 My name is Johanna Fung. I'm working at Northern Institute and the College of Indigenous Futures Arts and Society at Charles Darwin University here in Australia. For my presentation today is going to be discussing a couple of my findings from my PhD that I finished this year, earlier this year, focused on open educational practice with Northern Australian Indigenous workforce development, connecting culture and knowledge communities. Before I begin, I want to welcome the owners of the land on which we are working and meeting today. I'm on Lerakia country here, beautiful Saltwara country at the top end of the Northern Territory in Australia. I want to extend my special respect to the elders past, present and future and acknowledge the authority of Indigenous people who are joining us today and the authorities in the land on which you're joining us from. Just a bit of context where I am. Northern Territory in Australia is this section here. We have a life expectancy lower than many regions of the world and the rest of Australia puts us on par with some of the more unbothered nations and states around the world. We have a population of 250,000 people and that's just under one and a half million square kilometers here in the Territory. 30% of those people are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander or at sea, as the acronym is, and 30% of the people that live in the Territory were born overseas. Australia has a remoteness score that goes from 0 to 15 and most of the cities on the Eastern Seaboard here are a 2 or a 3 on that scale whereas up in the Territory here we're up at the top of the scale around 12, 13, 14 depending on where in the Territory we are. 30% of our households have no Wi-Fi and mobile signal intranet or even a landline. Many of the remote communities in the Territory have a payphone, one payphone in the center of the community. Employment participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population in the Territory is 37% and we have a legacy of some pretty interesting policies regarding respecting people's rights to self-determination. We wanted to look up the Northern Territory emergency response and boarding schools students across the Territory as early as the middle school years as well as the economic aspects of living in a highly transient population as well as reliant on extractive and industry sector and big expensive infrastructure projects that coming though. We've got a very particular and very unique culture and democracy and policy landscape that we're working in when it comes to understanding the impacts of how workforce development and indigenous populations here might be affected. So in my PhD I studied and developed and was a part of these four main projects. This is called Juleware and it's a page on the Bauerberg platform which is a citizen science website which my supervisor Cathy Kudziaka and I populated with biodiversity sightings from the homeland in traditional language and knowledge. PreVet is a pre- vocational education training set of digital magazines showcasing role models in different vocational job pathways and talking about the kinds of literacy and university they needed on the job. The indigenous fisheries training framework was a larger kind of set of practices and bundled and unbundled skill sets to help support people to business fisheries business and agriculture businesses on their country and kind of mainstream traditional livelihoods and involved a lot of videos that staff members in these communities made themselves. And this is an indigenous engagement model made as part of an international project for biosecurity with New Zealand and Indonesia as well. The Australian version and this is a way to instruct government if employed scientists to engage with traditional owners on their country and open the conversation up a little bit to them. So the way I analyze these is that a very particular cultural context that we're in is that the majority of a lot of institutional led education and policy programs don't always acknowledge how learning is done in especially indigenous communities. There's an assumption that they need to kind of come to the mountain so to speak. So my question was who are these resources and practices actually open to do? How do we make open education functionally successful for use with diverse sets of learners such as this very significant population that we're working with? What is open about these resources and practices really? I mean, how can we think about openness when it comes to different cultural understandings of what learning means and how it's done? So I went and I looked into a bunch of the resources. I put them through a big evaluation process and you're welcome to look at my GOGM presentation on my PhD in more detail. It's just a lot of steps that I won't belabor today. But I also tried to find the best practice and successful outcomes and how that was defined in a number of ways and how that contributed to an understanding of openness for use in these. I found these three principles to come out of the evaluation and I want you to just think about this. This was going to be my meant meter interactive poll, but because of the place I'm in, we had a huge power outage today. And I got a taste of what digital and power poverty is like just for four hours. So I'm very much living the remote life at the moment. So I thankfully had an asynchronous option to record an upload list for you guys today. So I'll do this this evening. I hope you believe if my bandwidth can handle it. So what I wanted to invite participants in my presentation to do is kind of consider these two questions about which of the principles from my findings you would use in your own settings. What communities or learning settings that make you think of and how can you see them being facilitating international international cultural and knowledge cooperation. So I found that language use develops consent and dialogue, so not just the spoken languages, but the ways we establish understanding and meeting across different knowledge systems. We kind of take for granted that we understand what open might mean in certain communities, such as our own open education. But I've had lots of rich debate with people about open being a copyright definition or a technical thing, but I'm kind of looking at openness as a cultural aspect and how it's expressed. So the ways that we understand and use language when we're learning with other people, how we can appropriate platforms with authorship from the learners, which I'll show you in a minute, and represent their narratives. Situated practice was another thing that I found to be really important. Practicing and positioned and placed knowledge in context really recentered the learners and their meaning for their learning. The local knowledge and sovereignty thereof to maintain the primacy of country based knowledge to keep knowledge on country. And you'll see an example of that as well. And also the final principle I found was this kind of transformative idea of the digital sphere being a cultural interface. And if claimed by authors of their own learning, we can come transcend this kind of content delivery idea of open and online and digital learning into authorship and authority and learners can actually practice their knowledge authority, which is a big term here in cultural knowledge discussions. So that would distinguish content from processes and learning through processes, promote traditional knowledge authors to use tools to retain knowledge sovereignty and learners authority. So really claiming some digital territory and appropriating it for the learners that have tens and tens of thousands of years of worth of knowledge of practice. So one example of the first principle is language use. So the previous magazines I mentioned before, this is the vocational pathways. They opened up a new dialogue about workforce participation territory. So they changed the discussion around indigenous employment, just by featuring and privileging indigenous role models as experts in their own field. Many of the students in such a small, small and sparsely populated part of Australia recognize a lot of these people as their cousins. And so it was actually pretty cool for a lot of students in the middle school and higher even older students that were accessing these resources to see authorities on employment, talking about living in those two worlds. Julia, this is my wonderful Nandi or mother, she was one of my supervisors as well. She used her understanding a deep knowledge of traditional language of seasons. So in northern Australia, especially in central Australia, all over Australia, we have seasonal calendars. Here in the territory, we have up to seven sets of seasons that have been identified by different cultural groups. So it's more than just winter, summer, dry, wet. We have yeah, seven different seasons. So it gives a bit of a nuance to seasonal understanding and understanding the elements, which of course, may have been responsible for the big power outage today again, so very much a life part of our lives every day. So with the views of a lot of indigenous common names and language, pardon me, covering it up down there. And Dorodorf is the season in December and she noted that this particular species was used for certain things. This is a paper bar tree. But then she talks about usage in indigenous culture. So she's kind of claims that are based with language and the fishery resources. This is an oyster farm out in an island community. And this was a video that was authored and narrated in language by a bunch of people that are growing beautiful oysters out on their sea country. So they were using a lot of their own language and we used English subtitles there as well. And the Plant Biosecurity Cooperative Research Center project as well. That adjusted the timing in terms of the conversation that always needs to have. And you can see there's a lot of different times to stop, make and prepare and reflect. So really using language in a very nuanced and very clever way of all of these resources. Situated praxis. This is wonderful. So context embedded learning. This is a candle retail being cut up and getting ready for the fire. This is a part of the tour guide resource. So that really something that was very common and understood as a real thing that happens in everyone's families in kind of the southern part of the Northern Territory out towards desert more where people is a lot more kangaroos. And so this is a common thing to eat. And so this is really embedded in the local context of learning. So having students recognize this rather than something that's very city oriented is actually really helpful to situate their learning with them. Do we're also the boxes had a number of different fields that you can kind of fill out. They were very prescriptive in that way. So the way that they used it, she appropriated a lot of boxes and she didn't fill out boxes for traditional information or stories that she didn't have the authority to speak up. But she also appropriated a lot with the next example. I'll show you the FRDC project used a lot of making creating this knowledge and claiming a lot of digital territory again with situating their knowledge here on country. And this is where we do our work. And there's a lot of debt in depth cultural governance associated with who can work on what country is well. And the plant biosecurity also situated dialogue, resituated the dialogue between stakeholders. And there are some beautiful videos in an association with the resource to talk about ways of doing things and with the featured in that as well. Use a bit of a star. So final principle is transcending the cultural interface. So this is my yeah, this is with the jacket daughter and she is the Aboriginal police community police officer in Galloway. She's quite a key feature in a lot of a lot of a lot of roles in society, both Yomal and territory levels of governance. So she really spoke to the camera and got a lot of the role models to offer what they wanted to say in each of the videos and featured of job pathways. So there was a way that the actual role models really just spoke through the screen to students because they knew who they were talking to, they knew who the audience was going to be with the also kind of appropriate created the taxonomy area for whether or not the species belong to the get a chat or do a plan. And that is a key feature of organizing the world and the ontology in the world is understanding plan membership of plants and animals, as well as people to and parts of the country. This flipping the terms of the relationship and the discussion between compliance to partnership was what a big job for the engagement model and how that kind of opened things up. And the choice of resources for the videos, the fisheries videos. Participants who made the videos did not choose an entirely open license. And I, you know, discussed all the options with them as well, that a lot of the knowledge that they created has already been culturally appropriated in lots of different ways. And so I think, you know, when we understand the definitions of open is purely license driven, and not in context of how knowledge in that community has been dealt with prior to this, I think that understanding the appropriateness of some kinds of level. And you may be thinking about traditional knowledge badges that came from cultural context. So again, which principle would you use and how would you think about language use and how how that kind of nuance language use and appropriating and flipping of the terms of conversation, establishing consent and authorship and narratives, effectively, and negotiation and time? How does that make you think of a learning situation that you might use these in? Situated in context, embedded sources and processes to re center your learners. How does local knowledge and knowledge sovereignty of those communities help to maintain the primacy of that local knowledge and the textualized knowledge that stays in a place and is significant to a place? What makes you think what what communities or learners does that make you think though? And finally, transcending the digital sphere and the cultural interface. When you think of the stuff that happens in the sphere, when we do remote learning and digitally enhanced learning and open practices, especially this year, what happens between you and the learning design and the resource that you're using and the people that use it on the other side of the screen? How and what happens in that space to transcend the relationship from passive delivery and acceptance to authority and authorship of learning and participation and partnership, where people can practice knowledge, sovereignty and learner authority over their own learning and manage their knowledge with traditional with respect to their traditional convention? How can we distinguish just content and engagement in content from the processes that are significant, not just to us, but to the learners as well? So I would love to have your thoughts if you have the time and mental mental bandwidth to to engage with me on this. And once again, so sorry about the power. I would love to have met everybody in the session today. But that's life in remote parts of the world. Thank you very much. You're welcome to email me or get me up on Twitter. And I'll be posting this in my session record today. Thank you very much.