Heather Ross’ “Introduction to Open Educational Practices- Winter 2022” course motivated me to finally start this website. I had been envisioning using a website to collate my ideas around mining education. The first blogs were all assignments for this course. And to all readers, her course, which is hosted by the University of Saskatchewan is free and she is a fantastic educator on open educational practices.
I really liked reading the blogs of my classmates who all brought different perspectives. We can learn so much asynchronously but that added personal connection through occasional virtual meetings elevated the entire experience. Heather was a fantastic facilitator of those sessions. And in person, there were always more tidbits of information to obtain through question-and-answer sessions.
I learned how to be brave and get out of my head by participating in Heather’s course. Instead of just thinking, I acted and wrote down some of my ideas. I was most interested in copyright and how to share open resources, and these topics were covered. Everything came together so that I started to build the BeyondGeology.com platform immediately where I could post blog entries. Luckily, I had the help of my friend Tristina Miller of Prairie Orchid Media there to help me in website building. She taught me that there are options for putting free-online courses in the public domain using Joomla add-ins. I am testing this platform out so I can make my course available, free of charge.
This website is all part of the story I want to tell about mining and ties to the “Hub” that I have been working on for the past 5 years. What started as a hobby is now in the public domain this week too. I present the Hub at a conference in Vancouver on May 4th (may the 4th be with you!). There is still so much data missing about Canadian Mines but I hope that others will help me to fill this in. I collated publicly available data in this database and will need the help of others to continue to add to the data. If I model open access, I hope colleagues will also want to participate in telling the story of mining in Canada in a similar way. I can always refer them back to this course as Heather has nicely introduced the culture around creating open educational resources.
When the BeyondGeology.com website is complete, I will add the link to my LinkedIn profile. The combined platforms are my excuse for traveling back and forth across Canada to find stories about mining and Canada’s commodities. I plan to keep adding to both platforms for at least another decade. I hope that until I retire, all that I learn will make me a better teacher here at the university too because I can be a better storyteller for connecting the real world to the classroom. Thank you for the kickstart Heather. Now I have the tools to start Rocking it, Open.