Catalogue

Open education is at a critical juncture. It has moved on from its northern roots and is increasingly being challenged from its own periphery. At the same time, it finds itself marginalised and under threat in an educational sector infiltrated by corporate interests. However, rather than bunkering down, becoming blinkered or even complacent, the editors of this volume believe that the voices from the periphery should be amplified. This book represents a starting point towards curating and centering marginal voices and non-dominant epistemic stances in open education, an attempt at critical pluriversalism. It is a curated collection of 38 blog posts, lectures, talks, articles, and other informal works contributed by 43 diverse authors/co-authors and published since 2013. Each of these contributions offers a perspective on open education that can be considered marginal and that challenges the dominant hegemony.

In 2017, <a href="http://rebus.foundation/">The Rebus Foundation</a> embarked on a research and development project to prototype an open, web-based reading system, with funding from the <a href="https://mellon.org/">Andrew W. Mellon Foundation</a>. <br> <br>Our main goals with this project were to clearly identify and understand the different players involved in the publication, distribution and consumption of scholarly monographs, and to explore how Open Web technologies could improve scholars’ access to, and interaction with, scholarly monographs. We've summarized our research findings in this report.<br> <br>Visit <a href="http://rebus.foundation/">rebus.foundation</a> to learn more about the Rebus Foundation and our projects. You can also contact us at <a href="mailto:hi@rebus.foundation"> hi@rebus.foundation</a>.

Literature Reviews for Education and Nursing Graduate Students is an open textbook designed for students in graduate-level nursing and education programs. Its intent is to recognize the significant role the literature review plays in the research process and to prepare students for the work that goes into writing one. Developed for new graduate students and novice researchers just entering into the work of a chosen discipline, each of the eight chapters covers a component of the literature review process. Students will learn how to form a research question, search existing literature, synthesize results and write the review. The book contains examples, checklists, supplementary materials, and additional resources. Literature Reviews for Education and Nursing Graduate Students is written by two librarians with expertise guiding students through research and writing assignments, and is openly licensed.

This collection of short narratives provides insight into the process of creating open textbooks and other open educational resources (OER). Over the first months of 2019, Donna Langille (Rebus’s then practicum student) interviewed project leads who have used the Rebus Community publishing platform since 2017. Her write-ups of these interviews focus on the benefits, challenges, and vision of publishing openly. The projects range broadly—from conducting literature reviews for nursing students to building a student-driven anthology of Spanish literature, from opening up LGTBQ+ studies to an international readership to designing a multimedia guide for learning sight reading for guitar. Unifying these diverse publications is the common practice of making publishing into a community-driven act, and throughout, readers will discover that open publishing comes with many different rewards. Indeed, what becomes clear is that making books also makes community—a community that is in the process of reinventing how knowledge is made, shared, and reimagined.

The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature was initially created by Robin deRosa at Plymouth State University. Working with students, they collected public domain texts, edited them as necessary and created introductions for each to form the beginnings of a new, definitive anthology of Early American Literature.

The project is now in the hands of Tim Robbins and the Rebus Community, who will expand the texts covered and source introductions to each section. We are looking for collaborators to help us develop a more comprehensive series of texts and build the book out to meet the needs of Early American students and scholars.

This textbook takes a distinctly socio-historical approach to introducing Early American literature. The anthology will allow students to engage with literature in exciting and dynamic ways. We currently looking for authors to write introductions for any remaining sections, and for individuals to locate public domain texts. If you’d like to participate, please let us know in the Rebus Projects platform.