistry was taught in the 18th century and I wanted to look at these instructors who were making big important discoveries so a guy named Joseph Black discovered carbon oxide where we are now called carbon dioxide as a gas.

John: [00:03:24] And he discovered all sorts of theories about latent heat and just a lot of really important chemistry. And so I wanted to look at how he taught his students those theories as he discovered them. And so I had my students reading the actual lecture notes that students took in their classrooms in the 18th century as he was teaching these theories.

John: [00:03:42] And I wanted them to pull out from these lecture notes that ranged over about 30 years. How were the lectures changed how Joseph Black’s teaching changed in line with his research and what we ended up finding was that the lectures didn’t change at all. He actually didn’t integrate his research into his teaching at all which I found startling.

John: [00:04:03] And so the project was really interesting and students transcribing the stuff and putting it online and then doing the analysis and writing I think high level research papers. But the the results were sort of negative we didn’t confirm the hypothesis that we went in with. So it was an interesting outcome.

John: [00:04:18] So it was an in-class project and then situating chemistry sort of extends that and I still look at courses but also the people that were doing chemistry in the 18th century the places that they were doing that chemistry the substances they were studying texts and objects and everything else related to chemistry.

John: [00:04:35] And we built out a big database of the situating chemistry outcome and I hope it’ll will be useful for researchers and then I also hope it’s useful for students as they’re doing research. I hope people send their students to that site to both find resources and also to enter new information about resources.

Bonni: [00:04:51] I was just having a conversation with one of my students yesterday and he was sharing his dislike for a class that he had taken some time ago where the professor didn’t give them really enough instructions to do something and I did. I didn’t bother to bore him with my big long lecture about how Actually it’s important to challenge you so that you. Because that’s actually when you learn more versus a fear a spoon fed all but I decided that probably when we just passed each other in the hallway stop at best to give that lecture.

Bonni: [00:05:23] But as you were talking I’m curious because they must have encountered a number of challenges as you were having them go through these projects what were some of the common ones and how did you go about trying to help them address them or just let them struggle on their own.

John: [00:05:38] Yes so it was it was interesting because I didn’t know quite what they would come across so as experimental and you know sort of I anticipated that there would be failures along the way. So what happened was I gave the students photograph digitized scans of these lecture notes sets and I made sure that they were high rez and that they could blow them up so they would be easy to read and then I gave each student just a page at first and I said we’re going to read through these and sort of see how chemistry was being taught. What they’re teaching all of these things.

John: [00:06:08] And so I talked about you know what types of terms they might encounter differences in English from the 18th century. Now all these different concepts that I was worried about and then I didn’t anticipate what they came back with was several of them couldn’t read cursive.

John: [00:06:24] And so I hadn’t even thought about the fact that all these notes were in cursive which you know to me was not important but it was the stumbling block that prevented several students from really being able to to participate.

John: [00:06:35] And so then I had to go find other sets of notes for them. And so yeah it’s just it’s anytime you do an experimental work you can anticipate some of the problems but not all of them I thought paleography would be a challenge or chemical terms would be a challenge. But in our case it was it was cursive.

Bonni: [00:06:50] And in that particular case how did you decide to address the fact that they couldn’t read cursive.

John: [00:06:55] I gave them luckily I did have some notes that weren’t in cursive. And so I could just sort of trade and literally ask people to raise their hands if they could recursive which is just not something I ever thought I would have to do with with so it never crossed my mind. But the way we were able to sort that out and get past it and then the other nice thing was that we were anticipating. Like I said seeing change over time and these lecture notes.

John: [00:07:17] And because there was no change over time the lecture notes almost ended up being verbatim over a 30 year window. And so lecture notes that were recorded in 1750 1770 in 1780 all ended up being about the same which meant that the students could compare their transcriptions with each other in the classroom to be able to figure out words that they couldn’t identify or concepts that they couldn’t identify. So little changed that they were basically comparing notes off of the same set.

Bonni: [00:07:42] Did this experience the fact that that was the findings make you think at all about your own teaching and challenge you in any ways.

John: [00:07:51] Yeah exactly that was my main takeaway was just you know I guess laziness at the faculty level has hasn’t been invented recently. I don’t think I’ve ever had two versions of the Course that were the same. I’ve certainly never gone off lecture notes like that. And so to see it for 30 years was startling.

John: [00:08:07] But I have had faculty when I was an undergrad that that might have done or at least you couldn’t tell they weren’t doing that. And so it did remind me that we should really avoid reading to our students. I think Black must have had lecture notes and must have basically stood in front of the class reading off of the same notes for 30 years. And so that really it really did impact how I wanted to teach in my classroom.

Bonni: [00:08:30] When, today we’re talking about open access resources. And of course one of the big reasons why people will gravitate toward looking for those to use in their classes is around their version of for textbooks. But that actually isn’t the case of why you initially got interested in them so can you talk a little bit about how you initially got interested. And any thoughts that you want to share about textbooks in.

John: [00:08:53] Yeah so history of science is a small enough field that there are no real textbooks. We don’t have the sort of the big classic Algebra 1 type textbook or even US history type textbook.

John: [00:09:04] So generally you pick you know maybe a couple of core texts that you want the class to read and then you supplement that with journal articles or with newspaper articles of interest or some sort of project of interest. And so it hadn’t really occurred to me how heavily faculty and other departments sometimes rely on textbooks.

John: [00:09:22] And so there was no real you know from my background it didn’t make sense to rely on textbook and for somebody else to provide you content that’s that’s up to the faculty to figure out what it is that they want to teach.

John: [00:09:32] And so when I moved into the our center for teaching excellence and I started seeing what was going on in the other departments it surprised me the amount of what amount of control over a course that faculty proceed to the textbook industry.

John: [00:09:46] And so I wanted to you know sort of push them back on that a little bit. I wanted to challenge them on that a little bit and ask them you know what is it that you really want your students to get out of your course. It can’t be reading a textbook. It doesn’t make much sense.

John: [00:10:01] And so you know are there ways that we can develop more meaningful resources things that get at you know what gets you excited about chemistry or algebra or or U.S. history in the same way that I was able to choose texts that got me excited about you know 18th century science or or Newtonian science or whatever.

Bonni: [00:10:18] And who is a person at your campus who really took that to heart and has made some changes in their own teaching because of those you pushing back in that way?

John: [00:10:26] Well luckily I came onboard right as we were starting this big initiative out of our library to to both provide money and sort of time for faculty to move towards open source textbooks.

John: [00:10:38] And so I’ve been helping one faculty member in the economics department who teaches statistics and he just threw out the statistics book and wrote a new statistics book. And again that one seems like somewhere where I can see you wanting to use a textbook just because stats as you know is somewhat linear. You have to go through mathematical concepts that build on each other.

John: [00:11:00] But his main point was with saving students money that no particular textbook was better than the rest and no book justified spending three hundred dollars on it. And so he was able to provide this book for free to his students and get at you know those concepts that he thought were most important.

John: [00:11:16] And also the epistemology in pedagogy that he thought was most important to convey the concepts. So I was really excited about that one. And then just convincing again people and history where they do have textbooks to to avoid using those to think more deeply about what concepts they want to they want to teach.

Bonni: [00:11:33] When I first came in to higher ed I remember being told that some of the accrediting bodies actually look down on people that don’t use quote real text.

Bonni: [00:11:44] But as I think back I’m sure so much has changed around that what do you see the landscape as far as some of the accrediting bodies or even just a measure of quality of course how that has evolved as it relates to textbooks.

John: [00:11:58] Yeah I hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms. You know I think we always have this word rigor which I find to be fairly meaningless. I think the accreditation bodies do you know attach various levels of rigor.

John: [00:12:07] But I have no idea how they associate those with particular textbooks. And you can look at cost and you can look at you know the name associated with it. But neither of those are all that meaningful.

John: [00:12:18] So I do think there’s this concern that the open educational resources aren’t rigorous or aren’t as valuable but there’s no reason that should be.

John: [00:12:27] Some people worry that maybe the educational resources aren’t produced in the same way that they’re not vetted and some where there’s no peer review on them but that there’s no reason that that needs to be true an open educational textbook is probably peer reviewed in the same way that any other textbook is depending on who’s working on it you know it’s really just a matter of cost and whether or not you’re you’re opening it up making it accessible to others.

Bonni: [00:12:49] I was listening to a podcast I enjoy very much called Very Bad Wizards. And whenever there are recent episodes which I linked to in the show notes in case anyone’s interested in listening. They were talking about one of the guys David Pizarro is in the field of psychology, social psychology specifically and of course they’ve had a lot of controversy around the replicability of their research and that’s kind of blowing up in that particular field.

Bonni: [00:13:15] And there was some I’ll get the details garbled on this but there was a lot of controversy from some scholars. Around people who are criticizing some of the researchers on public places like Twitter and blogs and things like that saying that this should be left you know within the realm of peer reviewed journals and not out there for everyone to see.

Bonni: [00:13:36] But of course their argument was that that is a form of peer review and if that’s not if your research can’t stand up to you know that sort of critique then perhaps you don’t have enough skin. A and B perhaps. So I do think you’re right that they are peer reviewed just not in the same way and with open access these resources are. But certainly if they’re out there for the world to see the world is free to comment.

John: [00:14:02] Yeah. I mean and some open some OER publishers still use traditional blind peer review or you know the traditional models and then they just just open publish. But I do really like the idea and a couple of places are starting to use just open review.

John: [00:14:18] And so they throw up the sort of mostly final draft of a source and allow comments in the margins of the of the Web site for anybody who’s reading it to see. And again most of the people reading it are going to be experts. They’re going to be people who have interest in reading this thing.

John: [00:14:35] And so you get you know a lot more eyes on it. I think you have a lot more room for progress and suggestion and improvement. And so you know there’s still a stigma against self-publishing but I just think people conflate that with open educational resources.

Bonni: [00:14:51] Talk a little bit about your evolution as it comes to making use of open access resources in your teaching.

John: [00:14:58] Yes so it’s so part of it was you know avoiding textbooks. But the other part was I wanted students to be doing something I wanted them to be you know not just writing a disposable term paper for me but actually contributing something that would feedback into the knowledge community.

John: [00:15:13] So that was just something that would be informative for their roommate or their classmates or their you know the college community where you know living online. I wanted them to be writing something and saying that they could be knowledgeable about something that could be an authority.

John: [00:15:27] And so initially I had students working on e-books. And one of my early classes that I was teaching and they could make beautiful multimedia e-books rather than writing me you know a traditional 10 page paper. And I liked the products of that. But books are locked into the and they’re most valuable. On my iPad.

John: [00:15:45] And so if you don’t have an iPad you can’t really view them. And so that seems limiting. So after that I switched over to Wikipedia and I had my students editing wiki sites.

John: [00:15:54] I think the best example was I had a student who worked on a Sidereus Nuncius article and this was one of Galileo’s textbooks this is his most important book published in 1632 where he’s talking about planets as he sees them. I might have messed up the date and maybe 1616 anyway.

John: [00:16:13] But what she did was she rewrote this wikipedia article on Sidereus and instead of having me as her only reader for this. You know what could have been a term paper that she turned in at the end of the semester. She was getting about 1000 readers a month and had it written you know the thing that shows up first on a Google search for this book.

John: [00:16:33] And so it’s something I could point to if you can be an authority. Your research is valuable. Nobody has written a decent paper on Sidereus Nuncius. And now one of my students has – and it’s been read by probably 20,000 people over the last year and a half. So there was the next step was from iBooks to Wiki articles and then finally onto Web sites and just having them use the blogosphere to record their thoughts and to write more meaningfully than in term papers.

Bonni: [00:17:02] And share a little bit more about how your students are blogging and how you introduce that in a class the idea of doing it in some of the benefits that they can expect to get out of it.

John: [00:17:13] Yes. In my first class we just used a course blog and this was a project called After Newton and it’s at wordpress.afternewton.wordpress.com. And the students there were looking at literature and science and how they interact.

John: [00:17:26] And so I’d have them writing about the science and drastic park or in H.G. Wells or in a movie that they had watched and mostly just wanting them to share their thoughts. And for us to have you know good conversation in class about what does an author trying to do with science how are they trying to portray it how are they trying to show the impact of science on society.

John: [00:17:45] And then for the students to be able to relate you know those perspectives to a broader world to be able to analyze more meaningfully. A movie like Jurassic Ppark and so it was nice to get the students writing and sharing their work in that space. But then we moved from teaching those types of courses into the center of teaching excellence.

John: [00:18:03] And I moved into working on our domain of one’s own projects here it’s called create so create.ou.edu. And there we give each student their own domain space. And so once that happened I started helping students to set up their own websites their own domains.

John: [00:18:19] And and being able to blog not only for class but for their family for their their study abroad for their work as a student you know from freshman to senior and and be able to chart that progress with them.

John: [00:18:33] And so it went from my own personal experience teaching in the classroom with the Course blog into this much broader ecosystem of student blogs and student writing.

Bonni: [00:18:42] When do students get their domain?

John: [00:18:46] So we try to reach out to students as they come in to OU as freshmen sometimes even before. But as soon as they’re in sort of the registration for being a student at university they can turn on their domain.

John: [00:19:02] And so they just need to log into the system and then it is active and they can start going. Most often we talk to students sometime during their freshman year and one of their classes.

John: [00:19:11] And so we’ll talk to them about how the teacher for that particular class intends for them to use their blog and then we help them to set up their domain and the subdomain for that class and give them a sense of of how others are using it and how they might use it.

John: [00:19:26] So hopefully we get to most students in their freshman year. And then you know encourage them to keep using it however they see fit while they’re in college. So many students will have subdomains or subdirectories for each of their courses and then their main domain will be you know about them. And we encourage them to keep that as a portfolio either for friends and family or for potential employers.

Bonni: [00:19:45] So if they have a subdomain for a course. Is that going to show up as something like a menu item or something navigate a ball from their main blog or are they. Is that a way that they can kind of keep it a little bit more separate and really have power over the branding of that main site.

John: [00:20:00] Yeah it’s up to them so they can we encourage them to link it from the main site if if they find that useful. And so they might have on their main site a menu that says you know here are the three classes I’m in now or the you know 12 classes I’ve been in over the last couple of years.

John: [00:20:14] But if they don’t want to do that that’s fine also. As long as they give you know the subdomain and you are to their instructor the rest of it doesn’t really matter. And so they can have a very streamlined. You know if they wanted to use their main domain as a photography site and just have you know the beautiful images that they’ve shot over the last six months or year 10 years that’s fine. And then they can you know leave the subdomains for the particular classes that they’re in.

Bonni: [00:20:38] That’s one of the challenges that I’ve ran into in teaching in a doctoral program I teach just a single class and it’s technology and leadership and I like them to learn about blogging and a lot of them have never done so before. And so it’s helpful for me to have them blogging about that content in the class and the things that we’re talking about.

Bonni: [00:20:57] But then I know that I limit their sense of freedom and sometimes unfortunately their sense of excitement about the class and about blogging. And if I were to give them more freedom and I get kind of this last time I taught it tried to change it around and say it can you can make this tell your own story.

Bonni: [00:21:13] And I made less of an emphasis on the course content but it sounds like there’s a there’s a there’s an sort of an either or there’s that both. And.

John: [00:21:21] Yeah I think that’s the great thing about domain’s as opposed to sites is that you can give them you know these separated spaces. I always use the analogy of a house and I say that you can have as many rooms in your house as you want to and so you can have rooms for each of your courses and sort of the main lobby for you.

Bonni: [00:21:35] Mm hmm.

John: [00:21:36] And I encourage them to it up that way but they don’t have to if they just want to use the domain domain space for the one course that they’re in at a time that’s fine too. And so we try to give them as much ownership in as much control as we can while still giving them some structure that they so they can understand what they’re supposed to be doing.

Bonni: [00:21:52] And then. Is there anything that the professors do to bring in the feeds from the various students into one place?

John: [00:22:01] Yes so the best thing for instructors to do is – sometimes just create a sort of linked list – so a blog roll either within our LMS or on their own website.

John: [00:22:12] But you can also if you want to set up a course site you can provide the students with the syllabus or you know whatever other content you want to give them. But then also have a blog roll there that uses something called FeedPress to pull in all of the RSS feeds from all of the students.

John: [00:22:27] And so you get a centralized blog and then when someone links clicks on any of the links on that blog it kicks you out to the student’s actual Web site. And so it creates good discoverability for all of their blogs. But then also links back to the original blogs that the students control.

Bonni: [00:22:43] I’ve heard about FeedPress before I’m trying to see if I remember correctly is that a word press plug in?

John: [00:22:49] Yeah. So most of these sites I think that one might rely on the students using WorPress but I’m not sure if it’s agnostic but it is a WordPress plugin about maybe 80 percent of the people who are using domains are using WordPress at OU and the rest are using Omeka or Drupal or Known or any of the other apps that work in an HP environment.

Bonni: [00:23:13] I know another example you wanted to share today has to do with your course the history of science can you talk a little bit about what you did in that class.

John: [00:23:21] Sure. So like I said there aren’t really good textbooks and there’s not even a really standardized curriculum for a history of science survey. And so for this survey I was working with one of my colleagues caviling shepherd at the Missouri University of Science and Technology and her course is she’s supposed to teach students the history of science from Plato to NATO.

John: [00:23:41] So from whenever she wants to start in Greek times too. Now in a semester. And so that’s that’s literally an impossible task. You can’t you know obviously you can’t teach everything that’s happened in science.

Bonni: [00:23:55] You can’t?

John: [00:23:55] So there’s a lot of leeway.

Bonni: [00:23:56] Well I could because I don’t know a lot about it.

John: [00:23:58] We just had gravity and that was it. So there’s a lot of leeway as to how you want to structure this thing. And so what we did was instead of us telling the student okay we’re going to focus on physics and we’re just going to talk about you know Aristotle’s idea for why things fall compared to Newton compared to Einstein and then now.

John: [00:24:18] And that’s one possible path or we could talk about you know understandings of biology again from Aristotle to Darwin and to Stephen Gould and now. But instead we said OK we’ll we’ll put all of this content into a tool called 3D game lab a website. Check it called 3dgamelab.com. Go and we’ll flesh out all of these different paths that Professor theoretically could teach.

John: [00:24:44] And then we’ll just leave it up to the students as to which ones they want to take. And so most of the students in that course were engineers or physical scientists and so we assumed that they would want to look more at physics or history of technology something like that but we also provided pathways for History of Medicine history of biology history of the physical sciences history of mathematics.

John: [00:25:06] And then as we were fleshing all of this out we realized that we had actually developed a grid. So we had each of these little disciplinary pathways but then we also had chronological pathways that cut across. So if someone wanted to they could just look at all of the sciences in the medieval period or all of the sciences in the 19th century and so that was another possible sort of pathway that students could take.

John: [00:25:25] And so we just told students you need to take two or three of these pathways over the course of the semester. And we gave them some guidelines on how to sort of accumulate points as they move through the system just to show that they had done sort of an equivalent amount of thinking and work. And as long as they they put in good effort that was the course that was their choice as to what they wanted to do.

Bonni: [00:25:46] How do you articulate in learning outcomes for the class what the goals are? Sometimes people get nervous when you say wait but how would I know they got the topics or the content. What is your alternate means of assessing this course?

John: [00:26:01] So for us the individual sort of dates and content don’t matter. It doesn’t particularly matter to me that students know when Sidereus Nuncius was published. As I said earlier I’m fuzzy with the date sometimes. But the main thing is that we are a couple of themes we really want to touch on and almost all of our classes. And so the interplay between science and society and culture. How they mutually you know shape each other.

John: [00:26:25] So one of the big elements is science and religion and almost all of our courses are going to touch on what is the interaction between science and religion. A lot of our courses will touch on science and politics or science and culture you know arts or we’ll talk about you know imperialism and science and so in each of the different paths what pathways we built we tried to make sure that each pathway touched on the same basic themes.

John: [00:26:49] And so whatever pathways the students chose that were going to be exposed to those themes and the activities we had them doing we’re going to have to wrestle with those themes. And so you know we gave them an overview as to what these themes are and why they’re important and told them they weren’t going to able to avoid those themes no matter what they chose. And so it was up to them how they wanted to go through it.

Bonni: [00:27:11] That’s such a good mental exercise to go through I find myself going through it probably every semester I think whenever I start to have the thought of gosh I’m not covering enough for it when it becomes an issue of topics being covered. I can almost always rest assured I’m on the wrong path.

John: [00:27:30] Yeah that’s like I said that’s the huge challenge for us just because there’s there’s a lot to do but you’re really trying to boil it down to how do I want my student to be able to do what I want them to take away from this class. I want them to be able to better understand their world when they leave or be able to ask you know better questions when they leave. And so we focused on what are those questions and made sure that they were omnipresent.

Bonni: [00:27:53] This is the time in this show in which we each get to give some recommendations. And I got to watch some videos from Ken Bauer’s class. It’s happening…. Their whole school shuts down and so his classes a concentrated one and he’s got some phenomenal guests that have been coming in and the week we’re recording this of course this is going to actually air much later so no one’s going to be able to catch it actually though the recordings will still be there so I’ll put a link to his classes schedule page where you can go back and watch some of these tremendous speakers he had and he posted a video that I’m going to share just a little tiny clip of.

Bonni: [00:28:32] This is David White of the University of Oxford and he’s explaining some terms that he uses that contrast with what a lot of people use to describe. Oh gosh. You know there there are these young people today who just get technology so easily and so they are the digital natives and then those of us who grew up in a different generation and didn’t you know come out of being born with an iPad in our hand we’re the digital the digital immigrants and there’s a lot of people who have started to push back on that particular way of describing.

Bonni: [00:29:07] I’m going to play just a little bit of the start of this video it’s called visitors and residents. And I’ll also be posting a link in the show notes so people can go and watch it. It’s not too long it’s a seven minute one it’s well worth the watch.

David White: [00:29:22] “They’re good with using digital technology, aren’t they? It’s easy for them because they grew up with it going online using the web. It comes naturally to them. They learn how to use technology the same way they learn their own language by being immersed in it from a very early age. It’s this metaphor of language which underlies the digital natives and immigrants idea put forward by Marc Prensky at around about the turn of the century.”

Bonni: [00:29:47] So he goes on and describes his terms of visitors and residents which leave us with much more possibility in our own becoming more digitally literate and also in helping our students do the same it’s an excellent watch I highly recommend it. And it’s a part of a much longer series which I haven’t watched yet but is on my watch list now.

Bonni: [00:30:08] And John, what do you want to recommend for us today?

John: [00:30:11] So I’ve been reading a book called The State of Play edited by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson and it’s a compilation of of journalistic articles and sort of think pieces about serious play about how games can be used to address issues of racial inclusion gender diversity just all sorts of social issues.

John: [00:30:31] And so it shows that games are serious and that games have an impact and that who’s building those games has impact. So there’s is a particularly good chapter by Anna Anthropy who develops a lot of open source games using an engine called Twine, which I’m currently working in. And so I think this book is a really good insight into how to think about games and how to think about the game industry.

Bonni: [00:30:56] And you’ve got another one too, right?

John: [00:30:59] The other one is the other thing that I’m reading right now which is The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, which is my daughter’s favorite comic book. So The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl squirrel girl is actually an Avenger and so she works with Iron Man and Thor and those types.

John: [00:31:14] But she almost always just out-thinks her opponents. And it’s really adorable. At one point she goes up against Galactus who’s the World Eater and she convinces Galactus that instead of eating earth he should eat this planet made out of acorns because acorns are delicious and so they go off and have a picnic together. And that’s how she saves the day. So anyway that’s my other recommendation.

Bonni: [00:31:36] Both of these things I’m told already The State of Play sounds so good and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. Just the title alone says I should definitely pick that one.

John: [00:31:45] Yes it’s wonderful for daughters and I think for everybody and it’s great for you know I think four to eight year olds but I think I might be enjoying it more than my daughter.

Bonni: [00:31:53] So as we close today could you give just one final piece of advice to anyone listening who isn’t currently doing anything in the open access resources what would be your advice to them as far as getting started.

John: [00:32:08] Well the main thing is I always want people to actually you know we’re producing knowledge theoretically as researchers. And so I want people to read what I’m producing and locking it away behind $30 articles and $120 books just seems really counterintuitive. Our students are also producing knowledge and they have so much latent ability.

John: [00:32:25] And when we just have them turn in papers that we’re going to mark up in red pen and file away on a cabinet that’s again wasting that capacity for for sharing knowledge and for producing knowledge. So just think about how you can take the time both for yourself and for your students to share what you’re doing.

Bonni: [00:32:42] Another piece of advice that I would have for people is to go out and get some inspiration and a great place to do that. Are any of the open access resources repository is the one that I am probably most familiar with is MERLOT II.

Bonni: [00:32:56] That stands for multimedia educational resource for learning and online teaching and how this works is you can go in there and either search or browse around your discipline and find all kinds of whether it’s case studies or videos or online courses. I mean all kinds of information that you could make use of in your courses.

John: [00:33:21] Keegan Longwheeler and I’ve been working on open games lately. And so you can find lots of links for digital assets for audio video images and game engines themselves on our Web sites for experience play which is XP.keeganSLW.com or on our our bigger site Goblin which I think is Goblin.keeganSLW.com. And so we get lots of resources for open gaming.

Bonni: [00:33:48] John I just want to thank you so much for taking time today to be on the show. I’ve admired your work for so long and both on Twitter and also your blog. I’m just such an honor to get to talk to you and learn more about a topic that has actually never been devoted an entire episode to open access resources so thanks for bringing this into the conversation.

John: [00:34:07] Thanks so much for having me. It’s been fun.

Bonni: [00:34:10] Thanks to John Stewart for being a guest on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed and thanks to all of you for listening. If you have yet to get to the show it doesn’t take but a minute and really hopes to expand to the community and let other people discover the show. You can do that by going to whatever service it is you use to listen to the show and just giving it.

Bonni: [00:34:33] There are a number of stars or even writing some feedback about your experience listening to the show I hope you’ll do that so we can continue to grow and hire and as always if you have yet to subscribe to the weekly e-mail that’ll get all these great links that John shared today right in your inbox without you having to remember to go look at the notes and you’ll also get an article in that same email with me sharing about teaching or productivity you can subscribe at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll see you next time.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.