 Okay, I think we might get started. It's a great honor and pleasure to introduce the next speakers who are leading lights and amazing thinkers in the area of open education, open pedagogies, digital literacies, et cetera, et cetera. So two out of the three speakers are here in the room, Lori Phipps and Bonnie Stewart. Dave Cormier is another speaker and he's going to be joining by video that he recorded because he can't join synchronously. So for everyone who's in the room, please come down near the front because the session is, as it says in the title, it's participatory. And for everyone who's online, I know there'll be ways for you to participate as well. So welcome, everyone, and thanks. Thank you, Catherine. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for coming. Please do come down if you're comfortable. If you're fine where you are, that's great. We do have some exciting stickers for the people who come down. But I wanted to let you know this session is really essentially a planning session and we had envisioned it in a little classroom with movable tables. So we're going to try to do a participatory group discussion, framing some ideas, and hopefully nobody will break a leg or anything else. But I'm sure there are doctors in the house, hopefully of the medical kind, if needed. So now we can't say that nobody got hurt. That's right. And the conversation that we want to invite you to today is part of a conversation that I have been doing a couple of talks over the last week in a variety of locations around the idea of the pro-social web and the participatory web. And part of it really comes from an idea of what in this room can we build on to make things different than they are. And that's why we want your participation and your ideas. Because, oh, now this is not working. It was working. That's not working either. Okay. Can you help us, Martin? Sorry. Martin's here. Yay, Martin. Okay. There. And basically this is our invitation to conversation. So we need to talk about the web. Some of you may remember that back in the day we had delightful cat videos, and that it was not just about monitoring the real-time collapse of late-stage capitalism. Web 2.0. How many people in the room are familiar with the concept of Web 2.0? And my assumption was that this would probably be a crowd that was broadly familiar with that concept. It was the idea that rather than the internet just being an online space where you could get to Encyclopedia Britannica, rather you could create Wikipedia, contribute, and essentially a read-write web where the users are also contributors to the things that are then used by other people. And so I had the privilege of being part of this web back in about its peak era of 2006. How many of you in the room same? Okay. Great. What I'd like to ask you to do now, how many of you have sticky notes and markers available to you? Who needs us to bring you sticky notes and markers? Please raise your hand if you need sticky notes and markers. Excellent. My lovely assistant Lori will be pleased to throw things at you. Markers, markers, please don't throw things at people. It's not inclusive. They may not have the desire to catch in public. What I'm going to ask you to do is on sticky notes, please write down one or two or maybe even three separate, separate sticky notes, practices, or things that you do where you leave a trace on the web, where you leave a footprint for other people to see. Just something that is part of what you do to contribute to the web. When you have your one or two or three sticky notes with your practices on them, I'm going to invite you to come down and to place those on this board. And I'd like you to consider whether those practices feel like they are in a social activity realm, a learning activity realm, a professional activity realm, directly in the middle of the intersection of the Venn diagram of all three or somewhere between. Jim, that is up to you and how you choose to frame this for yourself. And once you've come down, so one or two or three sticky notes with things where you contribute to the web, where you are part of the participatory web still, and then please bring those down and then... The people that put post-its on the board get a sticker. In fact, you can actually all have a sticker, but that's just me. Regina, lead the way. Come on down. And please do take a EdTechUnicornSizeOpenDoesNotEqualInclusion sticker. Just as we're watching this go up, it's really interesting to see what's emerging because a lot of people have Facebook and Twitter, particularly under the social piece, and there are other places where Twitter is solely over at the professional level or under the learning level. If I were to put it there for myself, Twitter has ended up actually being the place where I have done a great deal of learning over the past ten years or so because I spent a lot of the last ten years living in a very small, remote, fairly monocultural place, and what Twitter did was really, really open my world, not just professionally, but to people who have very different lived experiences from me. So in terms of my learning, it's been huge. So comments coming in online too? So people are saying online that it's very difficult to actually break down where things appear, whether it's social or learning, although they're trying to online, which is nice. And my hope was in setting it up so that there was a triangle rather than three lists of social, professional, and learning, that there was some room for intersection and that idea that there is bleeding between the two. Or three? We've got two mics now we can wrap. Oh, perfect. Okay, last few going up. You've got the clicker. So the nice thing about doing this kind of exercise with these kinds of people is that if we did this with 100 people at any other conference, we'd probably get 20 posters. It was an inverse relationship with this audience, I think. Well, the question that we just wanted to frame really here was, okay, so everybody is doing lots of stuff in this room. That's great. Is everything okay with the web? And if you had to pick an answer, who says yes? It's great. Oh, thank you, Dave White. A lot of us, I think at this point, might say no. So we want to know where people have pulled back from. Where are people not online now? Thinking about where you've actually put the post-it notes. Where you put them, whether it was social, whether it was professional, whether it was learning. What are the spaces that you've pulled back from in the last few years? Social? Yeah, just show things out. For myself, I'm still on Twitter a lot by some standards, but I'm on Twitter much less than I was because the space has shifted and you were saying Facebook has shifted for you. So it's where is so, which social? Is it all social? Why? So for me, it's different. So, well, we might want to look at what definition of authentic is. Well, maybe that's for later as well. True. So for me, I've pulled back from Facebook because I'm fed up with arguing about my family who support Brexit. Okay? So that's not about the boss, although they're obviously influenced by the boss. But that's why I don't do Facebook very much because I just get angry. So the reasons that we've just been given is the first one was Donald Trump. Who I'm not a fan of. And I didn't want to lose relationships with people who liked him. And then also, I had a child and didn't want people having access to photos of her. And also I'm happy with my family, but when I look at other photos of other families, I compare myself to them. And that just made me feeling down. And so I pulled back. So we're all pulling back from the web in some ways. You've probably all seen this image, right? And so this bottom one we've just heard about. So those are things. So Twitter for me isn't about wrath. Facebook's about wrath, but it depends on who you are. But we're all pulling back from certain spaces, right? Yeah. And there are other trajectories developing as well where increasingly we're seeing the web, like Jim said, as a space of surveillance, as a space of automation. This is from China, but it is about the class care system, which involves facial recognition software being used in learning spaces. There are also developments happening in my own country around research into this area and how can we tell if a student is engaged in learning. And when you consider that facial recognition software does not see, for instance, black faces as well as it sees white faces, we are setting up systems with deeply, deeply baked in inequities on top of the already baked in inequities that exist in our institutions of higher ed, right? So with surveillance and all of these automated pieces, we have some problems. In my own classes, I'm increasingly, you know, I recognize that I'm teaching students who may have already been red-pilled on 4chan and may come in with an idea that the, you know, men's rights movement or white supremacy is some kind of actual freedom from the great group think of, you know, this semi-enlightenment world that education is trying to bring forward in its crawling way. And how do I deal with that? We're also seeing, and again, the extreme version happens to have developed in China. How many of you are familiar with the idea of the social credit system there? Right, so it's a totalizing system based on closed cameras and big data and social media accounts that essentially for folks, there's a black mirror episode that's almost identical, but basically if you are not a good enough citizen, if you buy too much liquor at the liquor store or if you do X or Y, you might have your capacity to buy a train ticket revoked. Worse, if your friends and colleagues and peers are such that they are not considered good people within the system, that affects your essential credit ranking. Right, and so these begin to be seriously problematic impacts of the web. So one of the things a few months ago, for those people who are based in the UK, we had a United Nations report about the UK and poverty in the UK, a global North country and they were saying that one in four children actually grow up in poverty in the UK. And I got really angry about it and so I started going, well I need to read more about the report and I thought this was going to be about structural things and government level. And when I started looking at it, it was actually about digital and it really shocked me and the reason it was about digital is because the government have decided to go down a route of open government and actually opening things up and putting everything online and instead of it being digital as well, it became digital by default and so the poorest people in the UK in society were the ones that had the least access to devices, the least access to the internet and this is why we did the stickers that we put out today when you came down because as far as the UK government are concerned, open is not the same as inclusion. As much as the people open it up and as much as we put things online and we say this is okay, the UK government are actually at the same time as putting things online, also putting things in place that structurally take things away from the most vulnerable in our society. So they moved things online and then said you can't access them and then as well as that, what they also did is start putting things in place for example disabled people and they actually have an algorithm so that even when you do get to speak to a human about the welfare benefits that you need as a disabled person, there is a set of algorithms that the human goes through and says if this then that, if this then that. So as well as actually having it online even when you got to see a human the process of using algorithms, the process of using this technocentric approach disenfranchised people. Even though it was a very transparent and open system. And basically those of us particularly in higher ed and in the open community have often been at the forefront of digitization in the systems in which we live, in which we work and we have tended to sometimes and not all of you may be implicated in this we but see moving towards digital as potentially positive and I think it's important to really kind of put a couple of breaks on and go all right what is actually happening with this stone that started rolling. And one of the things that we're seeing is increasingly particularly in higher ed the ways that digital or the word innovative end up coding at senior admin strata is really just with this, it's truly kind of a code word. If you can say that something is innovative and you mean that it's digital it is often a fairly totalizing technocratic system that runs either on the logics of business or on the logics of the attention economy and media or some combination of the other without necessarily the ethic of care or the logic of care that Kate had spoken about this morning underlying it and this came from George Siemens as well also with his permission but same day as that other conversation was happening he was framing the rise of the term learning engineer and learning engineering for what we used to call the work of higher ed and as Juliana, my colleague in Spain had pointed out it's her response that I actually thought was particularly important let's use semiotics here engineering means white technocratic industrial and post-industrial male power let's take the meaning embedded in the term to exclude peripheral education, not a social process anymore and so this is Dave with his mouth open Dave is my partner and he and I for the last little while have been beginning to try to start this conversation about look what do we do about the web how do we bring back some of the things that may have gotten many of us into the web and so I'll let him do his own bit Hi folks, it's Dave Quinn I'm calling you from sunny Windsor, Ontario today because I couldn't meet you until 19 and I want to talk a little bit about the pro-social web so the pro-social web is a response to the challenges that we see of the unemployment and the ways in which it can be damaging and the trolls and the attitude and the cesspool that we so often see in our social media spaces and frankly across the web there's two responses possible to this and I think what we're seeing in a lot of the ways we're dealing with the web and children for instance as we're saying let's stay away from it as much as possible or worse, let's limit access to certain amounts of time or spaces those solutions are not going to change the fact that people are going to go to the internet the internet is too valuable a tool, it's too powerful a tool and social connection participation is way too powerful for us to ignore the other option is the one that we're proposing which is that we need to all actively move towards a more pro-social web both in our own interactions and our own advocacy and really in the choices that we make so I know a lot of very rational, very smart people who are leaving some of the social media spaces that we work in and I understand their reasonings they can be very damaging places they can be places we were attacked and I understand that as a white heterosexual male I'm in a very privileged position in terms of the ways in which I get treated in those spaces still, in every way that we can the work and the interaction, the participation we do on the internet basically creates the internet we only know the internet is created as we go along there are a lot of powerful institutions we're trying to affect the way we work a lot of it has to do with money some of it has to do with governance and power but turning away from those spaces is not going to make them better we're leaving them behind for other people to deal with and we make them worse I think every time a reasonable person leaves a good internet space or leaves a bad internet space that space gets a little worse behind it no more advocating for all spaces all the time what I'm saying is we need to find a way to bring our values to the internet it's not just our participation is better but also the quality of our participation so every time we go to make an assumption we know that in that entire group like lawyers or politicians the ways in which we make those groupings the things we say about those people now, getting the digital it actually reaches those people and those people can be harmed or offended or triggered or whatever that happens to be also your perspective about how to talk about those people don't get left at two o'clock in the morning at a pub somewhere they're there permanently as another framing of the antisocial way in which we interact with each other on the web every time you act in a pro-social way you create a positive threat every time you act against it you create a negative threat every time you step in front of somebody else who's doing it you're creating a new positive threat and that's really the call one person, ten people, a thousand people a million people aren't going to do this what it needs to be is a constant part of our practice particularly our practice of thinking about things like open as inherently pro-social not just open for open but pro-social how are we making the world better how are we helping it represent our values I hope you guys have a great conference we'll see you again I wish I'd used my own laptop so basically I don't think and we don't think that this idea is going to fix the web however in the sense that many in this community are committed to being in this web space and have all of these practices that tend to foreground not just leaving traces but building connections often with other human beings what we'd like to think about are how do we do open in ways that make the web better how can we build on some of the things that people in this room already do either at the individual or at the system level to make things decent what are some small things that you can do where you are that are building positive connection or positive modeling for your peers, your colleagues perhaps for students perhaps for your seed and your admin a lot of what's happened in digital is that most of the people who are decision makers related to digital in government and in higher ed and in lots of strata right now are not folks who had any experience of the participatory web those of us who have I think have perhaps some responsibility to think about what that means and perhaps how we can build that so what I'm going to ask you to do very quickly is sort of a think pair share I'm going to ask you to take a second maybe one minute try to think of at least one thing that you do or could do within your life your work, the systems you're in that is open that is helping to build pro-social connection and for whom does that have an impact feel free to jot it on a sticky note or feel just for your own self and then I'd like to ask you to turn to the person next to you alright and share that and talk a little bit about how this might work what can we do based on the infrastructure that we are familiar with to change some of what's happened with the digital or attack us online and if you want to hashtag this pro-social web, feel free those of you who are virtually attending please feel free, I'll grab my phone so I can read feedback one minute go I'd love to capture that okay, Bob does anybody want to share anything that they've got in their conversation let's start with this side who's got something on this side they want to share about a practice that's open excellent Bonnie already knows about this because we talked about this I'm Julia Hanksler, I'm from Vancouver Island University and I started off the side of my desk something called the Center for Education and Cyber Humanity at VIU and the mission is seeing education as a vehicle to promote society's pro-social knowledge, skills, attitudes, perceptions, experience, and self-efficacy with technology thank you, anybody over here anyone I've got the best side Virginia's being voluntoiled it's up to you Dave, go ahead yeah, it'd be nice if we had discussions back around larger chunks of content so it was nice when we used to have discussions around blog posts and things like that whereas I feel like that all of those kind of detailed or in-depth discussions online have got diffused into social media so if I write a blog post, people will chat about it for about 10 seconds in Twitter it's not about me but it felt more more participatory and more thoughtful when people were using slightly when people weren't putting all of that effort into a platform that then just kind of diffused it away we've got a response over here my PhD my PhD research is very much around the connect connectivity particularly in OER platforms and what's really coming back to me from my data is that it's digital fatigue people just have that quick fix they say, I can like it but it tells us nothing and we have lost that connection that we had and we need to get that back there is some synergy between thinking about the digital fluencies but also thinking about how we create these interfaces how do we make that connection prominent how do we get that so people don't feel so fatigued all the time and also when back in the heyday of blogging you were much more likely to have skin in the game or real estate in the game, a blog yourself that your comments were driving someone back to your blog to create an actual network of people now Facebook and Twitter have both made those networks very easy anybody else had any ideas just about things that they do or can do before we close up Martin and one right here you go ahead and I'll walk up here and get these two folks Hi I'm Elizabeth I'm from Royal Roads University Vancouver Island Canada one of the things that we work to institutionally and I was just sharing with Michelle it's tricky so instead of doing an honorarium for guest speakers we have a standard $50 Amazon gift card that can get sent out we try to give it an option to donate to Creative Commons so they can choose to donate to Creative Commons or receive the Amazon gift card instead so we're trying mine's really small and simple and on all of the platforms that I'm involved in I just try to boost other people whose voices are small and I think need to bear I feel like I'm on a game show come on down so something I try and do was reflecting on it is to try and open up the context of what people are thinking about because a lot of the open movement is reacting against systems of control and that were there but it's we're just one species on a tiny little planet and if we may as well work together we may as well be open and so it should be the default position so I kind of fight for larger context and get people out of the little wells that they're in and think bigger and then a lot of the conflict goes away it becomes more obvious that things should be open so one of the things about that thing about the structure especially in institutions is really important as I'm filling now as Bonnie comes down but that's really important so in my organization we run a course for leaders in higher education and I think that if we ask the question probably less than half of them were even aware of what open is so these are senior managers in institutions and probably less than half are actually even aware of the open movement which is why I loved Kate's closing to the keynote today which is we do need part of it is incumbent on us in this room to make people aware of the things we are doing and also to be ourselves aware of the things we are doing and consider how we can do them in ways that build a web that we would like to be a part of thank you for the ideas if you have sticky notes from the second part of the conversation on the way out if you want to put them on the wall over that chair I'd love to capture them please don't leave without a sticker open does not inherently equal inclusion you got to think broadly thanks very much for your time thank you