OER22 An Annotation Jam Session: Adding Meaning, Examples, Discussion to the UNESCO Recommendation
Channel: ALT
Date: 2022-05-06

Alan Levine

Years in the making, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER) (UNESCO, 2019) justifies at a global scale the value and rationale for OER. The five action areas included in the Recommendation comprise a high level map for nations, governments, and institutions to follow towards implementation of the promise of open education.

While often referenced as a whole, the language of the Recommendation, because of the global scope, is very generalized and perhaps somewhat removed from every day practice. Can annotation help break down and clarify by the meaning and intent but also open critical perspectives?

The theme of September Open Education Global online conference was framed around the Recommendation as will be the 2022 in-person congress in Nantes, France. To create more understanding and create a series of bridging activities between these events, OEGlobal established a version of the Recommendation published in Pressbooks (OEGlobal, 2021), where the five language versions were set up to be automatically enabled for web annotation in with Hypothes.is. A series of asynchronous focus events were established to draw attention to he text of the five action areas.

The promise here is to attach examples, references, questions to the specific words of the Recommendation, all in the scope of both making it more concrete and understandable but also to organize regional differences and implementation challenges.

Annotation of many forms is an everyday act and a familiar one for educators and researchers (Kalir and Garcia, 2021). Web annotation is a readily approachable form of open pedagogy (Brown and Croft, 2020) for courses but how does it fare as an open community practice?

The response so far for our call to annotate the Recommendation on OER has been relatively small (CROWDLAAERS, 2022). In this workshop style session, we question the value, purpose, potential of this annotation effort and itself as an academic practice. During the pandemic, web annotation seemed an ideal collaborative activity that did not require synchronous video sessions. But because web annotation is inherently a social process, this workshop is designed not as a led teaching session, but more like musician “jam” session, where participants can annotate individually or talk about their thinking together. Every presentation at OER22 ought to have a place to be attached to the UNESCO OER Recommendation.

The workshop will suggest a focus (but not limited to) on Action Area (iii) “Encouraging effective, inclusive and equitable access to quality OER.” We will explore what examples and practice support the specifics within the Recommendation, question what might be missing, or provide input on how implementation of this action area might include.This workshop is slightly different from the conference format; it is proposed to have a 30 minute overview for participants who wish for a structured introduction to annotation, but then to keep the space “open” for another 90 minutes for conference attendees who may want to drop in when convenient.