As a high school teacher, I tried hard to place the amazing work of students in places where others might find inspiration from it or learn from it. Or both. Often it was a website that documented a trip or some work we were doing. Sometimes it was in print where students could easily make multiple copies of things they had created. And sometimes it was a photo of somewhere I had taken the students, and I was able to frame it and place it in a nice location on campus.
Here is an image I took of some students on a trip into the Grand Canyon. It was placed above the fireplace in the school cafeteria. It was there for years. And here some more posters hung around campus.
I think I have continued with that feeling of sharing, or encouraging students to share, in my last twenty years of teaching at the college level. From professional digital and print portfolios to community-based activities where students did “work” for local organizations that was often visible to many.
As an instructional designer, I certainly have pushed “Open Resources” in many ways. I have done faculty workshops around tools like OpenStax and workshops around building textbooks on platforms like Pressbooks. The tools we have for sharing are really wonderful and we can, if we choose, provide others with information and experiences that re valuable. Sadly, we often choose what worked yesterday or expensive, for the student, question banks full of multiple-choice questions. But it doesn’t have to be that way and I think the future is bright were OER is concerned.
I have always tried to make faculty work visible to others. Both locally and for those elsewhere. Too many times the faculty in one office could be helped by the person next door to them if they only asked and had a moment to do it. So I have tried to use the web to share the ideas and answers to some things with faculty. The video below looks at how that worked for a bit on our faculty facing website we have for about twelve years at a community college in Arizona.
As part of that space, we created the 9x9x25 Challenge which was simply faculty sharing ideas. This is a link to the wayback machine version of some of that writing. Pretty amazing. All done for free.
More recently, our work around the Open Web with faculty is sort of represented here on this site. It is intresting to me just how information can be shared and I love that I can create a sinlge page with a bunch of free resources like this one with some good podcasts!
For myself, this site you are reading this on is much of what I have done professionally and unprofessionally (which is most of the stuff) and has new and old things.