 Thank you for coming to this non graveyard, but pre drink, pre celebratory party prep makeup sighs Oilers. It's lovely for me to be at this conference, but slightly odd because I felt like I came in with OER as it was 10 years ago and was very involved at point in time when it came to evaluating what was then the UK OER program, and thinking about how OER was the beginning of a sense of public comments is almost an alternative idea of the university as again some of the hideous things that were happening in our universities at the time. But also it was the beginning of a time I think when some of the programs that got funded particularly by the UK and the US began to look an awful lot like what Taskine called epistemic injustices in the guise of present giving and it was a very interesting time to be talking about some of those issues. What I've done since then is focus a lot more on learners and their engagement children with digital experiences and particularly more recently with what it means for learners, to be critical in relation to digital tools and networks that they're offered. So I wanted today to think about what the connection might be between Open Education as it's understood now in the community. Kate said earlier she was an ally of the OpenEd movement. I don't think I have quite as much ymdeg yma'r ffrifatig sydd yna bod ydych yn eu cael viaddd arfael gan beth oedd OER yn ysgrifennu drwy'r llyfr yw i'r llyfrion, cynnwch arall i gael. Mae'n meddwl yn gwnaethaf yn gweithio drwy ff Creator Ysgrifennu ymgyrch yn ysgrifennu dyma'r ffrifatig a'r cyffredin ac argyfreun cyllid SRF, nid i'n gwybod a chael arweinydd I was very glad to remember that I put critical in a few quotation marks as I went through and perhaps we can hold critical in those quotation marks and think through the idea of critical to notions of stance and resistance and also I hope of solidarity and what it means to be critical citizens. So what I plan to do is to open the space by asking just two questions those of you who know me will suspect that they are quite not just that simple, they are quite complex questions, one of them more contentious than the other but I'm literally going to ask two questions about this space between open and critical and then leave you for 15 minutes to talk about that. I've got three kind of guides to how you might talk about that in whatever group you form but I can also see because I know quite a lot of you in this room that you're going to completely ignore me and talk about this in whatever way feels right to you so that's fine too. So here we go with kind of where I came in with this. So an essay that I read about 15 years ago that many of you will know that had a profound influence on me was by Carnan Kellner and a lot of people cite this and they were talking about the need for what they called multiple technoliteracies, critical technoliteracies and these two quotes from that essay have really stayed with me for a long time but I also think they hide something very difficult in the middle of the sentences. So the first quote talks about critical computer literacy, so critical literacies of the technology itself, of the tools and the platforms, so that involves learning to use the computer technologies to do a variety of things and to perceive computer culture as contested terrain. Quite a large space between those two things. There's a comma between them but I think actually there's a very large space in our pedagogic practice between supporting learning to do stuff with technology and seeing technology as contested and tools and networks and platforms as contested space. Similarly with media literacy, the idea that it's about teaching students to learn from media, to create with media, to use media materials but also to become good citizens and again there's a comma in the middle of that sentence which I think probably hides quite a lot of conceptual and pedagogic work. So I'm going to ask two questions about how we might bridge the comma in those two sentences and move on from critical as an individual mindset and facility and resource, what Caroline called earlier the exploratory mindset towards a more collective understanding of how we might be critical collectively. And the first sort of suggestion I'm going to make which I think is the least controversial is that if we are going to be open educators we are going to demand that our learners are to some extent critically resourceful in some of those simple ways that we might talk about computer literacy and media literacy because at the very least whatever kind of open learning it is we're not going to close down at the start the issue of my pathway through my learning, when I do it, how I do it, the time and pacing of it. The question of how best shall I learn this is not going to be foreclosed by us as teachers. And I think if we're open educators in the sense that most of us hear me, there are a whole lot of other things we're also going to try not to foreclose on with our students. The question of the platform, the tool and the interface you choose to engage with, the mode of engagement, the question of what activities you actually carry out as part of your learning, how you produce your learning outcomes, what those learning outcomes are, the question of which communities you engage with and bring in to the wider network of learning. All of those we would want to not foreclose on at the beginning. So we're going to ask our learners right from the start to be making some critical judgments about what should I learn, what does this learning mean to me, who am I as a learner, what kind of learner could I become. Things that in a closed classroom as an educator we would perhaps be walking people through hand in hand. So we're asking learners to be critical users of learning as product, critical navigators of the pathways through learning, but we might be asking and I think we would want to be asking that they should also be or be supported to become critical subjects in the domain of learning and knowledge that we're introducing to them. So that's my first kind of contention about the connection between open and critical that we're demanding that our learners be critical and ideally we're supporting them in that journey as well. And I think the more contentious demand and I've heard it a lot today and it's really exciting to hear it but I also think we need to recognise it is contentious outside of this room is that to be open educators we must be critical in a much deeper, more socially situated way. We must be actually be critical pedagogues. And if that's the contention that we're creating that we're making, if that's what we're claiming, I think we need to have some grounds for saying that to moving beyond the critical mindset to a sense of critical engagement with the wider world of learning and of technology. So first of all of necessity I think that kind of pedagogic practice that tries to develop students as critical subjects that I just mentioned has to be challenging power and privilege in the space of the classroom, whatever the classroom means. It doesn't seem to be possible to do that without to give that power to students not foreclose for students on what their learning will be and who they might become is to challenge already our power as pedagogues necessarily. But I also think reflecting on it and reflecting on the last ten years when I've been hanging on the coattails of this movement and watching as it develops that there's been a kind of historical contingency about it that's been really exciting which is that digital open movement certainly in the English speaking west happened at a time of intensification of neoliberalism and marketisation so there was an inevitable conflict built in between the idea of open education as a new market model, a new way of branding a new way of giving, a new way of bringing in students as product and the ideal which has always been the front of house face of it of developing a new public democratic knowledge commons and we all know in our own work that that's a very real pointed conflict between trying to be open, trying to develop public spaces for open sharing and the competitive commercialised organisations that typically are funding open and funding our labour as open educators. I think that the market models in the English speaking western economies that I'm more familiar with have tended to win out or open education as a critical discourse has tended to lose out and then perhaps this space that we're in today and that we're enjoying in so much has become a space where the ideal of the university survives as commons as community but it can only be here in some kind of critical revolt against the really existing universities and institutions that have supported some of us to be here. So I'm making two contentions about criticality, about individual mindset and about engaging in a critical political space and that the two are in some way bound up together in that comma between critical mindset and engaging as critical citizens having something to say about this world in which we're trying to do education that they might be bound up together in some quite intimate way. Now I've opened the space and as I said I'm going to leave you now to talk about it and contribute about it and hopefully there'll be room to hear from each little bubble a little bit. There is a padlet you can go to if you want to begin to address some of the questions. I hope that if anyone's following this they'll go to the padlet and do that but if you're here in the room I would recommend beginning with the people around you because that's always a nice enriching thing to do. So I'll give you the questions with four or five minute intervals so you can get your teeth into them. I fully expect you to have gone offline with me very quickly, that's fine. But I've got three questions so you can see them coming up and the first one is if we have this ambition for our learners to develop as critical subjects what would that look like or what does that look like when you're assessing that in your learners. What are you looking for? You might want to think about assessment because that's a really pragmatic way of thinking about it and when I'm looking for case studies that's often the first question that I'm asking how are you planning to assess. If you have this ambition that your learners become more critical and we could think about the complaint that's often made of today's digital students that they're not capable of occupying a position they can manage vast amounts of knowledge and information but when you ask them to come to a judgement or to a position that they struggle with that and somehow the problem might be digital so what would it look like if your students were to come to a position and to stand in it and to place themselves there. What would that look like? What had happened? So I think that's the first question. You might bring your own subject expertise and your own ideas about how you assess to the question. Everyone happy to talk about that? I think I'm going to move us on difficult though it is. After each of these three questions it would be nice to take any burning responses to them. If you feel you have the answer please share it quickly. But if you feel you have something that was a problem or a challenge or the grit that made this question interesting please share that as well. Please. How can we ensure that we're helping them to differentiate what those things are? We thought analytical was maybe a word that might help for students to figure that out. Thank you. The thought was that students were invited to complain all the time, aren't they? Not just in relation to their education but in relation to things they find online. The digital world is full of feedback. That's the nature of it. So maybe some of it is to do with the criteria of judgement that we offer them and how we do that. It may be those criteria are very disciplined specific and that might be fine. It may be that there isn't one standard of critical judgement that works across the piece. Any other thoughts? Thank you. We looked at the knowing piece. Imagine ourselves as instructors with our students in front of us and we got into a conversation around problematising assessment and evaluation and what the university needs, a number perhaps eventually to show that students have demonstrated some capacity for critical thinking if you like. Then walked it back towards possibly different ways of students being able to demonstrate their knowledge and also different ways for us to be able to on an ongoing basis assess the students in the classroom based on the responses to questions or conversations. A variety of different things in there with perhaps different outcomes serving different purposes either for the critical thinking piece for the student in the classroom or for the requirement of the registry to have a grade that says the student has been assessed at this level of competency. Does that make sense? So it sounds as though there's a thing about competency in there but also you were relying quite a lot on the judgement of the educator as to what critical looks like. Am I right to think? Absolutely right but also that dual need then to represent that forward. A thing we were struggling with is that not necessarily the criticality that we achieve in our classroom is reflected in whatever the 70 or the 80 or whatever and she was putting a brilliant example about that student. I was just talking about very good students but they're getting 70, 80 and it's robotic because they've been trained in a privileged position from the age of two to produce a good essay and I don't just work with assessments that are essays, visual videos, different forms of assessment. I think you mentioned there about the educator maybe the college or the university metrics, the force to have these kind of assessments, these kind of exams and often the most critical student I have in the class will be a critical citizen but they don't know how to get 70 or 80. They haven't come from that background so what do we mean by critical? I think this is really interesting isn't it that critical like education developers but deep learning is another one that becomes a kind of badge for the kind of learning we approve of. We know it when we see it actually I'm trying to unpack and it may be to disciplinary level what we think it looks like and you may know what it looks like in the classroom and in an essay but what does it look like in a more visual mode of representation if your students have built some code or if they've created a video. What would criticality look like there? I think that leads on to the next question so when we're talking about critical it's very easy in the digital space it's very easy to simply begin to talk about kind of educational values and attributes that we would always expect our students to come out with or we would always hope they would become more able at and more confident in and I wonder then what is specific is anything specific about this digital time we find ourselves in. Is there a materiality of the media is there an opportunism of the actual networks and their availability that creates new opportunities perhaps for students to occupy more critical stances. If we are not giving them the tools but they're choosing the tools does that in some way facilitate them having a wider repertoire of perspectives on the knowledge that we're offering them. Does that create more opportunities for critique I'm going to ask you about ways in which critique might be undermined but I wonder if we could think in a positive sense about how digital opportunity, digital networks, open digital learning produced is critical subjects simply by some of the new opportunities and participative opportunities and productive opportunities and hyper media opportunities that are open to our students. You might think about issues like repertoire, you might think about issues like self-managed learning, self-managed context. What are the things that are really supporting students and learners to become critical in the digital environments we offer them. Time is going on. I'm going to just point the last question at you because they kind of go together which is thinking about whether there are new risks as well. So whether there are new risks to students capacity to be critical and to engage critically. I know we have only four minutes left and hopefully the conversations will go on. I'd like to spend a couple of minutes taking maybe one or two thoughts from people who haven't spoken yet and then I'm going to take a couple of minutes just to put in a few thoughts of my own. Francis I know will keep us strictly to time. We're all so scared of you Francis. On those two questions about whether teaching in digital open spaces creates new opportunities and or new risks for students capacity to be critical subjects. Again any top of the head thoughts from a couple of people. I think we probably had a lot of conversations very similar to everybody else in the room. I think we do feel that there are. There are great, there's a huge potential to use digital technologies and networks. They can provide new opportunities. I think particularly around engagement but there's a danger in open spaces and I think that relates to some of the things that were happening particularly in the session earlier with Bonnie Stewart and Laurie Fitz about people withdrawing from some more open spaces and social media etc. There's a fear that you might be attacked and I think a lot of people particularly in education when you're thinking about activity and you're thinking about where you're going to want your students to be, you have to think about that and the risk mitigating that risk in some way as well. I think then conversely then we're setting up networks or we're in danger of setting up networks internally particularly in universities that aren't very intuitive for students that are quite difficult to use so you actually might spend more time criticising the mechanics of what you're doing as opposed to the actual activity so there's things about that. I think one of the big risks we thought one of the new risks was this and it came up from the group earlier that the student as a consumer as well that whole narrative I think that that is a risk to criticality because as the group up there said you know it's the wrong kind of thing it's like you're paying to go through so just do that and you know systems that are being built now are going to make it very easy you know this whole lovely personalisation thing that you're going to have, you've got all the support you need. You might not necessarily get support in developing your own criticality or your own critical skills or your own sense of agency in terms of how you can be a critical learner, how you can find your voice. So that was some of the thoughts that we had Thank you Sheila that's great. So the whole kind of user experience focus and even the kind of co-creation model as it comes from the user experience kind of marketing branding world is problematic potentially when it comes to students meeting challenges knowing there are different ways to meet challenges and perhaps you know experiencing themselves as a community which may be part of the critical stance we need and I also like what you were saying and I hadn't thought about it in these terms but I'm thinking of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and how safety comes before self actualisation and of course the experience of being safe in any space depends on other experiences you've had not all students will feel equally safe will be equally able to self actualise in apparently the same learning space and so therefore we can reduce our capacity to develop students critically because we're not making them feel safe enough to do that. Yep I hear you Francis. So I've got loads of more stuff I could say but I'm going to go to just one slide in particular and this is a way that I've been starting to think about this space and this gap in the comma between critical thinking as a kind of user resource, user experience and what Barnett, one Barnett calls critical being as a kind of critical citizenship and I started thinking this way when I read this rather wonderful review by Lucy Ponglatsio which some of you may know when she looked at some of the ways of thinking about digital and critical and again this probably corresponds a little bit to Maslow's hierarchy of needs or possibly you know there might be some blooms taxonomy going on in here but kind of down at this left hand end there's a critical user so there's a student that is you know experiencing aspects of learning and responding to them and perhaps responding critically to them thinking is this right for me, is this good for me, is this how I want to learn, is this piece of knowledge useful to me in the assessment task that I have set for me and if you move into a more active space you have learners acting as practitioners of various kinds, they might be coders, they might be makers, they might be actually engaging with the repertoire of tools and techniques that digital makers have and in that engagement there may be a kind of imminent critique because they are more knowledgeable users more experienced users of those tools and therefore more able through that repertoire to be critical of how those tools get used again in relation to them. They might be practitioners in a more social sense that they're participating actively in networks and again a lot of open pedagogies assume that there is an imminent form of critique in this that if students participate enough openly enough in enough open networks freely enough then a kind of critique will emerge because there will be a variety of perspectives and viewpoints offered to them and a variety of modes of responding and participating. On the other side of that line though is a much more what I would call from the kind of critical consciousness field the idea that we are giving students theoretical resources students as social scientists, students as theorists to think about the issues that we think about here, big data, surveillance capitalism platform capitalism, you know where do my technologies come from whose labour is inherent in them, how have they been marketed to me, what are the platforms my university is using, how is my data being used, those theoretical resources we might be explicitly giving to them and asking them to use these resources and those are quite different, those are pulling in quite different directions and different disciplines will have different balances of those. And then over and above and beyond that I guess there's this idea of yeah but what could I do to make this world in which I can make in which I can participate of which I can be critical into a different place, who are the people I could act with to create change and so I guess in a sense thinking that through in a more approachable way there might be a series of questions that students are encouraged to ask, are prompted to ask as they engage what can I, how do I use it, what can it do, what can I do with it how can I use some kind of legitimate practice here, how can I produce this for myself and situate myself relative to these discourses and purposes how am I being situated and realised the theoretical tools who has knowledge and power here and then in the end ideally so how could things be different, how could this be different, who could I act with in solidarity to create this difference. I really wanted to appreciate please go and put some ideas in there, I really wanted to appreciate that many people have come before and as I said in an earlier session I'm particularly interested a third of a century ago that feminists were thinking about how to teach in a very similar way with very similar questions and issues and I wanted to finish with this very old quote but I think fantastically contemporary from a special issue of the women's studies quarterly on feminist pedagogy and it's from Barbara Ommelader who says there are three issues to form the context of my thinking about black feminist pedagogy, clarification of the source and use of power in the classroom which we've talked about today, the development of a methodology for teaching writing skills which I think we could transpose digital skills, digital productivity skills and the need for instructors to struggle alongside their students for a better university and I think the better university is perhaps what we're creating here in this space rather than those compromise institutions that are supporting us to be here. Thank you, I hope there will be some more thinking as a result of that.