 Well, good morning, it's 5 34 right a.m. Right? I think that's think that's about I think that's about right All right, listen, I want to move away from this podium, but I don't think I can I Need you to do me a favor All right. Yes. Yeah, all right. I need you to watch me It looks like I'm tipping over my eyes about their clothes You know you pound on the on the table, right? and at about 905 If I'm still talking I'm still talking at 905. I want you to stand up and do like You with me Can you do that? I need a backup person. Let me see I need a backup person I need somebody just in case she drops the ball on me You got me all right cool. All right, that's good. That's good to know. All right Thank you for having me here. I really appreciate it I had a conversation with David about this. I don't know when it was but it was in the spring and I argued with him profusely because I Should not be here That's my my my view of it. I can think of a dozen people better suited To start this conference for you. I Lost the argument. I Think I was on the right side of the argument, but I still lost it. All right so I Did what people do when they lose arguments I sought advice and counsel about What I should actually come here and do or or say I started With experts because you know, I am on my own learning curve or a journey where oh ER is Concerned it is true. I've worked for the guy a couple of different times Who at Hewlett? 16 17 18 years ago really at least launched the foundation's exploration into this Mike Smith and Mike is the kind of guy who if he thinks you're Slacking off or you've sort of lost your way He will call you over to the Starbucks in Menlo Park You know and sit you down and sort of go back over things with you until he thinks you've got a clear mind So I talked to him about this talked to my colleagues about this and I started thinking about Well, I'll come with slides and I'll impress you with how much I have learned and I let that go Then I talked to my comms person glad she's not here Glad she's not here. Well, wait a minute, you know, I have a communications officer But they refer to themselves. This is important as comms people, right? That should make you nervous right right there, right? They think about they want to analyze your audience. Okay, Kent. Who's who's going to be here, right? Let's think about what your core messages are and Maybe we can put Images running in the background something like that. Oh my god, I said So you're getting no images for me And get those from Jess You got a lot of sessions, there'll be plenty of slides At the end of the day, I am more of a conversationalist. That's why I gave you that assignment, right? and So you'll get a story or two out of me, but no pictures and And and I actually have about three that I and I will sort of back into the OER things that are on my mind in Process of telling these these quick stories But let me pause and give kudos to the program committee. The only mistake you made was me But beyond that I think The program and the kinds of topics as I peruse through it You know ethics efficacy attention to underrepresented groups of accommodations for special populations Sustainability I could keep going these seem like very much the things We need to interrogate And so I'm really happy about about that Let me just say as I've gone on my own arc Into the OER work, you know, I have lived in higher ed I was a dean for eight years. I Am still recovering from that It's about three or four years of recovery for every year in service I've been on a school board for eight years I'm still recovering from that actually I had just spent What four years in DC working in the government Another four years working in New York City running a research company And my wife called me She's gonna show up more than once in this talk. My wife called me and said Kent It would be really great if you could figure out how to do a job Where you actually lived right we lived in Philly I Was working in DC and then New York. I Got away with that because my in-laws moved around the country with us but They were getting to a point when They needed our care More than providing the support that they had been but my wife called it kent's Seven-year adventure. It's what she called it. She said could you please come home? And that's when I became a dean but no sooner than I got there someone asked me to run for the school board and I Lost that argument too. I decided to do it and my wife was the person outside Roberts elementary school with the sign do not vote for him He knows not what he's doing right but I was the chair of the curriculum committee and We were trying to figure out Where good content would come from and How we could engage our teacher work force in using stuff Other than the basal readers and the stuff that came Sort of canned with these sort of you know very little opportunity for adult learning You know that that you know that came with it. That was really my first Introduction into the OER World just trying to work through that and I think the values of the community of transparency access inclusion innovation collaboration these are all things that I Don't know if you can't appreciate just how in demand they are So let me tell you story number one I Have a hard time saying no to people although given the work I now do I am learning how to say no God got no choice right one person. I can't say I'm hardest person at that time saying no to is Angela Because she shows up with a smile on her face Very warm you know this about her if you've matters hard to say no to her I'm gonna try harder But I Sit on a committee at the Academy of Sciences. I actually chair it that's looking into how to fill the pipeline of of STEM majors and graduates From underrepresented groups We've been working at it For more than a year in fact if I don't run out of here after I talk to go write the preface for the report I'm in real trouble but As we got into this issue We decided to go take a look At the schools that were really getting it right. What am I talking about? I'm talking about tribal colleges Hispanic serving institutions HBCUs both four year and two year and a large number of Community colleges around the country we went to see them We went to talk to the students in these programs. We visited with the faculty and administrators and a couple of things surface right away number one These under resourced Institutions are the very ones where the students can hardly afford To spend two three hundred bucks for a text If a car breaks down or a sibling or a relative has a problem That margin is razor Finn and they get off to a remarkable in their borrowing money in the first place, right? They're borrowing money in the first place The second thing we learned was they know about open They know about open But there are a set of underlying questions. I'm sure some of you are aware of them around levels of engagement and motivation and The difference these institutions make There's an intentionality about the work that they do Is they bring this sort of cultural lands with them Too much of the content they can't find their their their own identity themselves in that content It would be easier to engage them if some of the problems they got to work on Were issues that surfaced in their own lives environmental justice criminal justice the interplay between transportation and housing policy and opportunity health care and wellness I could keep going all things by the way That we need a the masterably more diverse workforce in the sciences If this country Is going to thrive we our strategy up to now has been to try to import that diverse talent From around the world that'll only get us so far and it turns out there were real issues in being able to sustain that and so There's a challenge That is crying out for the open community to really go after and embrace it has Not as much to do with getting the cost of materials down We're headed that way for sure. It has a lot to do With what I think of as open practice or open pedagogy And really fostering more innovation in the use of the materials that are available to us Story number two I Am in the middle of what at Hewlett We call a strategy Refresh, I don't know anybody else in the real world uses that that term, but look I'm not in the real world. Who would move the men low part If they were in the real world wouldn't do it and And But that's what we do we have a we we have a very deliberate organized process by which we try to Look back and take stock of what we've been up to and where we've been Make sense of the moment that we are currently in and then try to think about where to go in our grant-making and the like We're about to do that, you know, we are Almost as soon actually we're already getting started with it before we're really done with the work in what we have called deeper learning right One of the things I've been on record Literally walking in the door at Hewlett was to say look We've got to think about our agenda around learning and our agenda around open as Moving toward each other. I went back in chat with Mike and said am I missing anything here? And he said no It's always been about learning That's where we started But of course As we got into this we didn't know exactly where we were headed with this Um, Mike by the way was the last person at Hewlett. I would argue Referred to me as sort of a gun slinger. He could just throw money wherever he wanted to and just kind of see what happens, right? New president shows up and sitting Doing any more of that we got to have our outcomes and our goals and our strategies and Hewlett became known for something called outcomes based philanthropy and That's when we really zeroed in okay. What exactly is it? We're trying to do How exactly are we going to go about it? What will be the strategies we pursue to achieve those things? And how will we know if we have and that's what these strategy refreshes are built To create this kind of profound logic around around the work And Mike said It was important to get at these questions of Build infrastructure it mattered To try to build the capacity To license and govern You know what it means to be open we have to work on building a community And establish trust And relationships and all of that Hewlett has kind of worked diligently on over over 16 years or so There's more work there for us to do we're not gonna drop the ball on infrastructure or Field building or any of that, you know, don't worry But I do want us To return To this question of to what in For what purpose? And how do we use what I think this community in many ways is uniquely built to work on Kind of really find out how to make a difference on the learning frontier the Demographics in this country have changed markedly Which takes me to my third story. I'm on another committee on another panel This one is working on Trying to build a set of equity indicators For the nation Remarkable how much harder that is to do Then the committee thought When we got together we thought all this will be a piece of cake There are all these big longitudinal national data sets out there Technology and digitalization has actually made it easier to store Manipulate and report the facts Boy were we wrong? Well, I mean all of those things are true all of those things are true But the conclusion we reached midway through our deliberations was that if we couldn't come up with an indicator system that People could actually do something with What would be the point? Let me say that one more time Very frustrating To come up with lots of indicators of things For which there's no evidence About how you would intervene Once we placed that burden on our process Thinking about indicators got way harder Because there's a lot of noise There's a lot of Debate and there's a competition of ideas about How to get better learning outcomes for young people We're swimming in data that shows glaring stratification by race and income to some degree by gender Immigration status and the rest language but The knowledge base around how to close those gaps and break the links between circumstance and Outcomes is lumpy and pretty thin And again We found ourselves in a conversation about teaching and learning and Then a conversation about what we know about the effects for instance of curriculum and It points to this gap. We need to close in the open community around even more evidence on efficacy We're gonna try on My watch in the little bit of a way that we can to close that gap, but the further we get away From The norm Further we get away in K-12 at least from reading and math In the early grades The less we know Not zero, but the less we know and so we've just got to really dedicate ourselves to bringing more evidence to bear and I think the thing we know for sure is That stand and deliver sort of like I'm doing now. How much time do I have I've got to get through with this, right? Thank you, am I That's way too much time I can do this Further we get away from from the kind of standard pedagogy the less we know and yet Standard pedagogy is the very thing that's not getting us where we need to Yeah It's the very end. So I think This is a moment Where the folks in this room and the community of which you are a part need to lean in on really Experimenting and demonstrating How open practice and pedagogy And it can make a big difference for kids So Jess I'm gonna do what David didn't do I'm from Lansing, Michigan Hey Must be some mission. I should have asked Let me let me find out who's here. It's what my comms person said to do Big mistake why she's not here Who who's in higher ed, I just want to see who who lives in higher ed here Wow Most of you Who who works in the K-12 world a small but vocal Presence it's good to see this is good to see so I grew up in Lansing, Michigan My dad Was a union guy He was a shop committee man in at the Osmobile plant and ultimately he became the education director of Region 1c, right? my mother Was an elementary school principal Well, actually she was a teacher right for many years and Then she became a principal down parenthetically that's when the labor management argument started to surface at the kitchen table right boy but And I was the oldest of three kids and I developed early on a reputation I don't know why for being argumentative I was the guy who would sort of Debate the facts When the facts didn't seem to be going my way, you know weren't in my favor, right? I didn't just do this at home. I had a way of doing it at school and There were some contexts in which that helped me but most of them know not not so much and I thought that if I could Take the facts that have been presented Put a rival argument on the table Question people if isn't there more than one way to think about this I Didn't have the term handy at the time. This was a long time ago not going to say how long ago it was But it was sort of like deeper learning All right, I was trying to use the information available sort of think my way around the problems um Recruit other people to my point of view Some people called me a politician I Did win the race for a homecoming king in high school twice I was the Representative the student representative on the board of education Twice right, so there was something going on here, but often it was not received. Well, it was underappreciated And my style did not comport with the kind of order an organization in the typical classroom and So oddly My GPA was lumpy You know, there were I was good in civics But man the further away you got from civics and social studies the rockier things got for me Because I just wasn't sort of towing the line. I Yeah, I actually flunked Jim You know How can you do that? I went I I went the problem. I went I went and This question of how can you do that was the question that my dad asked me he said, how could you do that? You and the problem was I had a lot to say to the gym teacher. I think was the problem Right, you know like I don't want to do those push-ups. How about sit-ups, right? You know that kind of thing but I think we're at a moment with this new diverse majority in this country Where if we can't Move off of the standard design to dramatically different ways of engaging young people Dramatically different ways of bringing the information and content to them ways of engaging them more fundamentally in the Experience and use of it These big gaps these stubborn and Unrelenting patterns so Correlated With circumstance they just won't move It is not Just a K-12 issue This is fundamentally about the connections between higher education and K-12 I remember at Temple The achievement gap I had there Was substantially with women in man We couldn't get or we didn't want to Get a set of young women Who we had failed for the first time in their secondary school experience past praxis one Praxis one it was about an eight grade achievement level in Mathematics it was a explanation for why the enrollment in elementary education in my college was full of women they were Avoiding the math requirements. I Went over to the math department asked the chair of the math department to take the test paid him to take it Because I wanted him To come back and tell me Whether or not the test was worth passing and if it was what changes in the experience He would recommend Then I tried hard. This is the life of the deed to get my own faculty to take the test Don't ask the faculty to take tests. Oh My god That's the worst thing you but you know I was this was early in my deanship, right and I said hey the test isn't gonna go away and The president of the university is not gonna blame the math department if our students can't pass this test And we have an obligation to our students To help pull that off guess what we had to do we had to open things up We had to create our own content That met our students where they were and were out from there With the kind of scaffolding and support so we could change the distribution of achievement In our of our own graduates if we couldn't do that We were gonna be sending teachers Into Philadelphia Not well prepared to work with a population of kids there Who had very little going for them you think about the zip codes Around temples campus it would have been like the blind leading the blind So we're at a moment quite frankly in this country where Thinking about these two systems as ships passing in the night that we have we just got a change that and So all of us who are working on the post-secondary side Got to engage the folks this this there's a small group of them. They feel like right in here Right on the K-12 side to see if together We can't change this distribution I have one asked I meant to tell you that at the beginning Because I think of my ten minutes is just about up, right? I'm very optimistic About things being open we're already there It's gonna go that way there's some things to worry about along the way We should gotta figure out how to work with ed tech people and the publishers We can't You know because they just got too much money. They're not going away, right got to figure that out The other thing we got to do is We have to worry a little bit about the intramurals sport in our community You know we are Words matter positions and stances matter. I'll probably take some that you guys should Rough me up about over time But my point is the more we argue in public big arguments in public about small things That's not help. That's not helping But the big ask I have for you Let me pause You know I should pause there because there's no reason you should clap for anything else. I've had to say but But that's the big arguments about small things is confusing And it doesn't help us see the larger prize, right? That's a really important thing Happens in the Academy all the time But here's the ask I think at the end of the day the thing that's going to make the biggest difference for us is if we could open up the community a bit more and We could get Me pause on that. Yeah, pause on that if we could open the community up a bit more The potential for us To generate a fact That would really change The state of affairs is unlimited If I had more time I'd tell you about this self study I'm working on now around issues of civic learning and participation We're at a moment where young people I worry a lot about Whether we can even argue the fact whether we can discern fact from fiction and Whether unless we're using our devices we can even get in a room together to talk about stuff, right if We could just open this community up and Bring more diverse players and voices and actors into yet bring more cultural relevance and Diversity into the content That's going to have a Multiplier effect on our ability to engage young people up and down the system It's going to have a multiplier effect on our ability to sustain what we're up to It will extend our reach In ways that are irreversible and so I just ask You to work with us on Coming up with strategies that would give rise To that. I'm over my time. Well, maybe not this clock says I'm good I'm going to yield the balance of my time We need the balance of my time to jazz So she can use slides, you know and visual Bring you some facts But I so appreciate you're hearing me out I look forward to spending time with you As much as I can while I am here But then I have got to return to Menlo Park because After a year of trying to convince my wife that she could actually join me out in California She did Like two weeks ago. She did Someone needs to applaud that I mean somebody come on somebody My god Lord that but she told me She said Kent You know the last time you moved me It was to Atlanta a strange pattern developed you Next thing I know we moved from Philadelphia to Atlanta and suddenly every two weeks I was in DC New York City in Philadelphia Other places each she said keep what why in the world did you move me down here? If you were just gonna spend all your time back up on the East Coast So I said well, I just who knew But it will not happen again She has a memory been married 35 years. So You're somebody I should applaud that too for crying out loud So she says all right. I'm gonna separate from my pediatric practice I'm gonna put Distance between me and my grandson Alexander and I'm gonna come to Menlo Park And we're gonna move into a little box You know, that's like a you know Atlanta Menlo Park Right I'm moving into the box, but you sure and heck better not start traveling on me again Like you did when we moved to Atlanta and I looked at my calendar And I said that darn David. Why did I agree to this? Every week between now and Thanksgiving I got somewhere to be So I got to go back to Menlo Park tomorrow afternoon Because my poll numbers are low Pulled up with a dropping right and so I got to work on that But I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna be here I'm gonna learn as much as I can from you while I'm here and thank you all very much It is 9 15, which is when I was supposed to be done. I appreciate it