 I'm just going to wait until everybody is seated before we get our final session underway. And as everybody has now arrived, please do take your seat. And I'm going to hand you over to Vivian and David in a moment to share lightning excitement, which I have to say you really deserve given that you are resisting the combined temptation of sunshine and either caffeine or beer. So I think you deserve a lot of credit for being here. As you know, we support the conference as an association each year. And I wanted to give one of our trustees and president of our moment to give some special thanks. Thanks, man. So I'm just going to keynote now, no, I'm not here. Yes. I'd say the OR conference is probably my favorite conference. It's kind of got a really good vibe. It's great people. And I always like the settings, but that stuff doesn't happen by accident. I'd like to welcome the all team on the stage and I'd like to give a really well organized conference. Thank you, everyone. All the hard work. And I think Harry did most of the work. Thank you. So thank you very much. We'll all be busy behind the scenes while you enjoyed the rest of OER 18. But together with my colleagues, it was a real pleasure to host you. And I think we're ready now to take our seats ourselves and hand over to David and Vivian for the lightning OER plenary. Please give them a very warm welcome. Thank you very much. Oh, sorry. Let me know organizers. We're actually really delighted to introduce just this last little section of the conference which has utterly been awesome, hasn't it? And what's doubly exciting is we wanted to leave it open and to reflect some of the newer voices within the community and people to share ideas. And I'm really just so overjoyed to have the people come forward that have come forward. So we've got four lightning talks, actually. And there's also going to be a hashtag where, as with last year, we had the I Will thingy. We can share our pledges, our commitment to open on Twitter afterwards, which I'm sure we'll all do. So I don't think we've got the first slide, Martin, or do I? Yay! Without further ado, I'd really, really love to introduce one of our PhD students from the community from Mauritius. He's going to quickly introduce himself. And Preeti is going to just give a lightning five minutes of some of the whole work and what she thinks about the community. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I really like this concept of saying what you feel like about, because this is simply where at the same time. First of all, I'm very grateful for being here. I'd like to thank the organizing committee, and especially Marin for organizing all this, and she's been really awesome. My presence at the conference is the first time here. My tennis is OER 18 conference, and I'm not regretted at all, especially because I've been able to read a lot about what's happening internationally about OERs and open educational practices. But coming here just makes a whole lot of difference, because it actually tells you what are the issues that people do talk about, but not what's not written actually at times. It makes a real difference in that way. Secondly, what I think this conference has brought to me is in terms of personal experience. There's been a lot of interaction, and I was so happy to hear all the keynote speeches. They were also wonderful. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time to meet a lot of people, but that's what you do when you have two days only and you have to rush back home because you've got a lot to do. So the thing is, with a conference like this, it's not only about OERs, it's not about OEPs actually only. It's about societies, it's about context, it's about people. And I think that if we have to promote OERs, it's about betting also on this argument. What are we doing with people, to people, and along with people when we meet them back in our home country? So that's a powerful question, probably, that is going to be at the back of my mind when I go back home. Not only because I'm a fervent advocate of what humanity comes in for first, what community represents first, but also because I'm very much interpretivist by nature and I like to represent the context first. And I think that I've said it before in one of my speeches I had earlier and I think that if we have to forward the agenda of OERs across countries, irrespective of every different context, we have to respect those context first. It's not about pushing an agenda, it's about pushing humanity first. And here comes the argument. How can OER help communities develop? How can OERs help be institutions, be teachers, be advocates and researchers? What does that happen? Then next thing I'd probably like to highlight is the value of young voices coming from the global south. I was happy when I came here at the first year at the registration desk. There was this book that was on the table actually. So I have a chapter in that, chapter eight, if you want to go and look at what the chapter is all about. But it really represents again the context because that was a research that was done with Mauritius as a context, Rwanda and also Tanzania, and it was done with collaboration with the people from the Open University UK. That was a great project. And I had the opportunity to work with them. That was great as well. Probably the next thing is about teachers. Unfortunately, what I feel about probably we talk less and less about is the teacher's voices. And I think probably this is what we can do a little bit more of. When we talk about open educational resources, those people who are concerned first is the teachers and they are there fighting, struggling every day. And not only about technology, because that's just a massive agenda and everybody talks about technology, but it's also because teachers black in their classroom fight a lot against the system at times because they are told to do this, do that, do that. And I think not sufficiently we haven't been able probably to just address that. So this is one of my takeaways. Some of the issues that I've been listening to, some of the wonderful conversations I've been having with people, I thank you all for giving me this opportunity to just be here and at the same time interact with so many of you. So I have a lot of takeaways in my bag, actually. A lot of them. And as I say, the best one is actually the human interaction that we've had and I take forward the issues for so many reasons. I hope back we're home. I'm going to share back all this and it's not going to be the first conference. I hope there'll be more. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. So that was actually three and not five minutes. Thank you pretty. If for your insight, you're absolutely right about the place and the voice of teachers a problem, not only within the community of content, but in the kind of wider education policy. We need to spend more time listening to teachers voices and I'm glad you've had chance to contribute your own voice and to listen to voices here at the conference. So thank you for a great reflection. Really appreciate that. So next up we have Marshall McLewitt. No, we don't. That would be a coup, wouldn't it? But even better. Next up we have Taskine Adam, who is going to share us five minutes of reflections and thoughts about the conference. So hi everyone. I'm a PhD student at the University of Cambridge and I'm from South Africa. So the first thing I want to say is thank you to all the speakers who spoke throughout this conference. You guys are so thought provoking. It was really incredible. And really a big, big thank you to the conference organizers. You guys put a lot of work into this. Now I offered to give this rapid fire session after Dr. Mamouda Salli's keynote yesterday as it inspired me so much. So to give you a bit of background about myself, about my research, I look into digital neocolonialism, MOOCs, and how they can support the most marginalized. Now Mamouda Salli, David Wiley and Lona Campbell strongly shaped this conference, at least to me, to be about including the marginalized voices and sort of adding onto that theme or feeding into the open to all. And I wanted to add a bit more to that theme, particularly on the topics of values and morals and particularly in line with this code for Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. Now as we have mentioned many times already in this conference, education is a socially, politically and culturally mediated project. And thus, so is online education. Now this idea of the medium is the message. It's about technological determinism and that is that technology actually shapes and modes society and its values rather than the other way around. Now this coupled with globalization and neoliberalism creates quite a strong powerful force. As OERs from the global north penetrate through communities globally, so do western value sets to the extent that they become the value set. Where local, cultural and religious values are often given second place, if they fit in at all. Now this is very similar to Onguki Watyonga's notion of colonization of the mind that Dr. Saleh spoke about yesterday. And an example of this value differences would be that for example in western societies there's a very strong focus on human rights and the rights of the individual. Whereas in other philosophies such as Islamic philosophy and many other traditions, it's more about human duties and what is your duty to others. And so it's just these small little twists that really change perspectives on things. Now I wanted to give one example from this book I'm reading called Foundations of African Thought. And it actually resonates a lot with Nick Baker's presentation today about the aboriginals and the first nation communities. Now in this book it talks about how in ancient African societies there was ten years to prove that they were ethically and morally capable of receiving specialized knowledge. Now this is so much different from today where morality holds no place in receiving knowledge but rather it's one socio-economic status that determines the quality of knowledge that one will receive. Another quick example, sorry this is turning into a show and tell session but another quick example I wanted to show you is this game called African Legends. I met the founder of it at a conference recently and basically he creates African heroes from African mythology as well as real-life African heroes and if you think about it this type of game embraces the African value system so rather than having a game that's top-down from MIT labs let's look at the local cultural values that we can include when we designing technologies. So I don't want to take too much of your time but I want to leave you with one take-home message and that is in the age of global communities and global citizenship we must be wary of who decides the universal values morals and social norms embedded into our open content we must be wary of who these values privilege and who they oppress. Thank you. I'm not really sure how to follow that that was incredible thank you so much Taskin amazing reflection teasing out a lot of the themes of the three keynotes that we've seen and other presentations at the conference highlighting it is essential that we listen and we respect all of the voices all of the cultural content both that are already in this room already in this community of practice and those outside of which that we would love to reach out to to become involved and to become a more inclusive and a better community so that's hugely powerful stuff thank you very very much for that thank you again next up is Javieria Hi everyone, thank you for letting me speak for a little bit what I want to do today is to extend your invitation I know that if I ask how many of you do ed tech loads of hands will be raised in here so how many of you do ed tech how many of you do civic tech hey okay so what I want to do today is to invite you to get out of the classroom work together as a community and become civil society go and argue to your government to get open education into governmental strategies be part of your national commitments be part of your national election plans open education matters matters to everyone and it should be part of the open government partnership national action plans how can you do that look at the co-creation standards join the civil society or start the discussion again amongst the civil society start an open education forum within the national open government partnership agenda in your own country design an action plan draft your commitments think about what you want to do design an action plan a policy strategy join the policy forum think about taking the value of your community of the group of people that you work with into a more strategic political action Slovakia is already getting a commitment in the open government partnership with Romania, Chile if you want advice and if you want to think about how you can embed your national strategies or even your political strategies as part of the national agendas please talk to the great Nicole Allen she's been doing great job with open government partnership with Vatna Vestamam from Chile they managed to get a commitment on civic education through open educational resources for the Chilean action plan Jan Gondel from Slovakia I'm happy to help too so if any of you want to think about how to take openness I mean open data open science, open access and open educational resources and open educational practices outside of the lecture theater outside of your own institution and you want to make openness a civic duty and you want to foster participation think about joining the civil society hope to see you in Georgia and the GDP summit this July if you are around the South American region international open data conference will be held in Buenos Aires so you're all welcome and actually there is also Abre la Tam so hope to see you around join all the conference join the other sectors join the other open movements and we hope that in a couple of years we'll see more national commitments like Romania, Greece or Chile that's a real call to action for all of us, I think what connected a lot of the speakers that I got a lot from and our three keynotes is that this is people that have done stuff this is people that have actually gone out there beyond the confines of academia and have made an active practical difference in the world and from Javira someone I've known for a long time in her writing and from Javira we have an invitation and a challenge to all of you to step up there and to do some stuff quite frankly so thank you again Javira so last up because we'd like to be diverse in this conference we thought we'd like to get a white middle-aged guy from North America so he's somebody I didn't say old you said old so this is somebody who's been around this community and shaping the community for such a long time has done a lot of the background work the underpinnings, the plumbing has probably taught at least half of this room how to use WordPress and have probably fixed at least 90% of those people's installs of WordPress when they have gone horribly wrong and set the settings in some stupid way that we weren't meant to do so so somebody who already gives a lot to the community I'd like to welcome Alan Cogdog-Lovine thank you okay do you have my PowerPoint? it's only 25 slides I'm really excited to be here especially to follow up Preeti and Teskeen and Javira three people I've never met before first of all we started this conference with a VHS tape and we're ending with these talks that no one has planned so I think we're working good on the edges of the conference I like that because I get kind of bored at conferences okay I'll get to that in a second the middle was great but I went to OER 14 and I really liked the vibe and the people I got to go there I came away feeling that it was a really human run conference and it was even more this year where's Marin? anytime you write to a conference you feel like you're writing to some monolith machine like edu-calls or something like that and you get a response from a person but it often doesn't feel very human and I really want to thank Marin and Martin and everybody for running this as a really human conference and so I got a couple like what I thought were weird requests and they were all yes responses and that's so refreshing in some of these times I also was thinking I thought I'd talk a little bit about splots because there was a joke there but the other part is the thing I liked about OER 14 really were the people that I knew and some met for the first time and when this conference came around first of all some of my best friends in the world were running it so it's just like yeah I'm going to go and I'm just going to pay my way there and so I don't work for anybody but it's worth it to make a trip to this kind of conference for the people and a lot of people I've known for short long periods of time but then as I'm like looking at the audience now it's like I still don't know a lot of people here but it's still a very human scale conference and that's what I want to go to and I my favorite session was the one that was this morning with Laura Richie and her students with the ukuleles and so you guys missed out on a really wonderful there were no slides but we made music and we talked about learning and I've really been aching for a kind of conference experience where that was like not one session out of the norm but all of them and sometimes I just wonder if we can get out of this presentation mode as I'm presenting or whatever I'm doing here and if anybody can do it it's probably this group and then it all gets me thinking about some of the conversations that we had at Coventry with Daniel and his group and some of these things I'm not mentioning OERs themselves I'm not talking about textbooks I'm not talking about licenses I'm not mentioning those right now I just said them but those things like like the stuff we do like at the personal and human level connections and getting to meet people and having the conversations out here on the tables and at lunch and standing in line waiting for our sandwiches I mean those are really valuable and I always think like we work really well at the human level and then when things go to the organizational institution level it gets really bogged down for some reason and so like I wonder about that kind of dilemma but then at the same time every time I learn about something from the University of Edinburgh I'm like that place is amazing still again at the bottom they say our default is open and that's like radical and that's the way things should be so follow those guys if anything that we do and girls I'm sorry I was just seeing if I get a response out of the girls you have much better shoes than me by the way but just in general like this stuff should be human and as reclaimed shows it should be fun like why aren't we having as much fun as possible and have excitement about this work we do and like you know after a moment I'm like I'm thinking about drying fruit on my patio and like how we can do things low tech for good purpose and you know I'm sure I mean this is the group that's going to do it I guess the challenge is like everybody who's outside this room and so you know we hope to see 19 in some place are we going to find that out so thank you very much Alan from that low tech stuff that works sounds a bit like fast cheap and out of control as somebody once said I can't remember who that all was it was probably David Wiley so I mean again the strengths of the community the connections that have been made here I look out here we look out here as conference coaches a lot of people we didn't know before the start of this conference a lot of people were glad and pleased to have met and just shared a part of our world and this amazing venue and this amazing space so thank you very much for those reflections and long may this conference continue thank you and it just remains to say from us thank you so much I must say thanks to the committee who are almost as extensive in number as the audience these days so many people want to get involved with helping shape this event thank you to all of you and you really really did help impact and shape what we thought this conference should be of course I could stand if the next hour just thanking the Association of Learning Technology what an astonishing group of people to work with I mean that from my heart and Marron you've kept me on an even keel yeah life was kind of going a bit crazy and thank you so much to everyone I'll say no more because I'll start crying but the last thing to say is we can all leave some pledges on the social network there using this hashtag what might we do different what are we going to contribute so please feel free to use the hashtag as you go home and I think is that all we need to say now wait a moment most important people we have not thanked yet so please put your hands together for our co-chairs there is a little extra thing when she says the most important people we she was lying basically it was fake news so could we have as many of the old team can be spared up here please that as unfortunately just me right now it's just you right now well in that case I'm going to give you five bags of stuff for everybody right this person we will definitely distribute presents we will pass these on there are presents for the team at all but I mean once again a big thank you to the team at all and to the venue team thank you to both so we leave you this challenge inspired by Vivian and David's OER18 it's a very enlightening idea and we hope that you will start tweeting now what's electrified your world this year with us at OER18 I'm not going to repeat anything because each of you has made a difference and those of us who have sponsored contributed in other ways have as well I hope we've met our motto open to all and this is the time when we look at not just making commitment for this conference but for the next year to come and see what we have to look forward to so I'd now like to invite onto the stage a very special preview of OER19 coming up next year so please put your hands together for Catherine Cronin Laura Charnovic oh this is such a joyful moment thank you very much it was also a really difficult secret to keep on behalf of Laura but I just want to say thank you to Alt and the Alt team for working with us inviting us first of all and working with us to talk about what OER19 could be and I just have a few things that I want to say about the theme that we've been working on putting together I really view this conference very much obviously it's a community but it also seems like this ongoing conversation and Lorna you did such a fantastic job of talking about the whole history of the conference but even I've been coming since OER15 and even from those years there was a strong critical strand of work at OER16 for example that was carried forward into OER17 which was the politics of open and then those conversations last year about inclusivity and diversity and voices that are being left out and included and not included came forward this year into open for all and so what we hope to do next year is create a space where those conversations can continue in April next year as they will obviously all year but I think in thinking about a theme for the conference we have all practiced openness and we've all learned a lot from our mistakes and from what we've done and what we've seen others do and it feels like we're very much at a time of moving moving beyond and kind of moving beyond limited perspectives perhaps moving beyond hero narratives moving beyond narratives that don't serve don't serve us adequately and by us I mean humanity not just the people in this room so our our do the next slide yes that's our theme our theme is re-centering open critical and global perspectives which amazingly it just seems to fall very naturally from everything that has happened here over the last couple of days so you know that's why that should be a surprise I don't know it's wonderful I think and we there's a bit of ambiguity in this title which we think is a good thing but we are thinking ourselves about re-centering our conversations and our practices and perhaps our definitions on the actual experiences of people in different contexts particularly people who have been left out of the narrative for a long time and particularly left out of the dominant narratives of open and perhaps even been marginalized by the dominant narratives so we are really excited about working with Marin and Martin all of all this community and these are very much just gestures towards questions that we hope will be addressed at the conference this is just a start of a conversation if you like so these are some of the things that motivated us to kind of come up with that theme and work with you know very many of you over the next while to kind of identify particular specific themes of the conference and as I said just continue that conversation and just as I said we're not doing anything but creating space hopefully we don't know where the conference will be we are making a bid from Galway so that could happen and but we don't know yet so but anyway on behalf of Laura and myself we're so delighted and honored so thank you that was the end but as you're all sitting here I feel we should say goodbye formally I hope this has inspired you clearly OER 18 has been so wonderful that no one wants to leave but on behalf of everyone involved and particularly David and Vivian and all the organizing committee I wish you very safe travels and that your journeys may converge again maybe in Galway but definitely at OER 19 thank you very much