For David Wiley’s Intro to Open Ed course I had settled on the “artisan” character class, helping to round out the on-campus “guild”. Though the artisan had clear value and balance with the other classes, I was not satisfied with it for a couple of reasons. First, the name was neither fierce nor inspiring! I mean, how successful will any RPG party without someone who knows how to swing a blade? Second, I have intentions to carry out with OER this semester that varied or went beyond the quests of the artisan class.
I proposed to Dr. Wiley that we’d benefit from a rogue,
…a versatile character, capable of sneaky combat and nimble tricks. The rogue is stealthy and dextrous … capable of finding and disarming traps and picking locks. The rogue also has the ability to “sneak attack”enemies who are caught off-guard or taken by surprise…
The nimbleness and ability to pick locks to “open” treasure fit my objectives. For example, when I was looking at the OLI I was annoyed at how the OER was locked-up by the technology, and asked myself, “How would I break this free?”
Rogue
The Rogue utilizes digital material production and web dev skills to obtain, reuse, and remix OER, using stealth and cunning to unlock and re-release OER materials that may be guarded or trapped by publishing technology.
To illustrate how this would fit, I took a stab at rewriting the rogue’s Quest 1 (based on the same artisan quest):
Employ espionage and reconnaissance on the following OER projects, noting the types of media predominantly used by each site. Evaluate the reuse/remix potential of the media, looking at openness of structure, code, security, source availability, semantics, license compatibility, etc. Review a sufficient sample of courses per site to gain accurate insight into their habits and routines. Write a substantive blog post that puts forth strategic directions for the re-release and reuse of the sites’ media with special attention to unlocking those OER that may be imprisoned by CMS or final format software.
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On Twitter the idea quickly showed that other possible OER character classes might be beneficial, including the barbarian (I already know a few of these)!