Challenge 1: Finding open content to open a course

This is not a surprise.

In a perfect world, I would be able to share – in an open course – a selection of both academic and thoughtful practitioner readings that point to common themes and/or raise questions about our thinking or assumptions concerning enterprise social networking.

It is easier for me to pull off this trick – at least, to the best of my own limited abilities – in a closed course. I have available to me the tremendous resources of a top-notch university library, which pays for my (and my student’s) access to leading journal articles.

All of my friends working hard in the open education field know this all too well. I’m just running into that first level of frustration today, in my first day of #wolweek, attempting to design an open segment of my course on enterprise social networking.

But in working out loud, there were some, uh, helpful nudges:

Ok. So I have that option.

Actually, am thankful for the connection to Kai Riemer. Not a surprise here, either. That in day 1 of working out loud, the activity leads to potential new relationships.

But at this point I am planning on leveraging the network to see if I can find an alternative path to the work that I see as most interesting to share in the open segment of my course. in the next couple of days I’ll try to post a reference list of articles I really like – contemporary, good research on enterprise social networks in organizations. But the list will be based on articles published in journals that I have access to – only for teaching in my “normal” MSLOC 430 course.

I’d like to see if there exists open-access versions of articles that build off of this reference list, in the way that good academic pieces do.

This week. That’s the goal – to live up to the words in the lobby of the Harold Washington Library in Chicago: Learn, Discover, Read.

photo credit: Chris Smith/Out of Chicago via photopin cc