Downstream with Open Educational Resources and Practices
rEAPing the rewards for the development of domain-specific language collections
http://www.flickr.com/photos/49467596@N00/327391975
Alannah Fitzgerald @ Kings College London
Overview• Open Educational Resources Research Hub• Open Source Language Development
• FLAX Language Project at Waikato University• Open Oxford and Resource Reuse
• The BAWE Corpus and OpenSpires• Digital Scholarship & Open Educational Practices
– MOOCs and Domain-Specific Linguistic Support• Research into Open Language Collections
• Development and Use Across Formal and Informal Education
Open Educational Resources Research hub
Open Source language development
Developing Language Collections in the Open
The open source dictum, ‘release early and release often‘, in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, ‘the perpetual beta’, in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. It’s no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a ‘Beta’ logo for years at a time. (O’Reilly, 2005)
FLAX Project at Waikato University
FLAX image by permission of non-commercial reuse by Jane Galloway
FLAX – Flexible Language AcquisitionFlexible Language Acquisition
library
Simple FLAX Interface Designs
The traditional text analysis software interface for working with large language collections (corpora) has been the Key Word In Context (KWIC) interface. Corpus linguistics researchers and developers of KWIC interfaces have claimed over the years that learners of a language can deduce language use patterns by examining KWIC lines. This method is also known as data-driven learning.
Open oxford and resource reuse
University of Oxford OER
12http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk/resources/index.html#posters
http://www.slideshare.net/tbirdcymru/itunes-u-corporate-channel-of-free-educational-resources
FLAX Do-It-Yourself Podcast Corpora with Oxford OER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si24d3Z-8nQ
https://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com/w/page/2483648http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/melissa/2013/03/23/licetne-anglice-loqui/
FLAX British Academic Written English (BAWE) Collections
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26i_Y146GOs
British Academic Written English corpus:browse by genre or discipline
BAWE sub corpus wordlists
The BAWE sub corpus text collections:POS-tagging phrases
http://tinyurl.com/cpwyefb
Search and store collocations
Retrieve and save collocations
Collocational links to further resources
Word lists: general, academic, specific, key
Moocs and educational punditry
The end of the university as we know it
“The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.” (Harden, 2013)
http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1352
The Education Apocalypse: #opened13 Keynote
“Where in the stories we’re telling about the future of education are we seeing salvation? Why would we locate that in technology and not in humans, for example? Why would we locate that in markets and not in communities? What happens when we embrace a narrative about the end-times — about education crisis and education apocalypse? Who’s poised to take advantage of this crisis narrative? Why would we believe a gospel according to artificial intelligence, or according to Harvard Business School [Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation theory], or according to Techcrunch...?” (Watters, 2013)
http://hackeducation.com/2013/11/07/the-education-apocalypse/
Digital scholarship and open educational practices
Domain-Specific Linguistic Support for MOOCs – Virology at Coursera
Vocabulary Across Academic Disciplines
“Natural science might be characterized as a discipline of discovery, identifying and describing entities that had not been previously considered. As a result, natural science employs a large set of highly technical words, like dextrinoid, electrophoresis, and phallotoxins. Most of these words do not have commonplace synonyms, because they refer to entities, characteristics, or concepts that are not normally discussed in everyday conversation.” (Biber, 2006)
Virology OER from Open Educational Practitioner, Vincent Racaniello
Collaboration with Subject Specialists
“In the emerging academic literacies approach involving cooperation between subject specialists and writing teachers, the aim is to help the students develop metacognitive awareness of the roles and functions of writing in that discipline, to enable them to stand back from it and observe how it functions, and then to help them gradually participate in the genres, where genre is understood as a constellation of actions rather than a list of formal features.” (Breeze, 2012)
FLAX Virology ESAP Collection • YouTube lectures streamed• This Week in Virology (TWiV) podcasts • Open Access articles• Virology Blog articles with hyperlinks to resources• Text analysis tools for e.g. lexical bundles,
collocations, word lists, part-of-speech (POS) tags, and links to Wikipedia, the British National Corpus (BNC) and the live web
• Digital library features: search, retrieve, save, interact and learn
Digital Scholarship and Open Educational Practices
http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/book-ba-9781849666275.xml
Research into open language collections
Research with Queen Mary U. of London
http://language-centre.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/home
OER Research Hypotheses
References
• Biber, D. (2006). University Language, A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
• Breeze, R. (2012). Rethinking Academic Writing Pedagogy for the European University. Rodopi, Amsterdam.
• Harden, N. (2013). The end of the university as we know it. The American Interest. Retrieved from http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1352
• O’Reilly, T. (2005). “What Is Web 2.0″. • Watters, A. (2013, November 7). The Education Apocalypse
#opened13. Retrieved from http://www.hackeducation.com/2013/11/07/the-education-apocalypse/
Alannah Fitzgerald: [email protected]; @AlannahFitzwww.alannahfitzgerald.org TOETOE Blog
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/AlannahOpenEd/
