Personal Blogs

Hi everyone,
This week we were asked to read two resources that provide views on different aspects of what openness means in higher education.  and to create a visual representation that defines openness in education by drawing on some of the concepts listed in our two chosen resources (I tried to include all of what I thought were the key ones). Our tutors suggested PowerPoint, Prezi or any other tool of our choice. I decided I would also share details about my tool of choice to try and help others decide what tool to use.
I didn't want to use PowerPoint because of the bad press it's getting so I went with the suggestion to use an online tool such as Prezi and found out about MS Sway.  My key concepts of openness are taken from Weller et al. (2018) and Tait (2018).  Here is my presentation: Representing open education (MS Sway)

About Microsoft Sway 
PowerPoint is too much associated with shiny-suited people with no speaking skills. Anybody can use Sway if they sign up for a free Microsoft account. People with an Office 365 can also use Sway, the free version provides more than enough for the average user.  If you enter a term Sway will produce the outline of a presentation for you, with definitions, uses, areas to cover, suggested linked topics, images, and more. This is all powered from Wikipedia data and gives full links back to the pages it uses.   So Sway helps you overcome 'writer's block'. 

I think the main advantage of SWAY is compatibility and share-ability.  It is compatible with the Web using Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer 11, Firefox 17 or later, Chrome 23 or later, and Safari 6 or later.  It works with Apple (online) and MS devices. You can embed a wide variety of content — including images, video files, audio clips, and maps — from several web sites in your Sway.  With Sway, you have a few options for who you can share with (specific people, your coworkers, anyone) and what access they will get (view only or edit). You also can control whether or not they have access to share it with others.

References

Weller, M., Jordan, K., DeVries, I. and Rolfe, V., 2018. Mapping the open education landscape: citation network analysis of historical open and distance education research. Open Praxis, 10(2), pp.109-126. [Online].
https://www.learntechlib.org/p/183582/article_183582.pdf (Accessed 21 March 2020).

Tait, A. (2018) ‘Open Universities: the next phase’, Asian Association of Open Universities Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 13–23 [Online]. DOI: 10.1108/ AAOUJ-12-2017-0040 (Accessed 21 October 2019).