Engaging with open education

This panel will address key issues and provide empiricallygrounded insights on learning about, with, and through open educational resources (OER). p. 1

She will first chart a typology that considers the affordances surrounding participation and community engagement in a diverse body of OER initiatives. She will then continue by problematizing the notion of collaborative communities or ‘relational networks’ within an OER context, and by proposing a framework that takes into account a number of boundary issues around the design of peer-produced content, including expertise, locus of agency and, pedagogy. p. 1

towards the notion of creating ‘Open Participatory Learning Ecosystems’; these efforts have outpaced our understanding of how educational systems behave when they become more open. p. 1

Panagiota's broader background is in media and communications, with a particular emphasis on new media cultures, knowledge systems and learning. She holds a PhD in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex. Her interests in open content communities have informed her teaching and prior post doctoral research at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has published on issues of collective intelligence and cultural citizenship. She is preparing a book (The Web of Knowledge: Encyclopaedias in the Digital Age) to be published by Polity Press. p. 1

• Mentoring and peer learning in Open Education environments p. 1

Panagiota Alevizou p. 1

Katarzyna Kozinska p. 1

As part of the OLnet project, her research focuses on exploring the motivational aspects of social and collaborative learning with Open Educational Resources (OER). Katarzyna will talk about the ways in which learners interact with others while learning on OpenLearn, the main types of social p. 1

activities and the dynamics of building communities in taskas well as non-task related contexts. Her empirical insights are based on a study entitled: ‘Motivations for socio-collaborative learning practices among registered users of OpenLearn – examining community interactions’. p. 2

Katarzyna has a Master of Arts in Philology (Applied Linguistics) from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (Poland) and has recently completed her MSc in Educational Studies at the University of Oxford (UK). Besides Open Educational Resource initiatives, her research interests include technology-enhanced, blended and lifelong learning, as well as collaborative and social learning practices. p. 2