 Okay, I'd like to begin by acknowledging the land on which we gather, it's the traditional territory of the Anishinabeg and Haudenosaunee people. Today I'd like to talk to you about the ethical edges. Who's being left behind? Slipping through the cracks. Why? How do we reconcile that and what is doing enough? I'm an American. I was struck by the practice of the acknowledgment of the traditional territory at the beginning of each meeting that happens in Canada. I live in Canada now. It surprised me and it surprised me how it made me feel. I felt more connected to the land in a deeper way, tuned into indigenous history on the land and acknowledgment of that matters. Maybe even more so and more accurately than the thanksgivings we celebrate. I'm going to do things a little bit differently today. Stick with me. If at first it doesn't make sense. And let it wash over you and pay attention to what sticks. These are barnacles. So I might say something that you think, hell, yes, that's a barnacle. I might say something that upsets you. That's also a barnacle. So let it wash over you. I think remember those barnacles that stick with you because I'm terrified of awkward silences. So if we have a chat or we have time to chat, please tell me what your barnacles are. I want to tell you some stories today, and there's stories from my perspective and some from my life. I'm going to talk a lot about black culture and indigenous culture in this talk. I still question whether I'm the one to tell those stories and I'm uncomfortable with telling those stories, and I think that's where we should be at the uncomfortable place. We should talk about the discomfort. I'm telling them from my perspective and my experience of them, and I don't mean for you to compare the stories. Again, let them wash over you. So uneasy is where I'd like us to be. There are a lot of elephants in this room. Our world is ripe with inequalities, discrimination and systemic biases. The so-called playing field is not level. All men and women are not created equal. Our unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness remain in reach of only some. So we have me too. Black lives matter. Occupy. And our right to education is not universally enjoyed. Some things aren't changing. We're still very much human. Some of us are scared to say things out loud. Some of us have power. Some of us still don't have power. So how does inclusion happen in that context? Where do we see it? I argue that we see it in each of us in our intolerance for failure. So what's your tolerance for failure? What I mean by this is at what point do you, with eyes wide open, knowingly draw the line and say to yourself, this is the best I can do. That's enough. This is as much as I can do. Who can we tolerate failing? We don't ask that question very often. We often talk about who we can help. I want us to ask ourselves who we're comfortable leaving behind. The thing is we all do this. We all draw lines. We all make a determination of what level of failure we're okay with. We all do this, but we don't talk about it much. We all make decisions every day, all day long. Does anybody's phone look like this? This is speaking about an intolerance for failure. We design our fun, we design our lives, our priorities, our minimum, our maximum, our ethics, and therefore our tolerance for failure. How many design decisions did you make today? How much tolerance for failure do you possess? So this is a picture of alarms every 15 minutes on an iPhone. But this is trivial. When we make decisions that impact others, the stakes are higher and the ethical implications are enormous. So I ask you, what's your tolerance for failure in education? Shui, draw the line at race. I think Bob Casper, Laurel Trenovitz, Michael Strickland are going to talk about this today in their session, Who You Calling Racist. Shui, the draw the line of disability. Carl Nelson, Louise Perez, Lynn McCormick, Cheryl Constantini, Melanie Morris, Joshua Mitchell, Michelle Reed, tell us the stories about who we're excluding by drawing the line at accessibility and disability. Shui, we draw the line at a particular socioeconomic status. I'm pretty sure we're going to learn about this today from Jacob Jenkins, Jamie Hannans, and Jill Liefstead. When we talk about the historically underserved groups, the repeating cycles of exclusion. Shui excludes certain geographies. This is a global community. We've got a presentation on the North and South on Twitter from Terrazina Marcones and Denise Biazzi. Tell us about this relationship. I've probably murdered all your names. How should we divide up the world and decide who gets access? English speakers only, especially in North America? My dear Sylvia, Urgos Politis, Elizabeth Goodman, Cecilia Vila, Jorge Baca, Laurel Mancera, dígame las historias de los estudiantes. Tell me the stories about the students. Kent's telling a story about Lansing. The stories stick with us. I'm not going to show you data. That doesn't stick. Who's the education available to? Context has always mattered. When we talk about education, we often do it in the abstract. We're educators. We educate students. We do so in institutions of education. I want to get deeper into that. I want us to talk about the context we learn, teach, and grow in. So this is the journey I'm asking you to take with me today. The way things begin matters. This is a picture of ancient Greece. In ancient Greece, education was for wealthy men. The foundations of all thought, including ethics, excluded anyone else. Women were excluded. The poor, the middle class. Most of us say education should be available to everyone, but we know it isn't. Obviously, some progress has been made, visible when we see who has access to education now. But is it enough? Are we comfortable with 90% access? Or what about 80% access? I want to argue that while some of these questions might make us uneasy, make a squirm, we all decide where to draw the line every day, in admissions decisions, in class policies for attendance, in the cost of textbooks, in the cost of education, in our willingness to make alternative formats, in the way we talk about students, in the way we determine success. Yeah, the technical decisions we make, the decisions we make in boardrooms, and the way we talk about the people that we're working with have an impact. And it's an impact on the chance for education, their access and their exclusion. People draw the lines, the ethical lines. We always have, and we always will. And throughout history, we have on notable occasions proven ourselves to be pretty terrible line-drawers. The ancient Greeks and their wealthy men only line? Pretty sure that was a bad line. This slide is one that Jose Antonio Vargas delivered to Defiance ML. It's a shocking slide. It's upsetting to many of us. People draw these ethical lines, though, and the point of this slide is that they call them law, and they do it as acts of power over another. These are not good lines. This says, the way things begin matters, apartheid was legal, the Holocaust was legal, slavery was legal, colonialism was legal, legality is a matter of power, not justice. These are seriously bad lines. We are really bad at some other things, too. I mean, we still get causation and correlation mixed up. We think tall people are more capable than shorter folks. We're a mess of fantastic uniquenesses, gnarly biases, and a sense of being reason-driven. We're so silly. And it's dangerous. So, who's education available to? And so, let's take this journey through stories that occupy my mind, where the Lions have been in our recent past and where they are today. A few weeks ago, some of you attended the Open Education Southern Symposium in Fayetteville, Arkansas. A few hours away from Little Rock is where my parents live now. It was in Little Rock in September 1957 that the Little Rock Nine, a group of nine African American kids, enrolled in an all-white public school. The governor of Arkansas brought out the Arkansas National Guard. The president of the United States intervened and students were escorted to school by the U.S. Army. Those students were tormented, bullied, harassed for years, not for a day or two, for years. What was their educational experience like? What did they learn? In between this slide, and this is a picture of one of the Little Rock Nine, and this next slide I want you to, in your mind-imagine, Kent State. So, if you drive six hours north and a little east, you get to my hometown in northeast Missouri. I grew up not far from the Mississippi River and rural farmland. To give you a sense of the community, the local high school would often clear out, especially of young men during the harvest and at the beginning of deer season. I see some nods. And when I think about my childhood there, I think about Cliff. Twenty-three years after the Little Rock Nine, Cliff was in kindergarten with me. It was 1980, and he was the only black child in our school. In his first week of kindergarten, Cliff was called the Unward. I think about his mother who had to give Cliff the talk. I'm not talking about the birds and the bees talk. I'm talking about the one that comes much earlier than that for black boys. The one where his mother explains to him how the world sees him. I think about him in his home before school begins, reaching for his favorite hoodie sweatshirt, pausing, remembering what this culture thinks about him, and black boys and hoodies, and then taking it off for a more appropriate shirt. He was in my school. He was in my grade. He was in the room next door to me, and my mom was his kindergarten teacher. So where's Cliff now? I don't know. What was his experience with education? Why am I here and he isn't? These are lines. These are the lines that we, as people have drawn historically. The Little Rock Nine is the changing of an ethical line by force, in one case. The reassertion of that line 23 years later in my kindergarten class with Cliff. Lines are a matter of power. All right, this is getting heavy. So we're going to go to Donkeys, or mules. So this is a picture of mules that carry the U.S. mail into the Grand Canyon, two hours into the Canyon to the Supai Reserve. I have micro-obsessions. I always have. I went through a U.S. Postal Service obsession a few years ago. Lately, I've been obsessed with making the perfect hamburger. I'm very close. I got really into the dividing of the momma bells and the baby bells and telecommunications history. I want to spend some serious time this fall practicing tying knots. And I went through a Nikola Tesla AC DC moment. So being here on top of Niagara Falls is pretty huge for me. I mean, this is where the war happened. AC beat DC, Tesla beat Edison, and the rest is electrical history. Join me with that micro-obsession. But the micro-obsession I want to talk to you about is the deep dark path of ethics I've been wrestling with forever. Why some and not others? Why this decision and not something else? Why are we happy with the line here and not there? I recently rewatched the Ken Burns documentary called The West, and it led me down a deep, dark path of ethics. The film might as well have been called the systematic eradication of the Native Americans. This is a quote from Chief Plenty Coop, it's a crow who said, education is your greatest weapon. With education, you're the white man's equal. Without education, you are his victim, and so shall remain all your life. Study, learn, help one another. Remember, there's only poverty and misery in idleness and dreams. But in work, there's self-respect and independence. But education wasn't really available to Native American kids. Their education came in the experience of the white man coming in and killing an entire buffalo herd. Now the tribe had no source for food. Now the tribe is lining up to get food from the government. Children were separated from their families and forced into schools where they weren't allowed to speak their language or reference their culture. People would go through the signing and breaking and re-signing of treaties every year or so. And this isn't just old news. About an hour from here is the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nations Reserve in Southern Ontario. This woman is Io-Karentha Thomas, a university student and a mother of five who's lived without running tap water since the age of 16 or children lack access to things commonplace elsewhere like toilets, showers, baths. For washing, they use a bucket. I'm looking forward to Joanna Fong telling us more about marginalized Indigenous communities in Australia in her talk. Listen to her stories. Flint still doesn't have clean water. I've often been interested in the social and political messes in the edge cases. I studied philosophy in undergraduate and graduate schools, but there was something I didn't get in the 20-page SAA assignments about the Nicomachean ethics. So I went downstairs, literally, into the basement of my school's library. Inappropriately squirreling myself away in the music library, micro-obsessing about Dylan and Baez in Vietnam. And don't get me started on Woody Guthrie in the Dust Bowl. Another micro-obsession. I think I need to talk to Emily Cox. We don't know each other yet, but I think that you might be the only person who can help me with this micro-obsession with music in your talk about open ed and intro to the music industry class. Emily, find me, please. So the basement, the music library, it led me to learning about New Orleans native sons, the Marsalis, or I call them the Marsali, the Nevels, the music up and down the Mississippi, muddy waters, old man river. I was procrastinating horribly on learning a ton, and my grades were lower every spring term because the New Orleans Jazz Fest overlaps with finals week. It was torture. No, I'm not a musician. I didn't study music. I just happened to go to school in New Orleans, and the context shaped my micro-obsessions. These diversions into the basement music library brought me to further rabbit holes of wonder. I swam around in culture and art, Baez and Martin Luther King, Alvin Ailey's revelations on the top, La Amistad, the slave ship, the rebellion on the bottom, strange fruit, and I'm pretty sure that this educational background made me obsess a little bit more about Beyonce's Coachella 2018 performance. I can't wait to read the dissertations coming out about that. Art and the social and the political and the educational and the music all together. There was no class for this. There was no major. I wanted to drink it all in until my next micro-obsession kicked in, which was catching a frisbee behind my back. I did that next semester. But New Orleans is a magical city. It gets in your bones. Southern decadence drive through dequeries, the music, the will to live, the resistance, slavery, subjugation, centuries of pain and suffering. Those stories stuck with me. I maintain I was designing my own education, a kind of game of following curiosity, chasing rabbits down to holes and exploring. I was having fun, and I was learning how to draw my ethical line in the sand. You know this guy. And this is true for so many of us. Kent McGuire said, I learned deeply in spite of schools so much more than because of school. Wish it wasn't true. Determined to fill up that today for today's students. This is true for so many of us because the ground isn't level. And to learn to draw our lines, we need experiences. This is a quote from Jesse Strongwell and Shawn Michael Morris, this new book, An Urgency of Teachers. I urge you urgently to go and read this book. Those experiences that we need are the stuff of exploration, discovery, wonder, epiphanies, and mistakes. So there I was, this young woman, one of two undergraduates, both women, applying to graduate school and philosophy. My ground was shaky. I was closeted. I was in the basement listening to music and I didn't know how to do this stuff, the stuff of learning without the expectations, within the expectations rather. There were advisors. There was the undergraduate advisor who said, you just don't suffer for it. You don't have something in you that compels you to do philosophy. I don't think it's for you. Look at you. You look normal, healthy, uncomplicated. Oh boy. He was an alcoholic in grad school. The other undergraduate has not been well. They were suffering, but he missed it. He missed an opportunity. Just like philosophy is not only those who are suffering. He drew the line wrong just like the ancient Greeks did. It's not just for men and it's not just for people who suffer for it. This is the foundation of all knowledge. I ignored him after a good bit of time licking wounds and feeling miserable, which is to say I overcame him, but never forgot what he said. And still for others, resilience takes much more overcoming. I want to tell you about Damon who went from being in a very bad crowd and dropping out of high school to getting his GED, going to night school at a private university, transferring to the university's engineering program, getting a master's at an R1, getting a PhD at an R1, and then getting a tenure track job. He's unusual. There are other daemons out there, but that guy is special. He's driven, but the obstacles he had to overcome, the people who actively stood in his way, the professor he admired that said he didn't think computer science was for him. He thought Damon should give up his dream of getting into the engineering school. Damon's experience of walking back to his car from the library, catching the campus police. You guessed it, same library. The utter lack of diversity anywhere he looked. They all stood in his way and said, give up, this is not for you. You don't belong here. I remember wondering what it looked like to him. By and large, the people of color on our campus were in the service industry. They were serving his food in the cafeteria. Damon was my best friend in university. He was the first person I came out to. We were a young, distractible lesbian from a very small town near the Mississippi and a young black man. From the other end of the Mississippi and Kenner, Louisiana, with a GED and a dream of being a university professor. Kind of sounds like the beginning of a joke. Damon would like you all at open at 18 to know that if he were a superhero, he'd be Iron Man. Because he has a cool lab and nearly unlimited funding. This guy is so nerdy, I love him. This is Dr. Damon Woodard, University of Florida, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a tenured professor. And standing next to him is Dr. Tempest Neal. She's a first of a lot of things. She's the first African-American woman to receive a doctorate in computer engineering from the University of Florida. She's Damon's first PhD graduate from the University of Florida. And she's his first graduate to join the academy. She just began her first semester as an assistant professor at the University of South Florida. She works on some really complicated stuff. So the changing of that ethical line in one case, the reassertion 23 years later in my kindergarten class, the eradication of a people and their life as a starting point, and the dissuasion of a young black man trying to climb. We know folks don't have the same opportunities. We know the ground isn't level, and especially in Louisiana, the ground is under sea level in many cases. Well, I was going to play you this amazing song by Randy Newman. It's called Louisiana 1927. Chuteau and Marsha Ball, for those of you from the South, did a nice version. Aaron Neville did a wonderful version for people from Canada. Jolie Holland, the co-founder of the Big Utanias, did a lovely version. The chorus is they're trying to wash us away. So this is about the great flood in 1927, where a million people lost their homes. What happened and what this song captures is that some bankers in New Orleans, white rich bankers, decided to dynamite a couple of levies in poor and less populated towns. They dynamited it, and then the next day realized they didn't have to do that, but it was too late. Those people did not get any compensation. They got no homes. This actually created the great migration of black people from the South to the northern cities, to Detroit, to Chicago. This is this enormous migration, this enormous cultural moment, micro obsessions. Open Ed, where do we draw the line in 2018, 2019? We've got digital redlining. Who is authoring our OERs? Who's publishing? Who can publish? How are technologies decisions being made at our institutions? And we aren't just talking about who gets in the door, literal access. We're talking about who comes with a full belly to class, having had breakfast. Who sees themselves in the stories they read? Whose voice is heard? Whose voice is heard in the world? What does the advisor think about who is fit for graduate school? This is a social development goal. Number four is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. So I think it's time we got a little uncomfortable again. We're achieving so much as a community. We need to do more. We need to celebrate the successes and then we need to look at where we drew the line. Is open licensing enough? Ethan Sennach and many others who just know is open content enough? Jesse, Sean, Rajiv, Robin say no and they push to open pedagogy. Is most students enough? The UN says no, it should be all. It must be all. I'm going to say something that might be controversial if I haven't already. In this community, we have many open textbooks with more to come. We're doing great there. We have great progress on open content and open licensing and we have a rich group of really smart people working toward open pedagogy. The work isn't done. It's never done on any of those. But the area that we don't have pretty much any work done is open dialogue. We don't know how to have tough conversations. We don't practice productive critique. We as a community don't talk about the hard things, the elephants. We don't talk about the institutions that say it's too expensive to make accessible content. We don't talk about how we don't know how to hire for diversity. We don't know how to talk about sexual harassment in a productive way. And why won't someone do a session at OpenEd about Mormons and OERs and about why so much leadership in this community is coming from Utah? Incidentally, if you want to learn more about Mormons and Utah, the struggle to get to Utah you want to know that context and that story, go watch that Ken Burns documentary The West. You'll learn something that I bet you don't know. Nothing is neutral. We make design decisions all the time. I was in a session that Rajiv gave at another conference. There was an educator there who taught at an institution in the UK and his college was in a poor neighborhood and he was using his own open textbook and he would make edits to it and then ask the students to download it again. He didn't realize until that session that he was actually contributing to digital redlining. Each time he was expecting his students to download the latest edits that he had made, the latest tweaks, he wasn't thinking about the impact on their digital usage and on their families. So let's be transparent about all of this. Ask the questions. What's the role of capital? Whose voice is being amplified? Whose is being diminished? What's our tolerance for error? What's our demand for transparency? What about privacy and representation? Billy, Mikey, and Steele, Wagstaff are going to talk to us about privacy and data in their session. I'm going to blow through this quickly. Barbara Chow presented this slide at an event maybe last year, a couple of years ago. Diversity is a number. Inclusion is a process and equities and outcome. And we know that inclusively designing things or thinking about inclusion fundamentally gets at issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It requires us not only to change our methodological approach, but to examine our own individual biases. We are beyond the point where we have to think about edge cases. If you aren't thinking about it and you aren't hiring for it, please see me later today. Do you walk into a room aware of your privilege? If you wake up in the morning and don't find yourself plagued by issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion and education, then you're probably walking with a chip of privilege. You should find somebody who will help you see that in a productive way. I don't mean to be a downer. This is the up part. Open education can help change these issues. Open education is the reason I learned about Ted. I met his wife at OE Global in Banff, Alberta a few years ago. He stuck in my head. He's a farmer. He's painfully shy. He has a learning disability and he hated school so much he dropped out of it in high school. His wife is an instructional designer at Portage College. By her own admission, she can't make it through a MOOC. That's me too. She has yet to complete one. He's completed over 20. He loves them. He comes in from the fields at night and he works on his courses designing his own education at his own pace to his own preference. This is open. This is a picture of a young girl at a STEM event for young girls in Guadalajara, Mexico. She's holding a comic book picture of me. This kind of makes my heart burst. This comic book is the hard work of Kelsey Merkley who's given us on Common Women these comic books. And a colleague in the Open Movement, Angie Contreras, brought these back home and had this event for young girls in STEM. So these young girls see women working in technology they see women who look different working in technology. This is how change happens. This is open. Truth and reconciliation. Kathleen Nguyen, the previous liberal premier in Ontario promised in 2016 Ontario schools would teach all children about the legacy of residential schools and would incorporate indigenous perspectives in the elementary and secondary curriculum including social studies, history, geography, and civics. When Doug Ford was elected premier that effort was abruptly cancelled. The Ontario Institute for Studies and Education responded with a large list of open materials that teachers could use to teach this material. It's an open list that anyone can add to. Once this information is open you can't box it back up. This is open. This is Ria Bhatia. She's a young woman from New Delhi, India. She applied to our Google Summer of Code program this year and was selected for her proposal for our project. We asked her to create a game for children who use eyes, eye gaze. And think of eye gaze as like a mouse that you move with your eye movement. It's for someone who has very limited motor control and they use their eyes for on-screen keyboards and for controls. So imagine typing out this talk using an eye gaze. It's laborious. And so a lot of the games for children who use eye gaze are binary. They're this answer or that answer or there are a few selections. These kids miss out on exploration and discovery and we know how important that is to children into learning. So Ria created this adorable game it's called Spy Find. Think of it as like a good night moon meets animation with spiders. And she sent me a message this weekend. It said I wanted to share something with you. I got the prestigious Google Women Techmakers Scholarship 2018 from Asia Pacific region. They asked me about Spy Find during the interview and absolutely loved it. As a part of the scholarship I'll be visiting the Google office in Singapore next week. She's amazing. This is open. If you'll humor me everybody please stand up. I'm done asking who's going to stand up so now I'm going to challenge you to be the person who sits down and sits down when you won't stand up for the following. If you're a man and you see someone interrupt or shut up a woman what are you going to do? You're already standing up so obviously you're going to stand up. If you're a white person and you see the voices of black indigenous people of color getting excluded or shut down what are you going to do? Thank you. If you're a straight person and you see a queer kid struggling what are you going to do? If you're a woman in a senior position and you're in a position to help a younger woman to mentor her what are you going to do? Okay cool. This work doesn't stop. It isn't a task. It's a practice and we need to push ourselves further. If you're only having diversity, equity and inclusion conversations and DE and I spaces we need to have them all the time. We need to have them everywhere. If accessibility bugs are not blockers yet if your events are held at spaces that aren't accessible or your keynotes recorded, captioned live captioned or your lectures who's going to say we need to talk? We need to figure this open dialogue thing out. The trouble with keynotes don't listen to me after you've been listening to me all this time be aware of the entrapments of the sexy slide deck I'm really glad that Kent and I did not plan this but he's right this has become the currency of our field now the high resolution pictures and the fancy fonts who does it exclude and who benefits from it so who should you talk to and listen to I just can't give you a bunch of names I'm going to make all these slides available these folks too okay so Todd Rose Sasha Constance Chalk Chris Borg Sean Michael Morris Jesse Strong Tara Robertson The Open Textbook Network Mahabali Michelle Reed Rebus BC Campus Uncommon Women Open Stacks listen to children listen to moms listen to LGBTQIA2S if you don't know what that is Google it listen to BIPOC if you don't know what that is Google it I'll tell you that one it's black indigenous people of color listen to people you disagree with listen to your curiosity listen to your gut open is the way we fix this folks this is what Ash Dryden said at the CC Summit a couple of years ago it isn't the job of people who are marginalized to help you understand how to include them don't ask how can I include you just do it it's all of our jobs every student UN SDG number four it's our job to be curious open and inclusive and to listen more don't forget the lines the Little Rock Nine Cliff Io Corenta Thomas Damon these are the lines that we make that are a matter of power also don't forget to celebrate the successes Farmer Ted Las Niñas Truth and Reconciliation Rhea Betia these are the example of the access to education that is power it's inextricable from issues of social justice the openness of things matters this isn't a difference of opinion between the pragmatists and the principled we're all both this my friends is an ethical battle we are all waging within ourselves to decide where to draw the line now let's talk openly about where we draw it if you clump together this week at Open Ed you won't benefit from the stories you all have if you know everyone in the circle of people you're talking to turn around and find someone you don't know don't get yourself into the situation with the usual suspects adjuncts where are you adjuncts are here students where are you grad school dropouts see me later I'm one of you outsiders misfits and the usual suspects unusual suspects make yourselves heard and seen this week tell the stories you all belong here this is open and remember to push farther I worry about the queer kids I worry about the BIPOC folks 1865 for the 13th amendment 150 years later how we doing I worry about how little has changed I worry that we don't exercise a Hippocratic oath in education and do no harm but I believe that changes with all of us wrestling with where we draw the line we are the people who decide where to draw the line I'd like to thank the Open Ed community program community for inviting me to speak today I'm not sure why you didn't thank you so much I hope I didn't disappoint you I'm deeply honored and I'd like to thank David Wiley personally for being so open being so kind and continually doing all the work and finally to those who never get justice who start below zero who don't enjoy the benefits the many many benefits we are coming hang on this is open thank you