Mission

The Alberta OER Journal Club aims to encourage critical discussion of open education articles through monthly Twitter chats. These chats are held on the first Tuesday of each month at 7pm Mountain Standard Time.

Format and Best Practices

Below is an outline of our our format and some best practices we’ve developed along the way. This page will continue to evolve as we document new ways to engage participants and foster discussion. In the spirit of open education, we encourage anyone interested in starting their own regular Twitter chats to adopt and/or adapt this model.

Pre-Twitter chat

• Choose a discussion facilitator three weeks prior to Twitter chat.
• Have the guest facilitator choose an open article or resource to discuss two to three weeks weeks prior to the discussion.
• Have the guest facilitator compose a short blog post with a link to the selected source and five guiding discussion questions.
• Have journal club admins and participants tweet, retweet, and promote the blog post leading up to the Twitter discussion. These tweets use the recommended hashtags (see below), and they often tag key open education organizations (@BCcampus, @eCampusOntario, Creative Commons, etc). Advertising tweets are usually accompanied by our stock ABOER image.
• We also recommend tagging the article author (if they have a Twitter hashtag) and encourage them to participate. Authors have chimed in during and after the discussion to provide their perspective.
• Sharing the date and time of the conversation, with a link to the blog post, on relevant list servs or other social media platforms is also encouraged.

Types of sources for discussion

We encourage the selection of any open article (scholarly or otherwise) that prompts critical discussion of open education.

During the Twitter chat

• Discussions are approximately 45 minutes to one hour in length.
• At the start of each discussion, the guest facilitator provides an overview of the format for participants.
  • Questions are formatted as “Q1 p#”, Q2 p#”, “Q3 p#”, etc., and each tweet is accompanied by a screenshot of relevant text from the article (for those who might not have fully read it).
  • Participants are encouraged to indicate which questions they’re answering using A1, A2, A3, etc.
  • All questions, answers, and replies should include the journal club’s hashtag (#aboerjc) so the discussion can be fully captured and archived. Using other hashtags such as #OER, #OEP, #aboer, and #OpenEd (or others) is also encouraged, as these increase conversation visibility.

Post-Twitter chat: Archiving discussions and sharing

• Following the discussion’s conclusion, the discussion is archived by a journal club administrator using Wakelet.
• The admin will compose a post-discussion blog post for the journal club website which includes the archived Twitter discussion (link and PDF), a link to the article link, and the Twitter handle of the discussion facilitator. This blog post will be shared out on Twitter. In the tweet we thank the guest facilitator, tag as many discussion participants as possible, and include the #aboerjc and other hashtags. We use bitly for shortening blog post (and other) links.
• A journal club administrator will also upload PDF versions of our archived Twitter discussions on our Archive Page.

Licensing information

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.