Tag Archives: open education

Slowing Down⤴

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I’ve been thinking a lot about slowness and refusal; in technology, in practice, in life more generally.  

Slowness and refusal was the focus of an Edinburgh Futures Institute Contested Computing event earlier this month on Imagining Feminist Technofutures, with Sharon Webb, Usha Raman, Mar Hicks, and Aisha Sobey. In a wide ranging discussion that questioned the dominance of techno-solutionism, the biases and inequalities that are encoded in technology, and the role of education in countering these historical structures of dominance, the panel touched on feminist refusal and the importance of “slowing down” development cycles in order to hold tech companies to account and give corrective measures and ways of refusal a chance to thrive. Slowing down can be seen as a form of progressive innovation, a way to offer resistance, and academia is a space where this can be brought to life.  

(I couldn’t help thinking about my own domain of open education where there has always been a tendency to privilege techno-solutionism as the height of innovation. Going right back to the early days of learning objects, there has been a tension between those who take a programmatic, content-centric view of open education, and those who focus more on the affordances of open practice.  Proselytising about the transformative potential of generative AI education is just the latest incarnation of this dichotomy.)

Recognising the value of refusal brought to mind a point Helen Beetham made in her ALT Winter Summit keynote last December, which I’m still thinking about, slowly.  

Helen called for universities to share their research and experience of AI openly, rather than building their own walled gardens, as this is just another source of inequity.  As educators we hold a key ethical space.  We have the ingenuity to build better relationships with this new technology, to create ecosystems of agency and care, and empower and support each other as colleagues.

Helen ended by calling for spaces of principled refusal within education. In the learning of any discipline there may need to be spaces of principled refusal, this is a privilege that education institutions can offer. 

During the Technofutures event, Sharon Webb asked “where is the feminist joy we can take from these things? How can we share our feminist practice and make community accessible?” 

This is a question that Frances Bell, Guilia Forsythe, Lou Mycroft, Anne-Marie Scott and I tried to address in the chapter we contributed to Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin’s generative book Higher Education for Good.  “HE4Good assemblages: FemEdTech Quilt of Care and Justice in Open Education” explores the creation of the FemEdTech quilt assemblage through a “slow ontology of feminist praxis”. Quilting, and other forms of communal making, have always provided a space for women to share their skill, labour and practice on their own terms outwith the strictures of capitalist society and institutions that seek to exploit and appropriate their labour.  These are also a space that necessarily invite us to slow down.  Contributors to the FemEdTech quilt were

“compelled by the process to decelerate, helping them to curate, to stitch, to draw, to write, and to think. We acknowledge the pressures of the time: being creative in neoliberal times is itself a form of resistance.
…
Resistance requires radical rest (rest for health, rest for hope). The slow ontology of the assemblage required waves and pauses which allowed space to think. This may be the most crucial resistance of all in an industrialised HE which fills every potential pause with compliance activity. Feminists create, feminists resist, and feminists celebrate difference.”

This is how we can share our feminist joy; by decelerating, by sharing our feminist practices and making our communities accessible, through networks like FemEdTech.

Of course it’s difficult to disentangle the process of sharing practice and building community from the technology, and particularly the social media, that mediates so much of our lives. The exodus of users from X to Bluesky at the end of the year promoted some interesting conversations on Mastodon about the role of different social media platforms.  I particularly appreciated this conversation with Robin de Rosa and Kate Bowles about the ability of Mastodon to provide a space for “big thinking” and slowing down. 

I’ve been forced to embrace slowness on a more personal level this year as a result of serious ongoing health issues.  Its been a salutary reminder that although our practice is mediated by technology, it is still embodied and that ultimately it’s that embodiment that governs our ability to work, create, and contribute to our communities.  I’m still trying to figure out what all this means on both a personal and professional level; how to make slowing down and refusal a conscious progressive act, and to find the joy in embracing radical rest for health and hope.  Like the FemEdTech quilt and network, it’s a slow process of becoming.

Open Education and AI: Proselytisers, prophets and poets.⤴

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I’ve been dipping my toes back into the debate about open education and AI over the last few weeks.  I stepped back from this space earlier in the year both for personal reasons and because I was getting a bit dispirited by the signal to noise ratio. It’s still a very noisy space, more so if anything, but there are some weel-kent voices emerging that are hard to ignore.

David Wiley laid out his stall last month in the webinar Why Open Education Will Become Generative AI Education, and his views have been predictably polarising. There have already been several thoughtful response to David, which I can highly recommend reading: 

I don’t want to repeat the very pertinent points that have already been made, but I do want to add my concerns about the staring point of David’s argument which is

“the primary goal of the open education movement has been to increase access to educational opportunities. The primary strategy for accomplishing this goal has been to increase access to educational materials. And the primary tactic for implementing this strategy has been to create and share OER.” 
~ Why Generative AI Is More Effective at Increasing Access to Educational Opportunity than OER

This is certainly one view of the open education movement, (which is by no means a homogenous entity), but open education isn’t just about goals, strategies and tactics, there are other perspectives that need to be taken into consideration.  I find this content centric view of open education a bit simplistic and reductive and I had hoped that we’d moved on from this by now.  I would suggest that the primary purpose of open education is to improve knowledge equity, support social justice, and increase diversity and inclusion. While content and OER have an important role to play, the way to do this is by sharing open practice. 

This slide in particular made me pause…

Leaving aside the use of the Two Concepts of Liberty, which is not unproblematic, I’m presuming “users” equates here to teachers and learners, which is a whole other topic of debate. It’s certainly true that open licences alone don’t grant the skills and expertise needed to engage in “high-demand revise and remix activities”, but I’m not sure anyone ever claimed they did? And yes GenAI could be a way to provide users with these skills, but at what cost? There’s little discussion here about the ethical issues of copyright theft, algorithmic bias, exploitation of labour, and the catastrophic environmental impact of AI. Surely a more responsible and sustainable way to gain these skills and expertise is to connect with other teachers and learners, other human beings, and by sharing our pedagogy and practice? While there’s a certain logic to David’s hypothesis, it doesn’t take into account the diversity of practice that can make open education so empowering. 

Aside from the prediction that Generative AI Education will save / replace / supersede OER, I couldn’t help feeling that there is still an underlying assumption that OER = open textbooks. (This was also an issue I had with one of the keynotes at this year’s OER24 Conference) It shouldn’t need saying, but there are myriad kinds of open resources above and beyond open textbooks.  What about student co-created OER for example? It’s through the process of creation, of gathering information, of developing digital and copyright literacy skills, of formulating knowledge and understanding, that learning takes place.  The OER, the content created, is a valuable  tangible output of that process, but it’s not the most important thing. If we ask GenAI to produce our OER, what happens to the process of learning by doing, creating and connecting with other human beings? 

This issue was touched on by Maren Deepwell and Audrey Watters in the most recent episode of Maren’s brilliant Leading Virtual Teams podcast.  It’s been really inspiring  to see Audrey re-enter the fray of education technology criticism.  We need her clear incisive voice and fearless critique now more than ever.  

Touching on the language we use to talk about AI, Audrey reminded us that “Human memory and computer memory are not the same thing.” And in her The Extra Mile newsletter she says:

“I do not believe that the machine is or can be “intelligent” in the way that a human can. I don’t think that generative AI and LLMs work the same way my mind does.” 

This very much called to mind Helen Beetham’s thoughtful perspective on ethics and AI at the ALT Winter Summit last year where she said that “generative”, “intelligence”, and “artificial” are all deeply problematic concepts.  

“Every definition is an abstraction made from an engineering perspective, while neglecting other aspects of human intelligence.”

Towards the end of the podcast, Maren and Audrey talked about the importance of the embodied nature of being and learning, how we tap into such a deep well of embodied knowledge when we learn. It’s unthinkable to outsource this to AI, for the simple reason that AI is stupid. 

The embodied human nature of learning was also the theme of Marjorie Lotfi’s beautiful six-part poem, Interrogating Learning, commissioned by Edinburgh Futures Institute for the inaugural event of their Learning Curves Future of Education series. Marjorie weaves together the voices of displaced women and, I believe, speaks more deeply about what it means to learn than any disembodied “artificial intelligence” ever could. 

What have you learned?

When asked this question how will a woman answer?

For a moment she’s back in her mother’s belly
a heart beating out a rush of cortisol
or a warm dream of sleep listening through a barrier of skin and blood
before even her own first breath.

And then the day she’s born
blinking at the bright of daylight, candle, bulb,
hearing the low buzz of electric
and the sudden clarity of a voice she knows already.
Learning it again.

There have been a thousand things to learn in every day I’ve been alive,
the woman thinks,
and I am 53 this year.

OER24: Gathering Courage⤴

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Hands of Hope, Cork, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell

Last week the OER24 Conference took place at the Munster Technological University in Cork and I was privileged to go along with our OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto. 

The themes of this year’s conference were: 

  • Open Education Landscape and Transformation
  • Equity and Inclusion in OER
  • Open Source and Scholarly Engagement
  • Ethical Dimensions of Generative AI and OER Creation
  • Innovative Pedagogies and Creative Education

The conference was chaired with inimitable style by MTU’s Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin and Tom Farrelly, the (in)famous Gasta Master.

The day before the conference I met up with a delegation of Dutch colleagues from a range of sectors and organisations for a round table workshop on knowledge equity and open pedagogies. In a wide ranging discussion we covered the value proposition and business case for open, the relationship between policy and practice, sustainability and open licensing, student engagement and co-creation, authentic assessment and the influence of AI.  I led the knowledge equity theme and shared experiences and case studies from the University of Edinburgh.  Many thanks to Leontien van Rossum from SURF for inviting me to participate.

A Cautionary Fairy Tale

The conference opened the following day with Rajiv Jhangiani’s keynote, “Betwixt fairy tales & dystopian futures – Writing the next chapter in open education“, a cautionary tale of a junior faulty member learning to navigating the treacherous path between commercial textbook publishers on the one hand and open textbooks on the other.  It was a familiar tale to many North American colleagues, though perhaps less relatable to those of us from UK HE where the model of textbook use is rather different, OER expertise resides with learning technologists rather than librarians, OER tends to encompass a much broader range of resources than open textbooks, and open resources are as likely to be co-created by students as authored by staff. However Rajiv did make several point that were universal in their resonance.  In particular, he pointed out that it’s perverse to use the moral high ground of academic integrity to defend remote proctoring systems that invade student privacy, and tools that claim to identify student use of AI, when these companies trample all over copyright and discriminate against ESL speakers. If we create course policies that are predicated on mistrust of students we have no right to criticise them for being disengaged. Rajiv also cautioned against using OER as a band aid to cover inequity in education; it might make us feel good but it distracts us from reality. Rajiv called for ethical approaches to education technology, encouraging us not to be distracted by fairy tales, but to engage with hope and solidarity while remaining firmly grounded in reality. 

Rajiv Jhangiani, OER24, CC BY Lorna M. Campbell.

Ethical Dimensions of Generative AI and OER Creation

Generative AI (GAI) loomed large at the conference this year and I caught several presentations that attempted to explore the thorny relationship between openness and GAI. 

UHI have taken a considered approach by developing policy, principles and staff and student facing guidance that emphasises ethical, creative, and environmentally aware use of generative AI. They are also endorsing a small set of tools that provide a range of functionality and stand up to scrutiny in terms of data security.  These include MS Copilot, Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Perplexity, Satlas and Semantic Scholar. Keith Smyth, Dean of Learning & Teaching at UHI, outlined some of the challenges they are facing including AI and critical literacy, tensions around convenience and creation, and the relationship between GAI and open education. How does open education practice sit alongside generative AI? There are some similarities in terms of ethos; GAI repurposes, reuses, and remixes resources, but in a really selfish way. To address these ambiguities, UHI are developing further guidance on GAI and open education practice and will try to foster a culture that values and prioritises sharing and repurposing resources as OER. 

Patricia Gibson gave an interesting talk about “Defending Truth in an Age of AI Generated Misinformation: Using the Wiki as a Pedagogical Device”.  GAI doesn’t know about the truth, it is designed to generate the most most accurate response from the available data, if it doesn’t have sufficient data, it simply guesses or “hallucinates”. Patricia cautioned against letting machines flood our information channels with misinformation and untruth. Misinformation creates inaccuracy and unreliability and leads us to question what is truth.  However awareness of GAI is also teaching us to question images and information we see online, enabling us to develop critical digital and AI literacy skills. Patricia went on to present a case study about Business students working collaboratively to develop wiki content, which echoed many of the findings of Edinburgh’s own Wikipedia in the curriculum initiatives.  This enabled the students to co-create collaborative knowledge, develop skills in sourcing information, curate fact-checked information, engage in discussion and deliberation, and counter misinformation.

Interestingly, the Open Data Institute presented at the conference for what I think may be the first time. Tom Pieroni, ODI Learning Manager, spoke about a project to develop a GAI tutor for use on an Data Ethics Essentials course: Generative AI as an Assistant Tutor: Can responsible use of GenAI improve learning experiences and outcomes?  

CC BY SA, Tom Pieroni, Open Data Institute

One of the things I found fascinating about this presentation was that while there was some evaluation of the pros and cons of using the GAI tutor, there was no discussion about the ethics of GAI itself. Perhaps that is part of the course content? One of the stated aims of the Assistant AI Tutor project is to “Explore AI as a method for personalising learning.” This struck me because earlier in the conference someone, sadly I forget who, had made the sage comment that all too often technology in general and AI an particular effectively remove the person from personalised learning. 

Unfortunately I missed Javiera Atenas and Leo Havemann’s session on A data ethics and data justice approach for AI-Enabled OER, but I will definitely be dipping in to the slides and resources they shared. 

Student Engagement and Co-Creation

Leo Havemann, Lorna M. Campbell, Mayu Ishimoto, Cárthach Ó Nuanáin, Hazel Farrell, OER24, CC0.

I was encouraged to hear a number of talks that highlighted the importance of enabling students to co-create open knowledge as this was one of the themes of the talk that OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto and I gave on Empowering Student Engagement with Open Education. Our presentation explored the transformative potential of engaging students with open education through salaried internships, and how these roles empower students to go on to become radical digital citizens and knowledge activists. There was a lot of interest in Information Services Group’s programme of student employment and several delegates commented that it was particularly inspiring to hear Mayu talking about her own experience of working with the OER Service.  

Open Education at the Crossroads

Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin opened the second day of the conference with an inspiring, affirming and inclusive keynote The Future isn’t what it used to be: Open Education at a Crossroads OER24 keynote resources.  Catherine and Laura have the unique ability to be fearless and clear sighted in facing and naming the crises and inequalities that we face, while never losing faith in humanity, community and collective good. I can’t adequately summarise the profound breadth and depth of their talk here, instead I’d recommend that you watch to their keynote and read their accompanying essay.  I do want to highlight a couple of points that really stood out for me though. 

Laura pointed out that we live in an age of conflict, where the entire system of human rights are under threat. The early hope of the open internet is gone, a thousand flowers have not bloomed. Instead, the state and the market control the web, Big Tech is the connective tissue of society, and the dominant business model is extractive surveillance capitalism.

AI has caused a paradigmatic shift and there is an irony around AI and open licensing; by giving permission for re-use, we are giving permission for potential harms, e.g. facial recognition software being trained on open licensed images.  Copyright is in turmoil as a result of AI and we need to remember that there is a difference between what is legal and what is ethical. We need to rethink what we mean by open practice when GAI is based on free extractive labour.  Having written about the contested relationship of invisible labour and open education in the past, this last point really struck me. 

HE for Good was written as an antidote to these challenges.  Catherine & Laura drew together the threads of HE for Good towards a manifesto for higher education and open education, adding:

“When we meet and share our work openly and with humility we are able to inspire each other to address our collective challenges.”

CC BY NC, Catherine Cronin & Laura Czerniewicz, OER24

Change is possible they reminded us, and now is the time.  We stand at a crossroads and we need all parts of the open education movement to work together to get us there.  In the words of Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and current Chair of the Elders:

“Our best future can still lie ahead of us, but it is up to everyone to get us there.”  

Catherine Cronin & Laura Czerniewicz, OER24, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell.

The Splintering of Social Media

One theme that emerged during the conference is what Catherine and Laura referred to as the “splintering of social media”, with a number of presenters exploring the impact this has had on open education community and practice.  This splintering has lead people to seek new channels to share their practice with some turning to the fediverse, podcasting and internet radio. Blogging didn’t seem to feature quite as prominently as a locus for sharing practice and community, but it was good to see Martin Weller still flying the flag for open ed blogging, and I’ve been really encouraged to see how many blog posts have been published reflecting on the conference.  

Gasta! 

The Gasta sessions, overseen by Gasta Master Tom Farelly, were as raucous and entertaining as ever.  Every presenter earned their applause and their Gasta! beer mat. It seems a bit mean to single any out, but I can’t finish without mentioning Nick Baker’s Everyone’s Free..to use OEP, to the tune of Baz Luhrmann “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”, Alan Levine’s Federated, and Eamon Costello’s hilarious Love after the algorithm: AI and bad pedagogy police.  Surely the first time an OER Conference has featured Jon Bon Jovi sharing his thoughts on the current state of the pedagogical landscape?!

Eamon Costello, Jon Bon Jovi, Tom Farrelly, Alan Levine, OER24, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell

The closing of an OER Conference is always a bit of an emotional experience and this year more so than most. The conference ended with a heartfelt standing ovation for open education stalwart Martin Weller who is retiring and heading off for new adventures, and a fitting and very lovely impromptu verse of The Parting Glass by Tom. Tapadh leibh a h-uile duine agus chì sinn an ath-bhliadhna sibh!

Martin Weller, Tom Farrelly, Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell, OER24.

* The title of this blog post is taken from this lovely tweet by Laura Czerniewicz.

Open crossroads and small acts of critical resistance: some thoughts from #OER24⤴

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Was the plane landing in the snow early last Wednesday morning, after some signs of warmer, spring air finally arriving, a sign that this year’s OER conference was going to be dealing with a mass of contradictions? Or it that just part and parcel of our everyday life now?

Anyway the sun did come out, and as ever the atmosphere at OER24 was warm, welcoming, open, critically informed. Thanks to Tom Farrelly and Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin for chairing another successful conference and to all the committee, ALT staff, and MTU staff and student helpers for all their contributions.

This year I have not been writing here as much as previously but the OER conferences always provide me with inspiration to write something here. This year I’m not going on a flight of speculative fiction like last year, rather I’m going to try and set out my stall for some small acts of critical resistance. So, are you ready? Then let’s begin.

GenAI loomed heavy over nearly every session I went to. It was also a key theme of the presentation I gave with Keith Smyth and Bill Johnston. We were fortunate that our presentation came after the amazing keynote from Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz. It’s no surprise that two leading open scholars would provide such a rich contextualisation of their own open practice but of the situation we all find ourselves in just now. You can read the essay that accompanies the keynote here and watch the recording here.

It does feel like everyday we are at not just a crossroad, but a precipice of climate change, political polarisation, war, famine, and general f***ed-upness. – or as Laura and Catherine more politely called it, the polycrisis . But despite all that, big tech companies are still feeding us the narrative that things can change for the better through AI, that once again technology will save us and keep the shareholders and “the markets” ticking along nicely and keep the rich rich and the rest of us in our place. We just have accept GenAI in education and do our best to re-frame what we do, how we “know”, it’s not going back in the box now. Or do we?

Catherine and Laura’s keynote was in many ways a call to arms asking us all what can we do, individually and collectively to meet the many challenges facing open education.

The way GenAI tools distort the 5 R’s of OER (retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute ) is quite a challenge to open education. Do we need OERs when we can just prompt AI to create something new, without having to worry about pesky copyright and citation? Now I’m not going to get into the copyright debate here (I don’t have the time or the knowledge) but Jisc has just published its “An introduction to copyright law and practice in education, and the concerns arising in the context of GenerativeAI” which is a good starting point.

From a personal point of view, one of the reasons I try to use and share OERs is not just about altruism (tho’ that is part of it), from a more practical and selfish perspective, if I release something with an open license I get attribution; if I share it through an open repository I can access that resource anytime, anywhere. If find and use an openly licensed resource I can see who has created it, I acknowledge them. I don’t just extract and move on.

In our talk we looked at a number of issues around critical pedagogy and AI, and how critical pedagogy could help us to address some of the challenges of AI and open education. How can we create alternative, meaningful narratives to challenge the Big Tech narrative? Some great work is already being done by many scholars ( shout out to Helen Beetham here and her imperfect offerings), but we need more porosity or leaky stories. Many of my friends don’t know about the environmental and human costs of AI, in fact some of them actually think “the cloud” is actually in the clouds, not on the ground using up masses of water and electricity.

In education it does seem that choice around using AI systems is increasingly disappearing. Whilst there is much great work going on around how to use these systems more critically (here and here are examples), maybe we should be thinking a bit less using the systems (and help to train the algorithms with every prompt we enter) and more about critically engaging with the terms and conditions of use (again a point highlighted by Laura in the keynote). So whilst many institutions are developing policies around use of AI, and publications such as the EU Ethical Guidelines on the use of AI and data in Education with sets of questions, the questions are really aimed at quite high institutional levels. I’m not sure if I could use them meaningfully. They are aimed more at awareness raising, many of them starting with “are teachers and students aware of . . .”. Which is fine as a starting point, but what level of “awareness” is really needed? What level of awareness do I need, do students need?

If (as someone mentioned to me at the conference) that they were “made aware” of MS Copilot being introduced the day before it went live, do they have time to even consider the implications for them, their work, their intellectual labour? Are the algorithms is it using transparent and explained in plain English? How are its “efficiencies” defined, and measured in the context of admin processes, learning and teaching etc? When you leave an institution, do you have a the right to withdraw your data from the copilot data set? Who/what is monitoring the outputs that the system is returning for accuracy? Is this just another version of a big system extracting our knowledge, and charging us to repackage it and sell it back to us?

I don’t know, maybe there are answers to these questions. But if there aren’t, surely this is where open educational practice comes into its own by providing the space to have discussion based on these types of questions. A form of Freire’s culture circles perhaps? And then share outputs (perhaps some standard questions that individuals could ask their institutions or use themselves to help navigation through Ts&Cs of any AI powered system) as OERs. These spaces, questions, outputs, could help us develop some small acts of critical resistance that just might help us collective create some new, open narratives and give us some hope for the future.

painting of Freire with various quotes added, from our OER presentation slides
What would Paulo think?

If you are interested in taking this further or have any other ideas, then please do let me know in the comments or by email and we can try and start to do something.

One final point about #OER24. It gave lots of us a chance to say thank you to Martin Weller for his work in open education. As you may know, Martin is leaving the OU and stepping down from the GO-GEN network in June so this was his last appearance at #OER in that capacity. I’m sure he will be back! But I just wanted to thank Martin for his open scholarship and practice. Through his blogging, not just writing but commenting on others blogs, he has opened so many doors for people like me to to engage with open education. Martin also took a bit of a chance and invited me to give a keynote (my first) at the OER15 conference. I’ll always be grateful for that opportunity. I wish him all the best for the next phase, and I have a sneaky suspicion open-ness will still be part of that.

OER24 Conference: Empowering Student Engagement with Open Education⤴

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This week I’m looking forward to traveling to Cork with OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto for the OER24 Conference. The conference is being hosted by the Munster Institute of Technology this year and chaired by the Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin and Tom Farrelly.  The theme this year is digital transformation in education and Mayu and I will be presenting a research paper on Empowering Student Engagement with Open Education. 

At the University of Edinburgh student engagement is a fundamental aspect of our strategic support for OER and open education and our institutional commitment to digital transformation.  As part of Information Services Group’s programme of student employment, the university’s OER Service and Online Course Production Service regularly employ student interns in a number of roles including Open Content Curators, OER support officers, media studio assistants, and open textbook co-creators.  These roles enable students to gain a wide range of core competencies and transferable attributes including digital and information literacy skills, which open the door to new careers and employment opportunities, while also providing the opportunity to develop open practice and digital competence, and improve knowledge equity  

Our research paper will explore the transformative potential of engaging students with open education through salaried internships, exploring how these roles empower students to go on to become radical digital citizens and knowledge activists, not just passive consumers of information, but active and engaged creators of open knowledge.   We will also provide guidance on how other institutions can adopt and adapt this model to engage students with open education and transform their digital skills.

Reflections and speculations from #oer23⤴

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I was lucky enough to be in Inverness last week for the #OER23 conference. The OER conferences do have quite unique atmosphere. They are relatively small, and there is always a really strong sense of community. This year was no different, in fact it I think that community sense was even stronger. So before I get into the meat of this post I just want to thank the co-chairs, conference committee, ALT and everyone at UHI for pulling everything together so well.

I’m still processing quite a lot of what I heard over the 2 days of the conference, so this post is really just focusing on one element that has been swirling around my brain. The conference marked 10 years of the Open Scotland Declaration. This was a community driven initiative to try and get the Scottish Government to formally adopt the UNESCO open education . . you can read more here. But the basic premise boils down to publicly funded educational resources should be publicly available. Not rocket science, totally achievable, but so far it has been almost impossible to get the Scottish Government to engage.

Lorna Campbell and Joe Wilson gave an excellent narrative of their stalwart efforts to engage with the Scottish Government over the past decade. There were many discussions and ideas about what should be done next. Based on some thoughts from the first key note from Rikke Toft Nørgård which looked at hybrid futures, I thought I’d take a bit of a speculative futures approach to Open Scotland. I also have to thank my Bill Johnston for a few ideas during a 3 hour car drive home. Spoiler alert, I haven’t done this before so it might be pants! But here goes . . .

The year is 2043. Scotland is celebrating 10 years of independence. The year has been badged as “Scotland, open for the world”. Celebrations officially started on April 6 – a nod to the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, the original document asserting Scotland’s right as an independent country. International events during the year include the opening of new UNESCO centre for open knowledge and policy development. COP 47 is returning to Glasgow to showcase how Scotland has exceeded the targets set in 2022, and has worked with 73% of all the signatories to every COP agreement since 2033 to develop sustainable and equitable energy solutions.

Scotland officially rejoined the EU in 2039, but between times has struck a number of international partnership agreements including a new Nordic alliance on knowledge exchange and sustainable energy, tourism and creative cultural developments. In a recent international survey on the best places to live, Scotland (for the 5th year running) came in at number 1. This was due mainly to the health and happiness of the population, not on property values. Scotland’s unique approach to education was seen to be at the centre of a remarkable evolution of a relatively small (by size of population), and newly independent nation. The UEP ( universal education partnership) is now recognised as being central to Scotland’s economic, cultural and health renaissance.

So what is the UEP and how did it come into being? Well, after the political turmoil of 2023 and 2024, the then SNP decided to that the only way to set out a vision for an independent Scotland would be for the people to decide its priorities. A (much maligned at the time from opposition parties) large scale public consultation of peoples assemblies began. The aim was to engage with at least 85% of the population through a series online and f2f events. During the first round of these assemblies there was a focus on a small number of key themes (sustainable energy, fiscal policy, education, creative industries, and health).

After a bit of a slow start, most interest began to centre on education. It’s not entirely clear how it happened, but the Open Scotland Declaration, in particular the notion of “publicly funded resources should be publicly available” started to gain traction. There are rumours of small bunch of open educational practitioners who ran an informal yet highly strategic public engagement plan ensuring that the Open Scotland Declaration was highlighted in every assembly meeting. In each of the over arching themes, the discussions quickly centred on education. It became clear that the success of any “future Scotland” depended on changing the education system. An independent Scotland would need a radical approach to education.

In late 2027 An anonymous poster began to appear in various places across the country, and online calling for a new universal education partnership (UEP) approach to education. Building on the concept of a universal basic income, this (at the time radical approach) called for every citizen to be given free access to education throughout their life time, at a time, place and pace that suited their needs.

Initial costings proved this would actually cost (slightly) less than the current tertiary education funding. #UEP gained more and more traction, and a plan developed. Instead of funding loans to post 16 education students and the current funding for universities and colleges, it was proposed that each citizen could access a fund that would cover 25% more than the basic living wage for the time that they were involved in educational activity. Quite quickly (again seemingly radical ) ideas about restructuring tertiary education and research began to emerge.

It turned out that turning “research subjects” into “research partners” has a dramatic impact on research. The fact that research participants were recognised for their part in research and could access their UEP fund has allowed Scotland to truly develop a nation of informed and engaged citizen scientists.

The earliest signs of success came from health research. As research participants didn’t have to rely on benefits, numerous studies (many of them ethnographic studies) have shown remarkable insights into treating some chronic health issues. The Glasgow Effect has almost been reversed. Similar effects are being seen across all sectors. At the same time, international research exchange programmes have flourished. Many large pharmaceutical. energy and financial companies have opened new centres in Scotland due to access to a highly skilled, and continually learning workforce. The changes to corporation tax including windfall contributions to the #UEP also seem to be positively accepted and widely cited in annual reporting.

Universities and colleges are now open spaces with new forms of partnerships around developing distributed and integrated curriculum. Tracking participation despite being seen by detractors as being a major challenge, was actually very simple. It turned out that every school child in Scotland already had a unique reference number that could be used. It was relatively simple to build out from this existing system. Closed exams are a thing of the past, Nearly every citizen in Scotland has contributed to the nationally supported knowledge base. Universities and colleges are now evaluated by public panels (decided through open ballots – using a process developed from the existing jury citation process). Community impact is a key factor of success. This approach has been adopted formally and informally by a number of other countries.

Research on the evolution of the UEP is continually developing and shared openly, including economic modelling. Though it appears that most citizens do access their UEP fund not everyone uses it all, many take up the option to gift their contributions back to the fund. Clearer longitudinal trends are just starting to emerge. For example, there appears to be a rise in access to funds in the over 50s. It appears that being able to more easily change career is actually allowing people to work longer. This combined with the overall increase in health and increased tax contributions and reduced NHS costs is providing a robust state funding model. Similarly there appears to be a new type of “research gap year” where 18 -25 year olds are participating in research projects before embarking on formal educational studies or taking up full time employment.

And All of this came about because it became apparent that open education wasn’t just about licences , selling “stuff” and services, or an abstract concept, it was about empowering people and making not just Scotland, but the world, open to education and all the opportunities that follow that.

Open Scotland logo

Open Scotland @10⤴

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OER23 Conference logoThis blog post was originally posted on the Open Scotland blog. 

To mark 10 years of the Open Scotland initiative we will be holding two events as part of the OER23 Conference to bring together members of the education community in Scotland to reflect on how the open education landscape in Scotland has evolved over the last decade against the backdrop of global crisis and uncertainty (Campbell and Wilson 2021). Hosted by ALT and the University of the Highlands and Islands, the OER Conference is taking place in Scotland for the first time since 2016. One of the main themes of the conference is “Open Education in Scotland – celebrating 10 years of the Scottish Open Education Declaration.”

Thigibh a-steach! Come and join us at the OER23 Conference in Inverness to contribute to shaping the future of open education in Scotland.

Open Scotland Pre-Conference Workshop

When: Tuesday 4th April, 15.30 – 17.00
Where: UHI Inverness and online
Who: Open to all.

This pre-conference workshop, facilitated by Joe Wilson and Lorna M. Campbell, will reflect on the Open Scotland initiative and discuss ways forward for the open education community. We’ll briefly address the history and impact of Open Scotland and explore the role of Open Scotland and the Scottish Open Education Declaration going forward.

We’ll ask whether the aims of Open Scotland are still relevant, whether the Scottish Open Education Declaration has a role to play in the future, and how it can be reframed to reflect current challenges and priorities.

How can we encourage more teachers, learners and education institutions across the sector to engage with open education?

How do we ensure that the Scottish education community tunes in to global open practice and makes most of the possibilities of open educational resources , open research , open textbooks and other opportunities?

Can we effectively lobby the Scottish Government to adopt policies that support open education and OER at the national level?

How can we in Scotland, the UK, and internationally, align with the principles of the UNESCO Recommendation on OER (UNESCO 2019)?

We invite key leaders, influencers, educators, open practitioners and advocates across the Scottish education community to join us. This workshop is free and open to all. Remote participation will be available for those who are unable to join us in Inverness. 

Registration
If you are not an OER23 delegate, please register here in order to participate: Open Scotland Pre Conference Session for External Delegates

OER23 Conference Closing Plenary: OpenScotland @10

When: Thursday 6th April, 16.20 – 17.00
Where: UHI Inverness and online
Who: OER23 Conference delegates

The closing plenary panel of the OER23 Conference will bring together open education advocates from Scotland and The Netherlands to reflect on the open education landscape in Scotland and internationally. We’ll discuss engagement with open education across Scotland, focusing on the benefits and affordances of open education and OER and how it can help to address local and global education challenges and priorities, while reflecting on the relevance of the original aim of Open Scotland: To raise awareness of open education, encourage the sharing of open educational resources, and explore the potential of open policy and practice to benefit all sectors of Scottish education.

Panel participants: Lorna M. Campbell, Open Scotland and University of Edinburgh; Scott Connor, UHI;  Maren Deepwell, ALT; Stuart Nicol, University of Edinburgh; Robert Schuwer, consultant and former UNESCO Chair on Open Educational Resources; Joe Wilson, Open Scotland and City of Glasgow College.

Background

Open Scotland is a voluntary cross-sector initiative, established in 2013, to raise awareness of open education, encourage the sharing of open educational resources, and explore the potential of open policy and practice to benefit all sectors of Scottish education. In the decade since its launch, Open Scotland has been supported by Cetis, the Scottish Qualifications Authority, the Association for Learning Technology, Reclaim Hosting, the University of Edinburgh and Creative Commons. Openness remains a key strategic principle for many of these organisations.

In order to achieve its aims, Open Scotland hosted the Open Scotland Summit (2013) and Open Education, Open Scotland (2014) at the University of Edinburgh, which brought together senior managers, policy makers and key thinkers to explore the development of open education policy and practice in Scotland. Members of Open Scotland contributed regularly to national conferences, and participated in international events including Open Education Global in Ljubljana, OERde14 in Berlin, Morocco Open Education Day, the Open Education Policy Network, UNESCO European Regional Consultation in Malta, and the 2017 UNESCO OER World Congress.

In 2014, inspired by the UNESCO Paris OER Declaration (UNESCO 2012), Open Scotland launched the Scottish Open Education Declaration (Open Scotland 2014), an open draft document that all members of the community were invited to contribute to. The Declaration called on the Scottish Government, the Scottish Funding Council and all sectors of Scottish education to endorse the principles of the UNESCO OER Declaration and ensure that educational materials produced with public funding are freely and openly available to all. With support from ALT Scotland and Creative Commons, the Declaration was brought to the attention of three consecutive Cabinet Secretaries of Education, however the Scottish Government declined to engage with these principles. Despite this lack of response, the Scottish Open Education Declaration has been influential elsewhere. It inspired the OER Morocco Declaration (Berrada and Almakari 2017), informed the OpenMed Project, and has raised awareness of open education within institutions, triggering discussions about open education at policy level.

Visit the Open Scotland blog to find out more about the initiative. 

References

Berrada, K. and Almakari, A. (2017) Déclaration du Maroc sur les Ressources Educatives Libres / OER Morocco Declaration. Available at: https://openmedproject.eu/wp-content/uploads/OER-Morocco-Declaration.pdf (Accessed: 9 January 2023).

Campbell, L.M. and Wilson, J. (2021) Open Educational Resources: An equitable future for education in Scotland. Available at: https://openscot.net/further-education/open-educational-resources-an-equitable-future-for-education-in-scotland/ (Accessed: 9 January 2023).

Open Scotland. (2014) Scottish Open Education Declaration. Available at: https://declaration.openscot.net/ (Accessed: 9 January 2023).

UNESCO. (2012) The Paris OER Declaration. Available at: https://en.unesco.org/oer/paris-declaration (Accessed: 9 January 2023).

UNESCO. (2019) Recommendation on Open Educational Resources. Available at: https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/recommendation-open-educational-resources-oer (Accessed: 9 January 2023).

Better late than never! 2022 end of year round up.⤴

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Is February too late (or early??) to write an end of year round up post? People often complain about January dragging but I swear it passed in the blink of an eye this year, and somehow we’re already half way through February. This is way, way, after the fact, but there are a few things I did at the end of last year that I don’t want to get lost in the churn. 

Although I didn’t manage to write an end of year review for this blog, I did write one for Open.Ed, the University of Edinburgh’s OER Service, which you can read it here if you’re interested: OER Service 2022 Roundup. 

EDEN NAP Webinar

In early December I was invited to take part in an EDEN NAP webinar on Institutional Approaches to Supporting Open Educational Resources, which explored the different ways that Universities are building open education capacity and acting as enablers of innovative open practice. I spoke about our experience of embedding strategic support for open education and OER at the University of Edinburgh. The other speakers were Professor Daniel Burgos, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR), Dr Carina Ginty, Atlantic Technological University, and Fiona Schmidbauer, DHBW Karlsruhe. There was an impressive turnout of over 160 participants from all over Europe.  The webinar was recorded and I’ll link to it here once it’s online. 

ENCORE+ Webinar

I also took part in another webinar on OER and credentialing, run by the European Network for Catalysing Open Resources for Education (ENCORE+) Project. ENCORE+ is an ERASMUS+ Knowledge Alliance project, funded by the European Commission, which supports the uptake and innovation of open educational resources for education and business.  Earlier in the year I was interviewed by Dai Griffiths as part of a series of interviews exploring innovative approaches to credentialing learning in the European OER ecosystem, the opportunities that they offer, and the barriers to their application.  During the interview we discussed strategic support for OER at the University of Edinburgh, the role (or not) of OER repositories, and benefits for students creating open education resources and open knowledge as part of their accredited courses.  The webinar brought together several of the interviewees to discuss some of the themes that had emerged in the interviews in more depth.  You can read my interview here: ENCORE+ Interview.

Femedtech

At the beginning of December I took over from Maren Deepwell as administrator of the femedtech Twitter account.  Maren has managed the account and our guest curators for the last year and I’m hugely grateful for the simple and efficient process she handed over to me.  Clearly we need to question the ongoing viability of Twitter as a platform for femedtech given the (lack of) ethics of its current proprietor and the degradation of the platform itself. Femedtech has always been a loose collective with multiple channels and I know that some of our curators this year will be exploring how we can use those other channels, including femedtech.net, and potentially Mastodon, going forwards.  In the meantime, we’re going to continue curating the femedtech account and hashtag on Twitter, so if you’d like to put your name down for a curation slot you can volunteer here: Get involved with femedtech. 

I also did my own curation slot during December, the first time I’d curated for a couple of years. (You can read my reflection on my last curation slot here: Reflections on @Femedtech Curation.) I had planned to open a discussion about the ethics of remaining on twitter, and the logistics of moving to another platform such as Mastodon, but I got sidetracked by the ongoing debate about the ethics of AI art algorithms, their use of art works scraped from the commons, and the harmful stereotypes that appear to be inherent in the datasets and algorithm themselves. 

Critical Ignoring

I think the real highlight of my curation slot was coming across this paper by Anastasia Kozyreva, Sam Wineburg, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ralph Hertwig on Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens.  

Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.

Critical ignoring is not a concept I’ve come across before but it’s something I’ve been consciously practising for the last couple of years.  If you spend any amount of time online it’s really hard not to get sucked into spirals of negativity, outrage and despair, especially when social media algorithms actively promote “controversial” content and push it into our feeds. Some people I know have sworn off social media altogether or take regular breaks to decompress.  I make frequent use of block and mute functions, and I also try to make a conscious decision as to whether it’s worth expending valuable emotional energy engaging with posts that will only anger or upset me.  I’ve also made more of an effort to separate my “work” and “non-work” time online.  It’s not always easy to know where the boundary lies but on days that I’m “not working” I log out of my main twitter account and ignore any e-mail sent to my work address.  This does mean that I sometimes miss personal messages sent through these channels, but I’m trying not to feel too guilty about that.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  The irony in all this is that I haven’t actually read beyond the first page of the Critical Ignoring paper…

UCU Industrial Action

I can’t finish this post without mentioning the latest round of UCU industrial action, which will see university staff striking for 18 days throughout February and March in protest at pay erosion and inequality, precarity, unsustainable workloads and pension theft. The first quarter of the year is always a really busy time for me because several open education events, including Open Education Week and preparation for the OER Conference fall in this period, so I find it really stressful not being able to work.  It’s going to be a long couple of months and the financial impact is going to be painful, but the alternative, just buckling down and doing our best in a system that is increasingly inequitable and exploitative is no longer sustainable. 

Photograph of statue of Donald Dewar surrounded by banners during Right to Strike rally. Buchanan Street, Glasgow.

Right to Strike rally, Glasgow, February, 2023. CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell

Transcending the digital and physical at #altc22 – the #femedtechquilt⤴

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It’s always tricky to try and summarize a conference experience in one post, so this post like so many other of my past conference posts is not going to try to do that. Instead I want to take a few minutes to share what was for me the most important part of #altc22 – the #femedtechquilt.

The #alt22 conference was my first “proper” f2f conference since lock down. I was simultaneously excited and a bit anxious about it. All the preparation, traveling and packing which seemed so mundane in the “before times” took much longer. However being back in person with some of my favourite people was well worth it.

What added to the #joy and sense of place and community was undoubtedly the first public outing and joining of the #femedtechquilt. You can find our more about the origins for the quilt here, it did seem to me (and others) that the more that 2 year wait to see it IRL brought even more resonance and power to the underlying principles of the quilt and its physical presence.

The quilt represents so many people, so many issues. Of course the quilt is a community created object, but its driving force has been Frances Bell, who has spent so much time planning, co-ordinating, stitching, quilting and writing about the quilt.

Frances situated the quilt outside the main lecture theatre used in the conference. It was at once a grounding and centering force. Arousing curiosity, attracting attention, allowing participation, creating conversations and ideas for the future. In quite a magical way, the presence of the quilt provided a way to bind many of us together by providing a safe, open, space to have long overdue catch ups, to share experiences and allow time for reflection and just “being”.

It was wonderful to see Frances explain the history of the quilt to those who didn’t know about it, to help those who had contributed to it find their square, and support and encourage people to make a contribution to squares to be added to the quilt. One priceless moment for me was when Marion Manton (who had organised a quilting circle to contribute squares to the quilt as well as supply lots of fabric for quilting) saw the quilt for the first time. A wave of unrequited joy washed over everyone nearby.

I felt hugely privileged to be able to help drape the completed quilt for delegates to see. I didn’t contribute to the quilt. I had planned to, but at that point in 2019 I had a creative crisis and wasn’t able to do anything remotely creative. However I have promoted and shared what I can about it. And now, I have also sewn a button onto a square!

On the final day of the conference I really missed the physical presence of the quilt. However, I know this first outing of the quilt won’t be its last. So I just wanted to thank everyone who contributed to the quilt, it really is a symbol of hope, of justice and the power of openness.

And of course congratulations to the ALT team, the Trustees, the conference committee and all the presenters and delegates for bringing #ALTC so successfully back to its physical space as well as supporting its digital spaces.

Photo 3 people beside part of the quilt on a table
Lorna Campbell, Frances Bell and Catherine Cronin with the quilt

My Liminal Podcast: Open for good!⤴

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Earlier in the summer, way back at the end of June, I had the very great pleasure of joining Puiyin Wong on her fabulous My Liminal Podcast. We had a really engaging and wide ranging discussion covering open education, OER, digital labour, knowledge equity, Wikimedia in the classroom, and perhaps most importantly, cats!  You can listen to Puiyin’s My Liminal Podcast on anchor.fm and Spotify, and follow on twitter at @MyLiminalPod.