 Hello and welcome back here to the last live session before the karaoke at the winter conference. I'm really delighted to introduce this session and in a moment I'm going to ask you all to hopefully put your virtual hands together to welcome our two presenters, Therese and Therese. Hello you two, fantastic to have you with us. I have to say I'm so excited about the session because we have a very long tradition of having open education special interest group sessions as one of the highlights of our winter conference and I was saying this morning in the welcome that we've toasted marshmallows over campfires and we're looking forward to having everybody join us for this last session today. I know that you're already in raring to go so without further ado I'm going to hand over to you. Thanks very much Maron and I'm delighted to be here this afternoon with my colleague Therese who's also an open ed seg committee member and what we're going to do today is really just run through a very different event that we decided to try out recently and talk a little bit about why we did it and how we did it and Therese and I between us will have a conversation around that experience and share some of the resources with you and we'd really welcome your feedback on this approach. The open ed seg traditionally has always hosted expert webinars if you like on a particular open education topic whether it's open source or values of open education we have recorded those webinars and then made them available through our website. Maron will be able to share our website link with you in the chat there so you can visit it if you've never visited us before and we decided to do something a little bit different so here we're just a quick reminder that those of you who are with us please do introduce yourselves in the chat and if you have any questions you can pop them in the chat and we'll have a few moments at the end of the session to address those and again this session will be recorded as usual. So why did we decide to make a change to our usual way of working if you like within the special interest group on open education? Well we had a conversation amongst the committee we're a small committee but a very active and committed committee and as a result of getting together and as a result of some suggestions from other members of the committee we thought about changing things a little bit so I think I just summarized and Therese feel free to add anything else that I've forgotten here some of the rationale for trying a different space and a different approach for the coming year in open edsig so we decided that the pivot online particularly over the last year or so and the conditions that we've been living through due to the pandemic really led to us rethinking bringing people into webinars we kind of were all feeling a bit webinared out yeah a sentiment that I think we identified with we're also aware that the demands of the pivot were actually a little bit of an opportunity for open education an opportunity to reach out to people who perhaps hadn't thought along the lines of using OER or producing and sharing their own material openly and that required connecting to newbies collecting connecting to people who may be interested and want to know more about open practice and open practice had been a focus for the sig for a little while and thirdly we really felt that it was important that people felt safe in that sort of environment where perhaps they're talking about open practice and that in itself can be quite controversial within institutions and I know Therese has some great examples of this where it can be ethically very difficult to navigate open practice and so we thought maybe it would be nice to have a safe space where people who could people could join anonymously and and just ask questions and reach out and find connections so Therese is there anything else I anything I've missed or anything you can um yeah I just know I agree and I would just like to um sort of highlight the this this need for a safe space it's it's kind of funny because you wouldn't think you know but I guess open education is it's a little political and maybe a lot political and and kind of the kind of struggles that we've been going through in higher education with the pivot online other kinds of education as well it's you can't necessarily talk about it with everybody so and if you need some help and you just need to try something if you'd like to try something else it's good to be able to find someone who kind of knows what the issues could be or could at least understand the you know the reticence you might have about speaking openly about some of these things so yeah I mean a couple of folks that we met that day are on Twitter but but privately you know so um you know so the tweets aren't even open so things even things like that I I realized that it's really good to to be sensitive to that and you know make a space for that yeah absolutely and and it's it is so important when people feel vulnerable to provide spaces um to support them I think that was a very much a part of the thinking um so from there we went through a sort of process that involved Therese and I and Deb Barth and others on the committee getting together when as and when we could to have a chat chat about what sort of spaces could we look at and and how could we facilitate this and how could it go forward and Deb was very quick to put forward um a couple of suggestions of spaces so we then did some testing um and we planned an event which we published on our website and pushed out through the gisk mail to see if people were interested um we did some sharing and some follow-up for queries and we shared a google doc for the event and again Marin will be able to pop that link in in the chat for you to see um it was at the time an open editable google doc and it sort of traces the beginnings of the process um the topics that we chose for this open house event which was a very different event as I mentioned from our earlier event and and the idea here was that we would have a record of um the nature of the queries and questions that were posed and also the resources that were shared during the get together I think it's fair to say Therese that we had no idea what sort of take up we would have we had no idea whether this would be a large event or not we really even in the sort of testing context we didn't really know um whether the uh the the site that we were using would contribute and help us achieve our aims it was you know we we felt it might but we didn't really know very clearly whether it would or not so it was very much experimental exactly I did I've just popped the um uh google doc into the chat so thank you that's great that'll share thanks for that forehands are infinitely better than two with us now as well yay wonderful because Deb was responsible for um bringing a couple of these different um environments to our notice and suggesting that we try these out um and one of those was um uh an interface called wonder uh and uh that was the one that we decided to proceed with there was a gather town was was mentioned and others were mentioned as well I think Deb's got a wide knowledge of of different platforms um so Deb Deb's tell us a little bit about you know why you thought that this that might be a sort of suitable place a starting point if you like a suitable platform for this different type of open ed sig oh yeah I mean I think really the idea behind it was um to give some people somewhere different really to come and kind of inhabit it and this has been a bit of a theme for me this week because um we had the sock med he um conference yesterday which was actually in gather town um um you know I've got to say having experienced that I I found that really really great um and I think wonder has the same kind of um you know approach to it I think perhaps I just didn't maybe use it properly having said that you know um I think the fact that it's kind of almost merges the the the different tools that people are used to using these days um and you know lots of these there's lots of these different platforms around but the fact that you know you can kind of bumble bumble along with your avatar all over the screen and then um accidentally stand on someone's head as I I see quite a lot which I didn't mean to but it kind of brings back that serendipitous um water cooler type moment that you would get in normal sort of face-to-face conferences really I suppose that's what we were kind of aiming for absolutely it would be really great really took and obviously it's not recorded we didn't record it or anything like that it was just to give people that's that safe space and you know the idea being that you could have lots of different rooms or tables or that kind of thing for that kind of conversation so um yeah if you're interested as well I was going to say check out the um the sock med one because that I think they put some resources out on that as well so sorry I was just no I was just going to say the thing I liked about it was um yeah it was a bit silly because because you had to kind of move your avatar over to other people because you couldn't hear the conversation unless you were closer just like in a real face-to-face gathering and I was like yay back to it felt kind of like back to face-to-face but then I was like having trouble with my mouse and I was like wait a minute I can't get can't get over there but then but it didn't matter because everybody was like that and you got there in the end and um and then I love the fact that you could do a tannoy announcement yes you know that was cool I mean that also gave us a feeling of like presence together yeah yeah and I think the kind of you know having that um those kind of issues is the wrong word but you know having to work through those yeah those things kind of gave you a catalyst really for talking and you know making it we're all kind of in this together and all that kind of things so in terms of social presence and all that kind of stuff I thought it really really had legs you know um so yeah I I think completely agree with you and and you know mouse in the wrong place and you know all sorts of things so it was a great fun issues with my with the screen size and things as well I couldn't read people's names so I was having to remember who was who but it was lovely to be able to sort of bubble around that space and go and meet other people and yeah but with my sort of chair hat on I was concerned before we started that there may be um if it complains sorry cat had to come into a window life goes on love it concerns about sort of accessibility and concerns about people feeling um oh this is an unusual space I don't know what to do here feeling a little bit um and and so it really as we did the testing and as we talked about it we talked about okay well how how can we address some of these things um and what I was so proud of and I haven't even had the chance to feed back to the rest of the team on this but what I was so proud of was that everybody within the committee and and also the people that came were very supportive of each other and you know if you saw somebody come in and you saw that bubble floating down they would go and sort of round that person up they'd go and get close to that person so they could hear them and say follow me or bring them to the conversation um and I think that welcome and I know you know that hospitality aspect of open practice which is something that Mahabali has talked about in the past um was put in action in a very real way yeah I care isn't it that whole yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean I have nicely with your phd actually well funny you should say that just notice that nice segue in there no I was just I was just going to comment that um back in the day when um I used to go into second life I went in there about a year ago um you know and and that one was like kind of full on you were some you were someone different everyone else looked different and that one was definitely like scarier I mean I personally didn't really find it that scary but sometimes people did because there was a lot that you had to do um and like you know you could like I don't know like you know lose your shoes or other parts of your clothing without knowing that you click that you know um so nothing like that in wonder me or I guess no yeah that's fine you know yeah um so it was personal you know personal and personable but not like to any sorts of scary extent no that's right and you've reminded me actually of something that occurred to me when Deb was talking earlier about um the serendipity of these different situations um I was a second life and still and now and again I'm a second life user and whenever I teleported my hair would fly off and I'd turn up in places bald and have to wait for my hair to arrive and it's kind of there was just something about that that just made me laugh and made you know it broke the sort of panic and anxiety of an environment that's actually very media rich and and quite challenging as you say you know a lot of menus to check and a lot of things to to take on board yeah so having fun playing so Deb very kindly provided us with a few images here after sort of checking with people that they were okay in sharing this it's interesting that we said to people you're anonymous in this space but they still chose to put their names in as they came in fine um but perhaps as you can see there the background there I went with was a sort of troubled ocean because it kind of felt that that's where we'd been over the last year and a year or so um sort of thrown in at the deep end and looking for two others for help and trying to um establish um a way forward um and literally as you drag yourself into these bubbles we had little areas within that image that were themed around meeting around the e-books sos discussion um a general chat uh talking about links and link rot and talking about copyright and IP so we had these spaces and only when you are in one of those spaces near to the people having a conversation do your um your video does your video feed show up and then you can see the real faces of the real people rather than the bubbles floating around um we also had uh obviously one big shared space that we could come into and we came into at the end it was really good to see people though I know Myron will recognize many of the people here but really good to see people who don't usually engage with the open ed sig um coming and we had some really fruitful discussions I think with the e-books sos people as well um and then the second image on that slide is an illustration of the sort of broadcast um so at the top the top right hand side of the higher image the fourth icon down you can see a sort of lectern and if you use that lectern it sends a message to everyone in the environment that a broadcast is going to start it's only a very short one but it brings everybody together and everybody can hear that so that's really useful for sort of announcements and drawing everything together so if you're not familiar with wonder.me or wonder me um that's what it looked like a lot of happy faces um which is good and in that document if you've seen it you may have seen it already um we also collected some feedback from participants um so I just included those in this slide guys if you've got anything um you want to comment on there I think we've sort of alluded to most of these but please do um or you know I think um I think that my kind of take home from from it is that you really need something really low stakes to kind of start off with you know with these things um so that people gain that bit of confidence that you know they can just wander around and press buttons and you know all of that kind of stuff and um you know I I think and anyway as I said I mentioned the SOTMED conference um because they'd obviously spent a lot of time to actually set up the environment you know and I think that was really really great the way that that was done and I think um if you know reflecting on how we did our particular one I think if we had more time to set it up we could have gone down that particular route you know and maybe done a um a little video or something for people to show them what it was like before we we started but having said that you know I think just having that capability where people could kind of drop in you know and maybe even use it for office hours all that kind of thing could be something to think about going forward so yeah I'm glad people played played with us around absolutely yeah it was great fun chasing people around the sky it really was and it was it was great to you know to see people taking that active role to make people feel at home so they didn't just come in and then disappear again many many people who joined us could couldn't stay for very long we had the session itself was probably about 40 45 minutes um but that's fine you know nobody really wants to spend hours and hours in online on top of what they're doing in their day job um so we did say didn't we as well that we were thinking that we could try lots of these different spaces out you know just to kind of have a safe space for people to come that's hard to say safe space this time of day wait fast day yeah yeah so it would be good to um to maybe ask um people who were who were kind of taking part today just you know if they're interested in coming along you know we're open to all different ideas aren't we about how we can absolutely I think another thing that was really helpful was to have um the google doc that you know anybody who came in could contribute to it like simultaneously as um you know it could be at the same time as while you're talking to people you could be just copying in an eight you know a url or something that had been mentioned um and um so that it was so like a joint document was produced just by lots of you know people from the community and I thought that was really exciting yeah definitely I totally agree and I was surprised that the google doc continued to be added to beyond the event yeah you know so you know I know you followed up with Dan and I also followed up with Dan to reach out because he hadn't been able to stay with us so we'd been one of the people who participated is from UNESCO who and was particularly interested in making contacts around open and so you know for us that was a really great opportunity to meet that person and to make that connection um and that'll be followed up obviously so I think I think the the the resounding feeling that I had at the end of the session was just one of the joy you know this was a joyful moment this was a kind of yeah oh this was something different and and um and connections were made that we hadn't made through um you know sort of webinars it was interesting as well that we had because we posted the invitation um on the on the community space we had a couple of queries there about you know how do I how do I register and because I'd been concerned about you know just putting the URL out there the link for the for the event just out there um I was then able to email those people and somehow that sort of creates a closer connection and I just hope that that sort of builds into other into other aspects of our work in open education going forward so I want to share one little video that I made I'll pop this into the chat as well um but I'll leave I'll leave it um there we go on my screen and this really was um let's just full screen this rather than sending it to the my telly which isn't going to help much I couldn't show it but my telly's the other end of the room so you're not going to see very much there um it was something that actually had occurred to me when in an LTHE chat a little while ago when we talked about bubbles or bubbles have been mentioned and we often talk I think when we talk about using technology about bubbles being a negative thing you know that people pull together in a bubble and they stay in that little bubble and they don't go outside it and so I wanted to do a very childish little experiment and you'll see it here and hopefully my screen is about yep my video is about to play back take a little while if it takes this long I'll put the link in the chat play it on your own machines my machine is going very very slowly okay let's stop my sharing and I'll put this into the chat instead because my screen is ridiculously slow and right let's put this into the chat so it literally is 10 seconds cool have a look and see what you if you think you know what I'm getting at cool doing it now they spent ages doing this for 10 seconds of video I just wish I could play with the bubbles as well I'm sending you bubbles but you got it to stick you caught it yes yes yes the power of video it was that normal bubble because you can get those bubbles with glue in it as well oh no no this was just ordinary bubbles ordinary bubbles from tiger I think and I still get them out now and again because they're fun to play with but it was there was a distant childhood memory that actually when you blow bubbles you can catch them and then link them up to other bubbles and they sort of fuse their accents people were just saying that they couldn't see the link in the chat so it was a video of um of Teresa basically blowing bubbles you know with a with a bubble um kids bubble kind of thing and um and she managed to catch a bubble so so when I put a link in the chat is that not visible to people who are joining us no I think I think only if it's done in the background so sorry Teresa I had a technical glitch I'll yeah I'll do that now absolutely thank you it's 10 seconds of bubble the bubble joy yeah let's go with bubble joy I'm very disappointed I was the only one with festive headgear you know what there you go I had mine ready here's one I prepared earlier oh yes and Yorick has come as well excellent so I don't have my festive jumper on as well so very nice very nice there we go jingle those bells so really I think what we discovered together was that actually we could take a leap of faith wouldn't it be wonderful if every platform out there was automatically accessible and easy to use for people using screen readers and everything else I couldn't find anything out unfortunately about wonder me and in that respect um but if anybody uses it please let us know because that's the sort of thing that open ed sig likes to push for that people put accessibility first and the importance really of somehow I suppose part of the pivot was that we suddenly something that we all enjoyed doing using learning technology had become a treadmill it had become a place where you know first thing in the morning you knew you got a log on you got a catch upon emails you've got to contact all the people who are struggling to use x um you you know and I know teres and deb's have both very much been you know at the at the chalk face of this and at that sort of very demanding interface where you feel pulled in so many directions and and it was just nice to rediscover that learning technology can be fun again so that you can do silly stuff and you know not dismiss it just as play being something superficial but as something that is connects us at a much deeper level and enables us to to learn from each other and make new connections make new bubbles and make bigger bubbles new bubbles yeah I'm just looking at some of these comments and um I like this was this was minutes ago Devon had said um it's a delicate process building building trust with the generation that invented the finsta for sure so the fake insta I'm glad you explained that yeah yeah yeah yeah so you know using well using the social media to sort of I don't know I wouldn't use the word stock but um it can be used to stock and that's you could say that that's what the fake insta is and so that's that's just another illustration of why it's good to have a you know um a safe space where we can say what's going on ask if anybody has had an experience like that can you suggest something can we do something new can we work together and it is important to try these things and yeah and to see maybe it's by experience isn't it that you you learn what maybe doesn't quite work well and that we know what you might want to do better and things like that so yeah yeah I think I think it's yet another wonderful um experience with my open ed sig friends and I'm I'm so privileged to be part of the group and don't forget it is an open group so you're all invited yes please join us join us through the the uh jist mail list open ed sig you'll find us on the jist mail and uh yeah just connect with us we have an open ed twitter as well open ed sig twitter account and there we go there's the link brilliant so thank you all so much and thank you to res and devs for joining me and suddenly stream yard is slightly less anxiety producing for me I've never used it before well a big thank you to all three of you it's been a really eye opening and inspiring session I really enjoyed the the bubble moment and I think it's wonderful that we've had our customary openness and warmth here for the winter conference so I know that everybody in the room appreciated it just as much as I did and put their hands together um to say a big thank you um for now I think we'll say goodbye and as the first day of our winter conference draws to a close I know that in just over an hour they'll be singing live on the internet so if you're up for a little bit of fun with Jim Groom and you're here on Emma Jane then goo join the karaoke there's options to watch and there's options to join in so I think two of you or three of you actually already have the right outfits on so I'm looking forward to seeing you there all later um I think there's one final question from Devin that we could pick up um which is how did you find the admin side creating spaces for people to float into especially in comparison to creating breakout rooms so why don't we pick up that question um before we finish up yeah sure it it was a little bit more limited in terms of the space you have you can set up rooms but actually when you well sort of spaces squares within your background visual and and to be fair I'm no expert I you know I've very much just gone in and sort of did what I needed to do sort of thing um but yeah it's kind of for me it's not the all singing all dancing collaborate ultra or zoom or whatever but it but it does do some really useful things and and just like um within an institution you know we've got rooms for different purposes it's it provided a space that was perhaps different for people interesting for people maybe broke down some of the normal barriers and uh yeah it's worth worth experimenting with I'm sure you can do more complex things we used a free version we just went with basics well Vicki commented in the comments that it sounded like a really safe and playful space and I think Kathy said sounds like a lovely group Lauren said thanks Fox just been reading info on the outside interesting investigating further so sounds like more people coming um so from all of us here at the open house session thank you again for joining us we hope you enjoyed a two of the conference and I just want to say a really big thank you to our three wonderful presenters love to you all and see you all tomorrow thanks very much