 Good morning. We're going to start. I'm Laura Ritchie. This is Kate Balls. We have Geoffrey Gervault is in Vermont watching online, I hope. He's sugaring at the moment making maple syrup. And Tanya is in Canada also hopefully catching us online. We're going to start with a video. These are my words. Kate made the video. It's something she made a couple of years ago before we ever met in person. Oops, how do I make the video go? Martin's going to save the day again. That was, uh, oops, I'll make it go to the next, and now I don't know how to stop. I'll get there. You're going to help me, Harry. Go to the next slide. Thank you. Sorry. That was a gift. I had written a small story, and that's the, one of the important things about this talk. We're talking about the pedagogy of small. How do small stories and our stories, and it's very ironic that we're in this gigantic room and you're all very far away. But actually, this is the up close and personal of online. What are the values? How do we share things? Why do we do this? And what does it give us? Small is a different model. We've heard about how we're challenged and charged with being aware of what we do, our relationships with open, the platforms we use, the way we do things. And actually, if you remove yourself from the really big, then it affords different opportunities to the users, and the principles are very different than a corporatized world. You suddenly find that there's a willingness to engage in a different way when you know that you're not the product and you're not being monetized. The four of us wrote a chapter in a book about this, and we found that some of the principles were based on another author. He found, Paquette found these value pairs within these communities, and they do stand separately, but they also are very intertwined. You find autonomy. You are your own. You're in control of what you do, yet you're within a community. The negotiation of how to work with others and how to create a sort of a place where you can exist in harmony is very important. You have the freedom to do things. And this, in an educational context, we looked at two different settings. One, a school setting that was online, removed from the actual education setting, and one, a completely social platform that was not intended to be an educational platform. But in both, we found that there is this freedom and responsibility for the users. Freedom being freedom of speech, freedom of expression, but the responsibility is a collaborative responsibility for how our things run. What do you tolerate? What do you not? What do you want in your community? And that also links directly into the democracy and participation. Because if you don't have a formalized structure imposed around you, it's up to you to create the rules and to work it out. So one example, Jeffrey, in 2006, in Vermont, founded the Young Writers Program, and he, basically, it's an online platform where students, aged 13 to 19, could come and have their own space to write. They write poems, short stories, it's multimedia, there's audio, there's visual, and they critique one another, they comment about things. He was asked, how do you deal with bullying? He said, there is none, actually, because the students self-moderate. There are mentors as well, so you can have people who are not staff members, but, for example, I was given a mentor account, and I could comment on other people's things. So there's a community. But this, I thought, was a nice picture. Jeffrey, he posted this a couple of weeks ago. This is where he does his sugaring in Vermont. And he posted as an aside comment, the, I don't like walls. They hide the light in the open air. But this was something that we also found in the online setting. The idea of open, and when it's truly open, it enables all sorts of activity. The learners tend to then negotiate with their environment, and they create their community. The other platform that we looked at was Mastogen. Now, some people use Twitter. I have a presence on Twitter, but I don't post much stuff. I don't And it may be that actually, you're, you're like this king, daddy surfer, and you can negotiate all that stuff and do it. Other people need sort of more still waters. And I think it's important sometimes to notice, and whether that's the fast noticing or the slow noticing, if you can notice the people around you and what they have to offer, then you may find huge connections come from that. So my contribution to this is to talk a little bit about my practice in using stories and teaching. I work using storytelling mode in undergraduate education, both large and relatively smaller classes. And I work with a narrative load that allows students to explore their own values and develop their own learning path by using the stories that they tend to tell about themselves and their everyday lives, and from that to derive a sense of purpose about what they intend to do next. The reason I'm including the most famous short story here is that this is not what we do. This is an incredibly, it's a notorious piece of brief fiction, I think it's Hemingway asking every possible way. And this is not what a small story is. This is a piece of flash fiction. And the reason why you know it's not what a small story is in the way that we're talking about is that it's overthought. It's almost hysterically over designed to pull off a trick that makes you sit back and think, haha, you got me. Nevertheless, people love six word stories. There are six word stories all over the internet. Jesse Stonewall has used this, I think, very well in his hashtag forward pedagogy, which pops up from time to time. So we're asked to use a discipline of brevity, a sort of haiku, but much smaller to say something meaningful. But a small story in the way that I think of it and I use it in my teaching is actually a much more easygoing mode to work in. We tell small stories all the time you will have told so many stories, since you've been here to each other about each other in your own head to your family's back home. This little thing happened how weird was that? I'll tell you a small story that yesterday Laura dropped Francis and I off in Galway and we walked with great confidence aided by Francis's Google Maps in entirely the wrong direction for a really, really long time. And after a while I said to Francis, we were going along like poo and piglet and I said, Francis, are we going in the right direction? You know, no, absolutely not. So we walked all the way back and it was a complete delight because Francis and I had been looking for time in one another's company and Google Maps gave it to us. So small stories are composed of the things that we tend to notice the little details in the everyday. Noticing is something that you have to learn how to do. They tell us what we're thinking about and what we value and they help us to notice that we are practicing our values in action. Return to the quote that I put in my keynote yesterday for me, using story work like this in pedagogy is part of a moral moment pedagogy. It's understanding that when I stand in front of a student or a student stands in front of me, we are making a decision about how open to be with one another, what to say about our lives, what to disclose, what to protect, what to withhold. It's never a simple decision. And I think the kind of story work that we allow in teaching is a tremendous ethical responsibility because we have an ethical responsibility not to spill ourselves all over other people, but at the same time to listen intently when they are trying to tell us a truth. We plan to do a very small exercise at this point and sort of somewhat gleefully said to each other marching in, well, this is what we do on Master Don. Hey, why don't we do it on Twitter? And as we were sitting there, I said to Laura, you know what, there's a reason that we do it on Master Don. If you haven't been on Master Don and you're interested in taking a look or if you've been and you've gone and you haven't come back, which is a thing that happens with Master Don, go and take another look. One of the things that I found in having a significant part of my life on Twitter and a significantly hidden part of my life on Master Don is that for reasons that connect to what Bon Stewart was talking about yesterday, I think Master Don is an effort to build the pro-social web and that means that for all sorts of odd reasons it feels a bit safer in there to speak openly about who I am, what I'm seeing in the world, what I'm noticing and what I'm thinking about. So rather than asking you to tell a small story about OER19 on Twitter, where this would go out to your boss, some of your students, people that don't even like you, we should take much more care with the stories that we tell. I think maybe consider popping into Master Don dot social and having a go. You can find us both there where under our own names you can find the hashtag and you'll find all sorts of stories told there. The critical thing about a small story, which is connected to small pedagogy, is that it is a very modest practice. It is a modest and humble way of learning from one another because of the simple humanity that we share. I wanted to close, this is a very brief presentation, it's a small presentation. With this beautiful quote from David Foster, this is well known keynote, this is water. I love this keynote. I think that he does some really great thinking in it. But this is probably the pivotal moment for me. Learning how to think means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. Being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how to construct meaning from experience. I recently been told by a close friend of mine that Simone Weil described attention as the purest form of prayer. As a very secular person, I initially rocked a bit. I wasn't quite sure what to do with something that was combined, was compared to with prayer. But I think that attention is the way that we express hope for the world that we live in by noticing the small details, the underfoot, the unrecorded. We will, I think, be able to make some headway on the larger project. Thank you. Any comments, questions, thoughts? If you're just reflecting in silence, that's okay too. Just to say that I'm feeling mobilized by the strongness of a small pedagogy concept. I think it's in the way we have to shift and turn open education, community based. It's not global. Thank you. I wanted to let you know about one of the students that I've worked with who's now in her first year of her PhD. She's researching the way families who have experienced significant illness, who have received a serious diagnosis, use a small story's pedagogy to make sense of the medical information that they're being given. So she's working out as a researcher how to sit with families in the time of crisis and hear how they tell the story of what did the doctor say, what's going to happen next, what are we going to do. But remember that time when. And her thesis, which is very beautiful, so a big shout out to Jevony Witheridge. Her thesis work has taken this small story's pedagogy out of the classroom into a practical project with our local hospital, which I think will have significant impact on the way clinicians understand family and carer relationships around information. There's also the thing to think about in the small, the activities that we do as the ordinary, the noticing the ordinary, the ordinary are what build up the big things. It's not just the I've got a PhD, but it's I actually, I got out of bed and I thought about it. You know, I opened the book and I read it and those may sound like that's so basic, but actually those are the important things for getting started. That small is important. Yesterday when we were having, I think it was one of the panels that I was in and we were talking about managing risk in open and it made me think about students and when we ask students to put their work out there, the duty of care that we have to make sure that they're in a safe environment and that we don't tie them to saying things that then become part of their footprint for the future and things like that. Do you think that these are inherently safe for spaces for students? I think that they're inherently more conscious spaces for people. I wouldn't say they're for students or for teachers or for anyone. So for example on MASTID and you choose to whom you share your writing. Most of the things I write do not appear in the public timeline, but they appear. They're not, they're not, they don't fit in the big stream. You can choose public, private, your followers only or direct messages. You know somebody could find you if they're really looking, but you're not going to be there on the on the shop floor. With the Vermont Writers Project there were 40,000 users and none of them were made to be users. It was started in 2006, but they had about 4,000 per year active users and it's voluntary. So there was no requirement, there were no assessments, there were no guidelines of you must do this. And I think that's an important thing that people are not made to do things, but also there's a strong awareness within each of the communities of a code of conduct. And they're devised, MASTID is not one thing like Twitter, it's federated, lots of small instances. And each one is a community with their own guidelines. So it's certainly food for thought there for me. Okay, we're actually out of time now so I will say thank you very much for a really stimulating presentation and to our other presenters for really giving us a such a rich understanding of the ecosystem and what we might be being by that. So thank you very much.