 Thank you, Lorna. We're on our way now. Katherine Cronin, you have information in your pack about Katherine and this information on the website and I imagine some of you already follow her on Twitter and in her many social media channels. She's from National University of Ireland. She's, this is a return to Scotland for her. She lived in Scotland for six years and it's a return for her to ALT. She was the keynote at the old conference two years ago and the delegates were inspired and enjoyed her presentation so much that we felt that we should try to attract her to Scotland to come and present at this conference. Her work focuses on online and open education, digital literacies and social media in education. She teaches and researches and she works with schools and community groups exploring open practice themes. She challenges us to think about openness in the context of equality and inclusivity. She has a degree in mechanical engineering, a master's in systems engineering and MA in women studies and her dissertation topics with gender and technology. She's a regular blogger and Twitter. You can follow along and her question to us today is, if open is the answer, what is the question? Katherine Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to all of you for the warm reception. Thanks particularly to Melissa and Lorna and the OER 16 team for inviting me here today. I'm delighted and honored to be here. It's not an exaggeration to say I think that in this room are a lot of the scholars that most inspire me and that I learned from and have learned from for quite a while. So as always I hope that what I bring this morning can just be part of the ongoing conversation of these two days and beyond and I'm really looking forward to what all of you are bringing it to the conference very much. I have to also thank this wonderful city that we're in Edinburgh. All hail Edinburgh. It's a beautiful morning. An amazing city. I didn't live in Edinburgh when I was here but I worked with the Open University when I was here some years ago. As many of you know an amazing city of art and architecture and science and technology and literature and because we have this very strong strand of open glam here today, our galleries, libraries, archives and museums, I just wanted to highlight two quick things that are inspiring to me. First is Mary Somerville, hands up who knows Mary Somerville. Eminent mathematician and scientist born in Scotland in 1780. She was widely honored in her day although you know I certainly never learned about her in school. I learned about her later in life and I'm taught about her. I just learned from Melissa recently that she will appear on Scotland's new 10 pound note in 2017 after winning a competition to who would be on that note. Please check out her Wikipedia page. One of the primary authors of that Wikipedia page is Melissa and I think I've made one or two contributions as well and her portrait, this portrait, hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery on Queen Street. So if you have any time, if you haven't seen it before, it's quite something, particularly when you know a bit about her to see the actual portrait. And then the Scottish Poetry Library is even closer, it's in the Old Town and I've been following this Twitter account from the Scottish Poetry Library for probably seven years. I think it's the most wonderfully named Twitter account that I know by Leaves We Live. It's a line from Patrick Geddes who did pioneering work on city planning, a lot of that in Edinburgh. So a little bit of culture to start and two things that definitely inspire me. Someone said at breakfast this morning, how many times are we going to hear this word over the next two days? So I'll start, okay. We come from diverse areas and we have many different questions, but this is the concept that brings us together for these two days. And if you just pick up a dictionary of your choice, Google or Oxford or whatever you wish, there are so many definitions of the word open and we use it in many, many different ways. So it's from describing simple attributes to very complex changes and phenomena. So it has perhaps inevitably caused confusion and disagreement about what I mean by open and what you mean by open and what you mean by open. There's no orthodoxy here. I think that's the most important thing and critical debate is essential. So hopefully that's what we'll be doing here in these two days. The definition, which I hope might be a light for us for these two days, are these not concealing one's thoughts or feelings and not finally settled, still admitting of debate, being open to ideas, being open to change. So in that spirit of connecting and bridge building and because we're at the start of our two day program, I'm going to take a leaf out of Jonathan's book and I'm going to ask you to say hello to each other just to get that bridge building and connecting started. So if you're really comfortable, don't want to get out of your seat, you don't have to get out of your seat, but you know, if you want to go say hello to someone that you don't know, please do. Take a couple of minutes to say hello, ideally to someone that you don't know. And for those people who are participating virtually, please say hello online and hopefully people will respond. So please. Well, that was fun. Hopefully there's going to be a lot more of that over the next two days. And I'm sorry to cut it short. What I'd like to do now is the title of my my talk this morning is really open culture, open education and open questions, this whole notion of asking questions. So what I'd like to do is get to openness via talking about participatory culture. And some of you, anybody seen this mural before? Okay, few people here from Ireland and beyond. Just about exactly a year ago, this mural appeared at a very busy gable wall of a very busy street in Dublin, and it was created by an artist and activist named Joe Castlin, and was painted in support of the marriage equality referendum, which was held in May of last year and past May of last year. A three month campaign led up to the referendum. And this particular image became iconic and gathered much attention. I mean, it, it, it hopped back over into mainstream media, actually, appearing on the cover front page of the New York Times. And it, it, it was used in a number of different ways. So it was remixed by different people, different artists. This is an image created by Rebecca Hendon. And these images and messages were shared widely on social media as part of the campaign. These images and creations were not only in urban spaces, they were all created in, in rural spaces. This particular mural was painted on the side of a castle. It's not actually painted, it's actually created on paper attached to building with potato starch that can then just be washed off. So the drawings that are just exploded. And it's, I mean, they're just incredibly powerful to see. This was one that was near my home in rural Galway. But there was also guerrilla artwork that appeared in shop windows and street corners and empty walls around the place. And they were shared with various hashtags that were used as part of the referendum. So the main hashtag that was used over the course of three months was MARREF, the marriage referendum. And then people really use social media and very powerful ways to enter the debate even though they weren't in Ireland. So Irish citizens abroad in many different places began advocating for a yes vote saying I can't come home to vote, but I'm asking you to use your vote to vote yes. So in the weeks leading up to the referendum, Irish citizens intentionally created these very visual artifacts and shared them online with hashtags that they would hopefully have an impact on the results. And then final days before the referendum, use of the home to vote hashtag rose, which was incredibly powerful to watch. People tweeted, these were the people who were able to come home and place their votes. Irish citizens were left abroad, that activity on the home to vote hashtag peaked the night before and the morning of the referendum, people are treating again images and videos and so on. They weren't all serious. Although they were all wonderful. This one was widely shared and favorited and I do want to say that I had permission from all of the people who who tweeted these messages that I could use them in the presentation. I recroty an Irish journalist shared social media analytics like this one from the day of the vote. He was tracking the activity on different hashtags, vote yes vote no home to vote. This is the activity on the vote. Yes, hashtag from the middle of the afternoon of the vote. And this is kind of a larger view here. It's an incredible image, I think of the Irish diaspora. Looking at that activity. So I mean, I could have used any example of this is one that's particularly powerful and personal for me, but this wasn't a coherent narrative. This was, you know, it was not framed by anyone. It was through messages through photos, visualizations and artwork shared on social media using hashtags. A story was being told collectively. And it was a particularly powerful example of participatory culture, which I think is hugely significant in terms of openness. The participatory culture basically is groups collectively and individually having an impact or seeking to have an impact on culture. So this, of course, is just a single example. As I said, I could have used many others. It's probably atypical in the fact that it was focused on an particular event and a referendum and had a three month campaign, although certainly that was after years of activism. But there are many, many other examples. You know, right now, we are witnesses to a humanitarian crisis of enormous proportions with the refugee crisis. And I've spent a little bit of time recently exploring how open practices, open data and social media are being used. Not just in liking and sharing, but in where individuals and groups are getting together to try and affect positive change. So NGO, small companies, community organizations, collectors and so on. So participation is the driving force in social change. Henry Jenkins first defined participatory culture. And I'm a part of the foundation report in almost 10 years ago now, characterized by these five features. So participatory cultures characterized by low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing informal mentorship where people mentor one another and to create and share and so on, learn new tools. Members believe that their contributions matter. I think that's evident in the example that I just shared. And the whole notion of social connection is very important. We can also look at the literacy practices of participatory culture. And I again, I think this is really significant for us working in open education. So participatory culture is characterized by these literacy practices. Communication is multimodal, multimedia, networked, social, purposeful, often collaborative, or not always, and agentic. So this notion of agency is really important. So people choose their voice, the topic, they're not acting out of their role as students or teacher or librarian or whatever it might be, but from themselves in a civic sense often. Choose the genre and the tone, it might be humorous or serious. And the collapsing of space and time by the use of networked and open media is significant. So a question that I ask as an open educator is, hey, how successful are we in our educational institutions about developing and supporting these literacy practices? And secondly, how can we help every learner develop their voice and agency so they can contribute to the shared production of knowledge and culture? And I think that's a central question for many of us. So speaking as an educator, you know, one model that I've used in communicating this is this one. Teaching occurs, you know, generally in higher education in kind of three different spaces, physical spaces like this, bounded online spaces, like the LES and open online spaces. And there are good reasons for teaching to happen in all of those spaces. But if we limit ourselves to the first two spaces, there are many things that we cannot do. So we come together in education as networked individuals, networked teachers, networked students, and we meet. But if openness is not part of what we are doing, then we can't share what we're doing out with wider networks. But nor can we invite the participation of our networks into the dynamic learning spaces that we create. So and it's not simply a matter of going where the students are, like let's use Facebook because that's where students are. It's much more fundamental than that. It's about recognizing the ubiquity of knowledge and networks. But the imperative to facilitate not just learning but empowerment, civic participation and capacity building. So I think that brings us to openness, which is our theme. At present, that worked in open practices quite uneasily and unevenly within our higher education institutions, within formal education systems, full stop. Bonnie Stewart has a beautiful expression as part of her body of wonderful work in this area. Openness is a complex phenomenon. It's economic, it's political, it's technical, it's social. So how do we grasp it? How do we grasp the nettle and enable ourselves to be clear about our terms and our goals and engage in discussion with each other? So one way is to be clear about our interpretations of open, certainly. You could pick any number of levels and you can call them different things. This is just a model. Probably starting with open admission like the Open Universities, the whole network of global Open Universities where it's open admission. People don't have to have qualifications to enter. And then we get to open as free. So if you have the skills and the network access, we're able to access the open resources. And then we go beyond that again, and we get to OER, open the licensed resources, and then open educational practices or OEP. The yellow line is hotly contested and I'm sure there'll be many conversations about that. Open resources that are free, but that are not openly licensed, we may say that some of us may say those are not truly open. Well, according to the dictionary definition, they are open, but they're not our definition of open. So hence, some of the difficulties that we have. So OER, I'm just defining as licensed for the use. So it's OER embody the concept that knowledge is a public good. I'm saying take it, use it, remix it, share it as you wish. And open educational practices, a little more complex. I mean, I've been studying this as part of my own research. And there are really two bodies of definition. One is very OER focused or OER centric, which says open educational practices about producing, using and reusing OER. And then another set of definitions is emerging, that's much broader. So which says yes, it's about producing, using and reusing OER. But it's also about open pedagogies, open learning, open sharing of teaching and ideas and so on, about really changing the relationship with the teacher and the learner. This is not to say that many people who work in OER are not also talking about changing the relationship between the teacher and the learner. But opening educational practices is the definition that's being used to really talk about that. There's a two way arrow in my diagram between OER and OEP, because many people who work in OER make a great case for the fact that it leads to OEP. But other people show a more emergent use of OER, and I'm certainly finding this in my research at the moment, about educators who come to OEP because they want to democratize learning and use open practices with their students, and then find their way to open licensing. So these would be educators who don't work at institutions who have any policies around openness, for example. So in addition to our interpretations that we probably need to clarify when we're talking with each other, there are the different levels of openness. So individual activities, if you participate in a Wikipedia editathon, for example, or at CC licensing, going further you might have open practices. Many people who use open practices talk about their values as an open educator. They talk about openness as a way of being Jim Groom, because he describes openness as an ethos metal license. We did say that once, Jim. And a deeply held value, or even a political statement. However, the lower part of that blue box are really individual senses of openness. And really, if you have individuals spinning your wheels using open practices, but there's no commitment to openness at the institutional level, then it only goes so far. And I know a lot of people in this room are working precisely in that space. So I posed a question on my blog, a number of weeks ago, trying to try to invite people to who are working in this open space. So what, what's the question? And if you say, Yeah, I do open. So what's the question? What is it healthy to do? It's probably a kind of a different way of asking why. Lots of comments in the blog on Twitter, which was wonderful. And there was a webinar before this conference and they kind of clustered in a few different areas, some people really focused on resources accessing textbooks. Or as Lorna was saying, publicly funded resources on heritage and cultural sector. A large number of people talked about the whole practices, the importance of open practices and learning, developing, reflecting, connecting, collaborating, and so on. And specifically, empowering learners, the notion that we started with. And then there were a number of people who spoke about this notion of values, about how important openness is to them. As a practitioner, serving the democratic purpose of knowledge construction, and so on. And then a number of people just really got asked ontological questions like, you know, why isn't everything open and what is open and how do you define it? And let's be clear about our definitions. So that's a space. And if you were to draw a web network of just the few people that I've been corresponding with this about, you would find connections from all levels on each side intersecting with each other. And that's just a small group of open educators. Now that isn't people in the cultural heritage sector, or people involved in social activism, or anything else. So it's enormously complicated. A few months ago, Vivian Rolf and myself did a little bit of research before the ALT conference and assembled some of the resources that we found we were sharing regularly with people around OER and WIKI. And we created this WIKI educator. We didn't know that two months later, the US Department of Education would announce their go open project. But I campaign to encourage open licensing in the US. If you go and visit this WIKI, I'll invite you to look at the section on mapping methodologies, because we gathered together some really interesting work that's been done by different individuals to help them work with groups and institutions to kind of assess where they are with regard to openness and chart ways forward. So there's Daniel Ellers model, sharing the trajectory of OEP, Cheryl Hutchkins and Williams has eliminated the different attributions of openness. So we're moving beyond the binary of opening closed, which of course we must do. But even that, I think is not enough. And what's very important and so enthused to see as a important strand of this conference is openness as a critical and reflexive approach. So we know so much about the potential good of openness, and we're really good at communicating that. But there's a potential for openness to do just the opposite of what we intend to create inequalities. So students and staff who are already marginalized, structurally or otherwise can feel pressured to take on open scholarship and maybe disadvantaged by it. So it's not a binary open and closed, but neither is it a binary in terms of good or bad. And there's some wonderful work in this area. Richard Edwards, among others, in a wonderful article called Knowledge Infrastructures, I mean Scrutability of Openness talks about how openness is not, it's not a binary opposition. It's not a continuum, but we must always think about the context and think about what forms of openness worthwhile for whom. This is hard to see sometimes. And very hard to act or to address, rather, but having a critical reflexive approach is essential. Saba Singh, who's here today. Saba's presenting her work later on today at the conference, which is wonderful, talks about our privilege as open educators. This is really important for us to realize we may feel very comfortable in our networks that we have created for some time and really enthused about inviting our peers or students, but it's not the same. So every experience is individual and contextual. So we need to have that sensitivity in all of those interactions. We need critical research. I looked at the whole program and so I'm just going to name check a few people. I'm sorry if I leave anyone out, but again, so please see this strand on critical approach. Jeremy Knox, Vivian Roll, Suzanne Cosioglu, Sheila McNeil, Keith Sneth, Christian Friedrich, Leo Havenman, Javier Atanas, Andre Middleton, Katherine Jensen. Just a first look of the PAPA's program. All of these people are talking about critical approach to openness. I think this is wonderful and probably really the next stage of our work in this area. A small note. I'm almost finished about my research at the moment and I've been working with academic staff at one university that does not have a policy around openness to try and understand their use or not of open practices. And it's the key attribute that is important to people is this notion of balancing privacy and openness. So even in a small group of academic staff, people recounted instances of bullying or harassment or stalking either from a part of themselves or someone in their family. So no number of stories of openness are going to convince those people that it's a good thing to share. We need to be sensitive to that. Female staff, for example, are often marginalized in other ways and are very aware of the amount of online shaming and abuse that happens more frequently for women. So they might think twice again before putting it off and sharing. So openness entails negotiating new forms of risk, as opposed to the main point. Anyone can have a voice, so new kinds of boundaries and status hierarchies emerge. And just to finish up and in my study, I'm talking with academic staff, but I actually think this is relevant when we move beyond individuals and talk about institutions and that is it is always very personal. So we often stop at the macro level, say are you using Twitter, are you blogging, are you assigning open licenses, but the hard work happens beneath that, what I'd call the meso level and the micro level, so meso kind of a community. Who am I sharing with when I share in the micro level around personal identity? Who am I sharing as? And although people don't formulate the question as that, that's often where people trip up. It's not about the mechanics of retweeting and assigning a license. It's who am I when I express this voice in an open network. And one other level, which has come up in my study, and I'll call the nano level, is will I share this? Even when you've done all that work, you know, as somebody said, it's a lot of work to do for one tweet. You know when your fingers are hovering there and thinking of sending something out, you're negotiating these questions with every interaction. So we, if we're very experienced in openness, we might diminish that work, but it's very real. And so work around digital identity and context collapse is key for supporting people in this. And you know again, as someone in my study said, you're negotiating all the time. Every friend request, every interaction you're negotiating all the time. So work by the likes of JISC and in Ireland, the National Forum for Teaching and Learning, the work that they're doing around building digital capability, I think is very important. But we mustn't forget that we have to recognize privilege as many people, you know, Orby Waters, Dana Boyd, and so on have called to mind. So last slide, coming back to our word, open. And just a few summary. Openness is not universally experienced, so I don't think we can forget that. It's always complex and contextual. It requires digital capability and agency. It's both descriptive and aspirational, so we may choose closed conversations if our aspiration is open. Not everything that we do must be open, but if our aspiration is open, some of those mixed modes might get us there. And it leaves me aware of that. And critical discourse is essential. And just end with a quote from Trezy McMillan, we really need to move from access to equity and justice. And keep in mind our larger goals. And with that, I will just say thank you. And I hope to continue the conversation with you. So, get a few questions for Catherine. We're your friendly, but not very necessarily fast, Mike, bring us. So if you have a question, please raise your hand. And we'll who you are and where you're from. And we're also going to try and tweet some of the questions, so remote participants can read them. So if you have a question, please raise your hand. If you've left us features, Catherine. Yes, one over here. I'll come back to David. Catherine, that was an absolutely awesome keynote. Thank you. I just want to ask you about this relationship between learning and teaching. You made some, you alluded to the fact that the relationship is changing. I just wonder if you could expand a little bit more on that for us. Sorry, I'm from Open University. Thanks, Alison. Well, I mean, OER is it really points our way to that because it starts with the concept that knowledge can be co-constructed is indeed co-constructed. So, you know, the people who are involved with OER projects where you share, not only share knowledge that other people have created, but invite students to create and share their own work and CC license that changes the power dynamic. It doesn't eliminate the power dynamic of teacher and student, but it enables hopefully more equal sharing of knowledge creation. And I think that's that's where the most important thing. I think David can hand side. We're in the back. Okay, yes. Yes. Thank you for your talk. My name is Yoram. I'm from Germany. And I would like to ask you a question on the move from access to equity and justice question. I assume that's not only a question of where we have to move to, but where we are coming from. Many of us are coming from these questions. So, are we somewhat confused or lost between what we are coming from and where we have to move to? Can you say more? Ah, I hope you could. It's not only that most of us are not coming from the question of access, but we have a background in equity and justice questions. So, do you think we might have lost the focus on equity and justice on our way to open and too much focusing on questions on access and licensing questions and everything? Yes. Well, that's interesting. I mean, you're saying you're not focused on access, focused on equity and justice where I think many people who work in the area of open education particularly are really focused on access, you know, for very good reasons. But the point is that that's not enough. And that we have to think of, you know, access for whom and who's being excluded. And I think, you know, just what you said starting out with equity and justice will probably bring us to better open solutions than simply focusing on access. Hi, David Kernahan from the Followers of the Apocalypse blog and the internet. I firstly adjust the range and sheer awesomeness of the people that you're quoting from in your keynote. I just wanted to reflect for a second what a spectacularly rich field that is becoming. But I was interested that you didn't really talk about content in that still underpinning all of the benefits of open is the idea of open content, open educational resources, if you will. It's in the name of the conference. And over the last few years we seem to talk less and less about the content. I was just wondering if you could talk for a little while on what the place of content is in open. Do we need to be sharing content in order to be open or as open practice moved beyond content entirely? Yeah, great question. And it actually has been a strand of a lot of the conversation I've had even since I've arrived here. I deleted a slide from here because I was worried about timing just showing OER and OEP and arrows going to each. And I'm sorry if I appeared to minimize the importance of content. I suppose what I was trying to do was in a lot of our conversations we talk a great deal about content and it is important and it's a foundation for much of what we do. However, I was just trying to redress the balance of talking about the importance of process and equity and really a social justice vision of education. If we are just focused on the practices without the content that's not, I don't believe that is as sustainable. Is it? I mean because if we still have locked away content and we're having all these practices that's not in the interest of greater equity or greater social justice. So it's very much a dialectic I see between open educational resources and open educational practices but I would put them equally. I think what's happened is some of the work that's been done in OER has then come to practices about actualizing that great work that's been done in resources. However, what I'm seeing now is some people coming in to open practices from the social justice perspective finding their way to open resources. So I think we need to be able to have the conversations across that divide. Does that make sense? I just think the conversation is getting broader and I think that's a very good thing. Thank you very much for that. Rob Farrow from the Open University and OER Hub. Catherine, I think you're interested in something that I'm quite interested in which is something like what is the normative content of this openness commitment? And you want to say something like it's got a social justice dimension, it's got a critical dimension and you're kind of bringing these values to it, right? But at the same time, you're kind of sitting on the fence a bit about the definition side of things, right? So it's perfectly possible for someone to have a definition of open which involves none of these commitments at all. You might just think well it's just a practical thing that I do to share my work more widely or promote it or something like that. I think there is a way to get there and the way I'm trying to get there at the moment is through the idea of freedom. So for any open, OER, open data, open source software, whatever it might be, essentially when we talk about openness we're talking about removing some barrier to activity. So you can do something you couldn't do because it's now an open scenario. So I want to say something like it's always directed towards freedom, freedoms. Now if we go down that road we can have these thicker normative ideas because you can have an idea of freedom that involves not a commitment to social justice, respecting other people and so on and so forth. So I wonder if that's something that's occurred to you if you've kind of explored that at all or whether it's a kind of new perspective that might be worth exploring. Yes and I read your work about critical pedagogy and openness. I was very interested in that and hopefully we'll have time to have a conversation these two days. What I, in my own work, and again this is just my personal take on my approach to openness but I see connections with many people who are here. I think coming back to the question all the time of open for whom and under what conditions. For example, Laura Chernivitz has done some wonderful work around the values of the global north. So if we release and share open resources but don't allow them to be adapted and contextualized it's a very colonial approach to openness even though from our standpoint it may seem wholly valuable. So asking the question and it depends on what we're releasing, who we are, whether we're in the heritage and cultural context, whether in higher education. I think it depends on the context and releasing open resources is not a bad thing but it's often not enough and I also think again coming back to this notion of privilege. Those of us who are active in this space are quite privileged to have networks and supportive networks and agency to have these conversations and to share and to know that it will be received but if we encourage other people in more risky positions even within the academy to do that that can be quite dangerous for them. So I'm not criticizing open educational resources or openness but I'm just asking everyone to in their context ask the question who's being left out who may be at risk and I'm not the only one doing that work I think there's many people who are doing it but yeah new questions but important questions is that our time or how we're doing okay. Thank you Katherine that was awesome. I really appreciated it. The quote you end with the move from access to equity and if you go home brought this up as well or you're drawing my right with that brought this up as well as from the context and I really love that you're saying of the states this move from access to equity and justice building on what David said too so much of the infrastructure around OEOPS became a content and it became a political though undercutting the state funding of public education so the idea of openness and enclosure came hand in hand and so I was interested how would you all I know Europe is as complex as you know anything of think about this content relationship to textbooks and open like it's not a particularly American interpretation of open like you're also hearing your complexity without I'm coming calm text where we've almost boiled it down to textbooks which pisses me off so anyway that's I don't know if there's a question the answer is that is it less about text from here is is yes is a resounding yes although but many many people in this room have written about that and I mean I point to Vivian Roff has done a lot of work in this because Viv I think you've bridged the kind of two open education communities quite well so will you be talking about that in your session yeah but there there are definitely our cultural differences and isn't it wonderful that we you know some of us can can start making those connections and saying hey wait a minute it's not actually the same you know in this different area in this domain because that's really important you know because we do we do operate from within our frames don't we but it is different here here I say Europe I'm speaking from Ireland Catherine thank you very much for getting our conference off to an excellent start ladies and gentlemen round of applause for Catherine of course