 So I'll just introduce you to our session now and to our panel as well in a minute. But first I'd just like to welcome you to Open Education Week 2022. Please continue to introduce yourself in the chat from France, Croatia, Denmark, Ireland, across the world. And I'll keep an eye on the chat every now and again. And any questions you have as you go along, please put them in the chat or any comments or anything use, be part of the conversation. Don't hold back, say whatever you like. And the title of the session today is Yes, It's Open, but Is It Any Good? And Reflections on Open Reading Initiative of Scholar Research. And we're gonna talk a bit about reading and openness and some entanglement of these things and what it might mean to read well. And we're here thanks to Eden, Eden Digital Learning, European Distance and E-Learning Network, one of the premier professional bodies for digital learning professionals in Europe. And the other thing to say is, move my slides forward. Let's see. Now there we go. So, Eden Digital Learning has a statement to support you will have seen about solidarity, sport, sovereignty of Ukraine and the condemning the unprovoked illegal and immoral attack upon the national peoples of Ukraine. And it's just, it's obviously a very sad, stressful and unprecedented time at the moment. And our thoughts are with people in the war and people who are suffering really terribly right now in another part of the world from where we are. And it's against this backdrop that we kind of have that in mind all the time. It has a huge effect on us and it's having a huge effect on people. So we just wanna make sure we mentioned that first and because it's always gonna be in the back of our minds over the next time. So, we have an initiative in Dublin City University here in the National Institute for Digital Learning where I work. My name is Eamon Costello, I work here in the university and it is about reading and enhancing our reading. And we have this annual project led by my colleague Professor Mark Brown who will be one of our panel members. And it's about enhancing our own depth of understanding to promote a culture of professional reading amongst not just academic staff but other categories of staff, support staff and professional services staff and just in general to create this culture of scholarly reading. And also to provide a service to the wider research and professional community and that's the kind of open aspect of this. And this is an article I wrote a long time ago. I'm not pretending the article is any good or anything but I just thought I'd share because it was published in the journal of Open Distance Learning and it was called, it was about a special issue, opening up education. Eamon, just to let you know, we're not seeing the slides you're not in presenter mode yet. Is any good? Yes. Yes, brilliant, thank you. So, my apologies. So, we've got, I'll go very quickly. Opening up to open source, looking at how Moodle was adopted in higher education. And this was a bit about opening up ideas of open source, open education and so on. Published in this journal sponsored by the UK Open University and I shared it online and this very nice lady who I know got back to me said, Eamon, I would love to read your article and it sounds really good but there's only one problem which is that it's, I'm not able to access it because it's asking me for a lot of money to read your article and I'm not able to do that. And I know it seems a bit strange because you're talking about all this openness and stuff. So that was a kind of rather chasing experience and it kind of gave me this awareness that we're in this, I'm in this kind of filter bubble. I arrive on campus in my car, I connect to the university Wi-Fi by my phone, it knows I'm there, I'm geo-located, I have this type of scholarly privilege, I get to my desk and I just have this huge wall garden that I'm immersed in of access to literature that is seamlessly because of geo-location that I can see and access and everything. That's not the case for everybody who's not in university in particular. But the other thing is just because it's open or accessible, does that mean it's any good? Not necessarily and there's been a lot of this in the pandemic, a lot of paywalls being lowered and things being made available for free and this is kind of possibly a gateway drug by publishers and ed tech companies. But also just because it's open, is it any good? And in the manifest for teaching online and other sources you could draw on, they're questioning this idea of openness as well as a construct and it's not just a benign force and problematizing this issue somehow and that it prescribes other things and openness depends on closures. So I think that's what we're gonna do today. We're gonna dig into this idea of openness and talk a bit about that. But also if it's open, doesn't necessarily mean it's good or anything, but what we have done here is some work on, we do have some things that are good, that are open. And for example, this article is open access and it's a very nice article. And what I liked about this is it's a well-paced article. It's written with students, which you could see as a kind of open practice. It's very inclusive, they're co-authors of this paper. And for me as a reader, what I liked about this paper is the pacing of the paper. It's got a good cadence. It introduces some concepts, for example, student engagement as a construct and active learning and it introduces them in a nice way and then it critiques them. And I think that's a nice flow to that and doing that is well done. So there's a lot of rhythm in this paper. I don't know if Professor Gorlez is a drummer or anything, but I like the pacing of it. And this article is, I'm not sure if this is quite open access actually, but it's another type of open access. I was able to access it on my phone last night when I was making dinner for kids that weren't gonna eat it. So at least it was accessible because sometimes openness is a kind of purity about some of these things. But it relates to, for me, a form of open scholarship and it's about being open about in the kind of sense of open science about doing open work in the open, work with others, being explicit about what you're doing and entanglement of research and practice and working in huge groups of authors and opening up the boundaries of academic publishing even because it's based on two other studies that all of these researchers came together to write about COVID, teaching in the age of COVID. I'm going quickly here because I wanna get to our panelists. And this is a wonderful article about emergency remote teaching in higher education by our third panelist, Dr. Melissa Bond. And this is a wonderful piece that synthesizes a lot of other research out there. It's open access in a platinum open access journal. And one of the conclusions of this was that a lot of the research that was done in the pandemic is emergency research effectively like emergency remote teaching and maybe not necessarily as theoretically well-informed as it might be. And this article here is an outlier. It's not in our top reads of the year. But it is an open access article published recently and it links to the last article. This is an article by Professor Mark Brown about the main trends in online learning and helicopter view of possible futures. And the link with the previous article is it does draw on a sense that there is a big history to online distance education and that history shouldn't or can't be forgotten and the trends that are happening now are to be seen in that context. And in particular, a trend of openness and this idea of openness and closures is one of the themes called on this article. So now I'm going to open to our panel and I'm going to very briefly introduce our panel and then I'm going to ask my first question. So we've got Professor Leslie Gurley from University College London Institute of Education, Dr. Melissa Bond from the University College of London also and University of South Africa, of South Australia and Professor Peter Jandrick from the University of Applied Sciences in Zagreb. And I'm going to give our first question to Professor Gurley and I'm going to ask you, please Leslie, what was your top read from 2021? A very difficult question, an impossible question perhaps. Yeah, I mean, thank you, imminent organizers for inviting us is really interesting and yeah, that was a really difficult question. And I almost answered, you know, with, you know, Erving Goffman, you know, from 1950 something, you know, because sometimes your top reads are not necessarily the latest published work. Obviously that's not really the question you're asking. So let me just, I'm going to put in the chat the link to the paper that I'm going to nominate. And it's an excellent piece by Lena Rahm, whose work I have to say I hadn't come across before, it's called Educational Imagineries, Governance at the Intersection of Technology and Education. And it is open access, isn't it? Yes, I think it is. And it's in the Journal of Educational Policy. And I really like this because I'm working on the concept of socio-technical imaginaries at the moment in my own work and that's coming out of Shiba Jasinoff's work in Science and Technology Studies. And I thought this paper was really nice because it's not only theorised, but it's a developing theory. So Rahm takes the notion of educational imaginaries, sorry, socio-technical imaginaries and she develops the notion of educational imaginaries. And I think this is very, very relevant to our current situation in terms of digital education. So yeah, I find it really excellent and I'm going to use this in my own work. It's very well theorised. Another, I think, great feature of the paper is I think it's a suitable paper for a reader who does not know anything about this area particularly. It's very clear, but it's widely, the citations cut across several different areas. So it's broad and deep, which I think is another characteristic of a successful theory piece. I won't say spend too long talking because I know we don't have much time, but that would be some of the reasons that I chose this paper, but there's lots of other fantastic papers as it was a really hard choice. So I'll pass to the next person. Yeah, so that's wonderful. The writing clarity and broad adept of the citations and how they're into one of the great characteristics. And I'll give that same question to Professor Petter-Jandrikus. I don't know, maybe you'd like to tell us, Petter, what you've already plugged something in the chat there. Well, thank you very much. As Lesley already said, first it's a great privilege to be here. And it's a very hard question indeed. So especially even more so because of, I'm immediately reminded of different genres. So obviously we are talking about academic papers, but then there are books as well. And then there are other things, other formats and genres on writing, which are really, really, really interesting perhaps, but not suitable for this discussion. So what I've chosen is an article, which is on the screen at the moment, which kind of crosses genres, which is really interesting when I saw Lesley's paper of choice, it made me smile, because mine is also about visions and theorizations and the imaginings of something which is not yet there, but could be at some point. What is interesting about this paper, which is unfortunately not open access, is actually a structure which I find quite unique. So the first author who actually organized the whole paper was inspired by a book by Bill Ayers, published a few years ago. And she picked a paragraph in which Bill talks about future schools, about as yet schools. And then she invited people, she put out an open call in which she asked people to send their photographic reactions to this paragraph. So basically the idea was that people responded to this paragraph with a photograph. And then after collecting 10, 12, 15 photos, I'm not sure exactly how many, the lead author invited four theorists of photography to interpret the photos and to bring, to move away from the visual world to the world of theory again, and to see what has, to interpret the responses. And then finally she managed to get Bill Ayers, the guy who wrote the original paragraph who inspired it all, to write a post script and actually say how he feels about this exercise about his own work. And I think it's a wonderful example of a paper which crosses genres, crosses, it's collectively written, it's open in so many senses, it's open to the visual is open to it, it's open in a sense that it allows for various, very different interpretations and for various different interpretations which are told in radically different languages as well. So the only way that this paper is not open paradoxically is that it's really not open access, but in all other ways it's really, really very open. And this is what I'm, this is the way in which I'm trying to probably send my last message for this for minutes is that openness has many faces and that being open access doesn't really mean being open. Like for instance, I added a Springer journal which has mixed access publication mode. So if you work at a rich university which has an open access contract with Springer, then you can publish your papers in open access. But if you work for poorer institutions such as mine which does not have an open access contract with Springer, then you publish behind the paywall. And you can say that this opens up opportunities for open access, but then you can also say that this basically creates a huge divide between rich and poor universities, between people working at places which can afford open access and people working at places which cannot afford open access. Meaning that the basically open access which is on offer in my journal is open just name and it's actually divisive and it's actually the opposite of open in my opinion. Open to inequalities, opening to inequalities very, very interesting. And I think it's a wonderful example of a paper like I love this idea of a kind of pop-up community of scholarship around a paper, almost that this community of a paper can be a community of its authors and a wonderful example of that. Thank you for that, Petter. And I'm going to next ask Dr. Melissa Bond about her, please tell us Melissa what your favorite read of 2021 was, The Impossible Question. Yeah, that is really an impossible, that is yeah, very much so an impossible question because in a lot of the work that I do, I do a lot of evidence synthesis across all different educational levels. And so I am engaged in a lot of reading and I found this a really difficult question and actually the one that stuck in mind was technically something that was published in 2020 and I thought of another one that was published in 2021. So I'm going to share both in the chat just because. So this is the first one and then, and it's ironic what the two of them having comments. So they are both available open access but they both are centered around the K to 12 space or more specifically the secondary education space and how, and so they actually use, both of these articles use the voice of students themselves. So they include secondary students in the writing process. So it's not just about talking about the student experience, it's bringing the students into the writing process so that their voice can also be heard. So this particular article is by a secondary student and she talked about how the pandemic affected her specifically and went through examples of how it was managed in her school, within her subjects, how she responded to all of the different tweaks that were made during remote learning. And yeah, there was just something about it that really resonated with me and then the second one was even more so in that and I know I'm sorry I picked two, I can't help it. The second one was even more so but technically it was published in 2020 and this one was actually co-authored between two academics and their children. And again, it was about bringing that student voice and co-publishing with them. And it was a really interesting like auto ethnographic take on the pandemic and their lived experience. And this particular article, I actually ended up, I don't know, it touched me or something about it really reached me and I actually contacted the academics and I contacted their children as well because they were all listed as co-authors just to say thank you because it was really fascinating to get, I don't know, a different take on their experiences and their opinions and what using technology meant for them and not just the benefits but the challenges and the struggles. And I feel that open education should be about hearing the voices of some of those people that don't necessarily get to tell their story. And these were two examples of the students being involved in the academic running process and I thought that was fantastic. So they are the two I chose. That is wonderful, Nessa. Thank you so much for that. And I think that's what there's a lot of things about that I could say but this was my one very brief comment is I think it's lovely that you contacted the authors say thank you for writing the thing. I try to do that sometimes but it's a beautiful thing just really as an author to get that email from somebody to say that their work is appreciated. That beats all of the other extrinsic things you can get and I'm sure that must count as some kind of open practice or it's something at least it's done sort of for open reasons and without gain and two great examples there. So our next question. Oh, sorry. I'll go back there after one more panelist there. I'm going to ask Mark about your favorite read of and you've been spearheading an initiative on this so you've already had some much thinking done in this space but what was your favorite read of 2021? Well, thanks, Aiman. And yes, this is kind of dear to the heart because we have now for six years done this exercise of challenging our own team initially to say what was the best read. And as our panel and fellow panelists said this is a hard question but I actually think it's a really good question at the end of the year for all of us to think about because there is so much that we could read. I put in the chat links to my best read and it probably comes as no surprise that it actually also is the number one that we identified in our NIDL general reads on educational technology. EdTech within limits anticipating educational technology in times of environmental crisis. You know, it sort of strikes at how you select you know, what really is a good read and I do like to what I call sort of going vertically or horizontally. So we've got an example of that instead of reading vertically in your own area that you might describe crossing or border crossing and things someone else said but in this case it's hard to go past Neil. I've been reading Neil for a long time and I know Neil very well personally even right back to when he was in Cardiff and this one really got me thinking and if there's one thing that I would say that when I'm looking for something that I would say is one of my top reads or good reads getting me to think and on the one hand, there's been a body of literature for some years that has talked about how online distance learning provides an environmental option that's much cheaper than bricks and mortar and all the cost and the electricity and everything else that comes with it. Actually there's a challenge to that when you understand the total cost of ownership. I'm sitting here with a monitor going at the moment and really that's the flip side of what Neil had to say actually starts firstly very first line which grabs you which is a lesson for writers despite climate heating and rising ecological instability environmental issues feature really in discussions of educational technology and so it addresses a gap but what's really challenging is the fact that in the future with the kind of data centers that we're now seeing and sadly even you could put it in the context of the Ukraine crisis these centers become sites of struggle and conflict and potentially very problematic and so the costs of ed tech in inverted commerce may be unsustainable. Certainly got me thinking I know in my personal activity with new tech I keep a laptop for my last laptop was for six years I keep a phone for usually about four or five years so I think it also has resonance with my own practice if you like but a great read. I liked the use of as Leslie was saying earlier in a comment on her paper what I liked about this paper that Mark recommended was the use of citations and the way they were put in I was like oh that's really good like citing these this type of research that I didn't know about and this type of research that I did know about and making those connections to them I think there's a kind of quite an art to that in papers but also a very important topic in many other things. So I'd like to now return to Leslie and ask her how do you keep up with current literature and how do you decide what to read? Just had a bit of a hollow laugh there before I unmuted myself because there's so much out there the whole notion of keeping up is in itself quite problematic I think one of my challenges I think is and I think it's the case for many of us in this field is it's a field, not a discipline, right? Therefore that it's very interdisciplinary and there's many of us present and also maybe participants listening or other people writing in the field are taking generatively from different subfields and substrands of work and so I think that's interesting and challenging in order to enrich the work that we do as Petter was saying, we don't simply look at edtech journals we're looking at a range of different theoretical resources and methodological and empirical work from a range of different areas so I think I tend to, in practical terms I don't know if you want me to say anything about how I do it but basically one really important thing for me is actually currency is really important and seeing what has just come out is really important but one thing that I learned when I wrote my last book was the importance of going right back to the foundational work because so much, I can see Petter nodding I know you're very thorough with this as well so often there's constructs which are thrown around in the fields which have lost their original meaning they've been sometimes taken out of context that they've changed and that's okay you know that's fine too but I think for me what's helped me a lot is trying to be very very clear about exactly what I mean when I'm used to certain terminology so that means very often going back to maybe some you know quite older work and finding out where it came from and looking at books sometimes that are print even or you might struggle to access it and again this comes back to the question of privileged access, how extensive your library access is and so on and I realise that that's very unevenly spread but yeah that would be it so there's keeping up but there's also delving into the deeper roots of where things come from I mean I was actually I went off Twitter for a few years because I just found it, I was looking at it too much it was taking up too much time and I just recently rejoined it about three weeks ago so I thought I've got to because that's another thing you do get, keep up with brand new things quite often coming up on social media so I do a bit of that but it's not my main approach so I don't know if that answers the question but yeah breadth across different sources but also depth in terms of going right back and really doing the deep reading that lies behind some of the more recent work I think that's kind of shows new writing and it's a great reminder that there's a depth of literature out there and we've got to keep drawing on that and keep going back to that and interrogating our original ideas and saying well what was that about or finding what people have said about this and it also puts everything in context I think going back to the past as well and it gives more a bigger scope sometimes so Petra I'll ask you the same question Well I'll start with the second question how do I decide what to read? My answer is well I don't decide what to read being an academic editor, editing journal editing book series, editing quite a few books per year myself I get things in my inbox pretty much every morning and there's so much reading I would say that I probably spend between four and six hours every day editing other people's texts for every working day in average in a year so I work with other people's texts all the time that's what I've decided to do in this period of life and for me I think so I don't really decide what to read what I decide to do is I've created a certain community around me so there's a I know what type of papers will come into the journal I can roughly expect what kind of chapters will come into different books and reading all those things well this is the first thing I'm doing I'm working on those texts of course those texts especially the good ones will usually have a lot of references of course to some other works and I do actually check references and then never stop just at the text I'm reading I'm always trying to and I really get inspired by some so I really found many, many useful and excellent sources by following the thread of citations so somebody cites somebody and then I check this somebody and then this somebody cites somebody else and in three or four or five steps you can actually find I mean make a really nice journey from the most recent stuff as Leslie said to really classic sense to those foundational to those foundational works in really any field so I think and of course there's also the social media and everything but we live in the age when there's simply too much stuff being published and there's so much stuff being published that I really think that the only I mean the approach that I'm taking is that I don't really care too much about ways of finding the sources what I'm trying to do I'm trying to develop an interesting community around me and then this community actually does the job for me and I'm doing and I'm also giving back of course with my papers with my and everything so it goes both directions and I also want to say one more thing which is I've talked to many academics privately in pubs in water cooler discussions as they call them and many people complain about the same things that I think are not so often out in the open and this is that working with texts and all of us working with texts even you don't need to be an editor in order to if you're an academic you are bound to spend hours and hours per day week or month working on your or other people's texts and working on texts I've got this big problem that actually reading does not relax me anymore so when I was doing other types of jobs then I would come home and I would take a book because it was a way of relaxing but now after five, six, seven, eight hours of working on texts I just cannot really relax with texts anymore which unfortunately brings me to the situation that my reading outside of work is very limited and I don't really know how to fix this problem but I know that I've learned so much from the classics I've learned so much from literature I've learned so much from novels, from poems from all these others, beautiful genres which have nothing to do with the academic work and somehow they have everything to do with the academic work at the same time so my thinking is that while we focus to our academic stuff I think we should also pay a lot of attention to other things such as really the art of writing and those completely other genres which are perhaps not related to our work at all The next question will be precisely on the art of writing we'll come back to this one and there's a couple of things I took from your response there one was that lovely idea of intertextuality and this idea that the text can open into other texts for you and lead you down these wonderful pathways and the other about texts as something that is parts of communities and reading is part of, it has this community about it you mentioned that a couple of times you mentioned the people and there is a part of the openness of reading practices about sharing, it's lovely to share with people to say oh have you heard of this person or you know someone will send me a PDF and we're starting a new project at the moment about some hacking and rewilding concepts in it and I was reading back some of the original literature I knew before about hackers and that kind of the philosophy of that and this idea of sharing communities built around gift giving and so on so some wonderful things there in all of that and I go on to ask Melissa as well what about you, what are your strategies for reading do you have the same problems as Petter do you have too much reading to do all the time just coming back to these systematic literature reviews or how do you decide? Sometimes I do feel that way sometimes I do but I also am a big fan of community building and using those communities to help inform my reading I have to admit I do love Twitter and I probably don't spend enough time on it in my opinion but I'm a big fan and not just from building a professional learning network, building community but yeah you just get so many great ideas from people through there in terms of not just the newest literature but also like we said coming across some of those gems that you might have missed or you want to revisit coming through I also really like to use other platforms like ResearchGate or Google Scholar to sometimes curate my reading so sometimes I might sign up for an alert to let me know if someone has cited a particular work or someone has published something new if they're an academic or a researcher that I really enjoy reading then sometimes they can send me off into all sorts of different myriad ways I think the other influence I have as you mentioned the systematic reviews I really enjoy reading them and I find they can be quite an interesting source of new things to read whether or not their current depends on obviously what they included within the review and in terms of when things were published but that can be a really interesting way of keeping track of some of these newer developments coming out and certainly Openness does play a role in what I read because I do find that obviously like anyone if you find it easy to get easy to download whether it's on a repository somewhere or you've got open access to it through the platform well of course you're going to be able to read that first because you've got your instant gratification as well and if it's behind a paywall then I'll park it but I've got a massive list of things I'd love to read that I think I'll come back to that later when I can get access to it and it's really true that I do so certainly Open Access does play a role for that but yeah and the other thing the other thing I do tend to do now with my systematic reviews is I like to create openly accessible databases of the studies in my review so that other people are able to at least access those and they're able to filter them by maybe by study level or by topic or whatever that they're particularly looking for and then I'm hoping that kind of helps them keep track of things that they might be interested in reading so yeah that's probably my strategies Wonderful and as there will be note to finish and there's as a kind of setting of reading and you're curating for others as well it's like and like the practice that a lot of you have Petter talked about about communities for readers and so on and that will be the idea of of keeping paying it forward with the literature and so Mark how do you keep up the date with current literature and how do you decide what to read and does Open Access play any role? Well Open Access certainly does play a role just because of the sheer quantity of literature you can't leave this to pure chance so I kind of think you have to think about who you're going to read what as in what publications that you might single out by that I mean what journals in particular or there may be particular websites from government reports and so forth where you're going to go to in other words and you just can't cover everything so you need to have a filter and understand what the questions and what your interests are and hence what's a good read for me isn't going to be a good read for others necessarily I do subscribe to several hundred journal alerts doesn't mean I get a lot of traffic email but I'm always looking for that new idea something that's different Melissa's mentioned Twitter so yes I couldn't underestimate what I discover new in the literature of our Twitter and the other part to that is when I find something perhaps I haven't read before it's the references to that work that are also it's actually the first thing I go to typically in an article after I've read the abstract is I go and look at the references because that might give me something else to look at how the arguments positions being constructed another part is actually as though I probably don't do I know I don't do as much as I should which is reviewing articles prior to publication one of the benefits of peer review is you get to see the work before others do I know I had the privilege to review Martin Weller's forthcoming book and there's a couple of concepts or links to literature that I wasn't aware of that I'm now using PhDs are another great source I do a reasonable number of examinations and so you'd like to think a PhD student is right at the edge of what they're researching so that's a gift when I'm examining or even supervising to have someone else finding material and then a culture of sharing I think is really important I like to think that I certainly model that whenever I find a publication I recently had one on crowd sourcing research or funding research through crowd sourcing and shared that with the Vice President of Research at DCU as an example but the one thing I do think you have to also think about it's not what you find and how you say up to date you then have to decide are you only fast read or slow read it and my concern is too much of what we do is just grazing today and I know this from the exercise where we identify our top reads each year and also I'm doing a bit of work at the moment for the OECD that's forced me to really slow read some pieces that I may have glanced through previously but it's perhaps what Melissa also benefits from far for me to put words in your mouth Melissa but from doing systematic literature reviews you really have to get into the depth of the article what I personally do last comment is I just have a commitment to read one article a day I have a sad life which that extends typically to reading one on a Saturday and Sunday as well so that's 365 articles a year if I keep up that commitment but when you think about the wealth of literature I'd hate you could someone could probably quantify that I suspect it's less than two or three percent of what's published so those are my strategies that's wonderful Mark thank you for all that and it depends how you circumscribe what you define what's published because it may be a smaller fraction possibly and there is a couple of other contributors I think Petter talked about this is all the tsunami of things that are being published out there and there was a really lovely article about a few years ago about unsighted papers in K-12 I think was that you might remember the name of that one Mark but they went back and they looked at these papers that had never been cited and I just thought it was a really nice article for lots of reasons methodologically it was really good but conceptually it was brilliant for just it just gave a great sense as well that there's just so much research out there there's actually really good research that's been done that's never been picked up and it's as good as the stuff that's been picked up and it gives some kind of solace or some kind of perspective in this huge widening sky of publication and this notion of transience and time and so on a temporal element to it so our next question I think we've touched this is I think a really important and interesting question we've touched on this already lots of times and I'm going to ask our trying to get our our community online as well to please start contributing directly on the question so I'm going to put this out to everyone including in the chat and what is the relationship between reading and writing for you and I guess you could unpack this question in different ways and I'm looking forward to hear more people think and I'm just minded when when Mark mentioned that edtech within limits paper by so and and I remember reading that article and I was trying to write something at the time and sometimes I forget how to like write sentences or something I'm like I just can't even remember how to write a sentence anymore how what does an article look like or something and then I go right I read an article and I go this is really good but it's not rocket science I could write something like this you put this here you put this here you cite these type of things here this is how many hundred words you need here you need this here and this here and it gives you kind of it gets you back this notion the kind of readerly and writerly text is one of the things they talk about slight digression there for me so I'm just going to ask Leslie about what what is the relationship for you between between reading and writing and what's this what's that translation for you look like please yeah it's a really good question I mean my work is these days entirely theoretical so reading and writing are very strongly connected because I'm not working with some powerful data and so you know the kind of material as it were that I'm working with and thinking with is always textual in some shape or form I mean in practical terms actually that I've got quite specific approach to this whatever I'm writing I open a word document and this includes a book as well I would do I use one document only and I don't take notes into different documents and because I just find it not useful for me at all I think it's confusing I get version problems I just open a document and a start and I write in full sentences always I never make notes of any kind at all it doesn't mean it's the last version but I'll write that the most um the the fullest kind of you know closest to the final version that I can as my first um you know first draft as it were you know so I try to make that fairly developed this relates to reading because another thing that I do is um I read and write together at the same time always so it's very unusual for me to just read and with a book rather than a longer than article I might I might sit and read it without writing at the same time but if if I'm only going to use little bits of it then I might not find myself writing as I'm reading but if I do that then I use post-it notes and I write on them and I put them all over the book so these are my kind of ways of kind of forming a bridge between the reading text and my own writing um so that's one thing that that causes it to be very intertwined um trying to think what else I mean in terms of if I'm stuck if I can't think what to write next or what the direction of my argument then reading obviously is the key and I'll sit and read something and try and pick up a thread and I often think of the whole thing as being like that you know the sorts of metaphors that we use but the one that works best for me is we can talk about voices and so on but for me it's always the idea of weaving threads and some of the or fabrics and or something like that and sometimes the big thick strong thread that is going to weave all the way through a book for example or an article and that's the almost kind of center of it but I don't I would also try to find other sort of smaller threads that I can weave in and out of the text as well and that's where the reading comes from and the other thing just to finish on this is um I really like um Catherine Hales's work on reading um she talks about three types of reading one of them is hyper reading which is the kind of jumping through links on online that kind of meandering wayfaring sort of reading and I think that's very different obviously from sitting open in a book and reading it from cover to cover but I think that's incredibly important as well and the what really helped me I was lucky enough to have a sabbatical couple of years ago and what really really helped me um was for the really I think almost for the first time in my academic career I could do the really slow scholarship and read things properly you know not quote mining not kind of dipping in and out but doing slow scholarship and I think that's incredibly important it's very it's a privilege to be able to do it but I think that's what distinguishes some of the best work that I read is when I can see that the person has done that so I think reading is absolutely foundational and a lot of the I think we're talking about there's so much stuff out there and sometimes a lot of it is is the data set is really nice and everything's great but it's just not got the depth because the reading has this is lacking and I think that like you know academics are always saying I've got no time to write but really the reading is the first casualty not I think not writing and I think that's where we really struggle to find enough time to do the reading properly so I'll stop there because you've got me on one of my kind of favorite topics oh I won't say any more about that just now uh no that's so wonderful we could definitely who listen to you talk all day about that that's brilliant to some wonderful things in there like reading to unlock writing when you're when you're stuck we we try to back in very thanks for sharing your practice of writing and that that dividing that up into ways with the post-its and the other things is very interesting separating out those types of writing and so on and then reading as the first casualty of of the of the time crunch and everything else so and Petter I'd like to ask you about the relationship between reading and writing for you please if you could share some thoughts on that for us well for me both reading and writing are really forms of thinking there are of course different forms of thinking but there are definitely forms of thinking so when I read I don't just take in the information which is contained within the text when I read I connect this to my experiences to my thoughts to my ideas to my circumstances and what I do really is that I always interpret what I'm reading for myself and this is a creative act it's not just an act of accepting something that's written it's also an act of interpretation and an act of thinking and reading can be a creative act as well and I think that it's really important to emphasize now writing writing for me has become something that has become so deeply ingrained in my in my identity and that I just when I want to think something through I write about it and sometimes it doesn't really have to be academic at all so sometimes I'm I'm just I just have a certain question that I need to resolve whatever it is whether it's a personal thing in my life or whatever and I will write about it often those texts will remain unpublished and they will be the only person who will see them will be me myself but the idea is that writing for me is a form of purification a form of cleaning up my ideas a form of making me understand myself and obviously those two things are are extremely connected I'll tell you an anecdote which I think is really it's really interesting my partner would tell me go buy this this this and this to the shop and I would go to the shop and I would remember less than half and then she would tell me okay you need to buy this this this and I would say wait let me just make a list so she would tell me what to do and I would write down a list of things what I what I what I had to buy but then of course I forgot the list at home so I came to the shop and I was without the list again but because I've put down those things on the paper I actually remembered everything that I've written down although I didn't have the paper on me and I actually bought everything meaning that the text can be useful even though you don't have it on yourself even though it doesn't exist in a way writing and reading for me are a form of thinking in the form of understanding the world which goes way beyond just question whether something will be published whether something will end up as a good text I mean the shopping list is a typical example the only purpose of this shopping list was not to have a piece of paper with the list of items the purpose of this shopping list really was to systematize things in my head in my mind so when I come to the shop I can actually understand remember what I needed to buy of course this whole thing happened next my point is that there are many forms of reading there are many forms of writing but I always but I do I mean they are not they cannot be separate from each other we cannot really I mean of course everybody who reads needs to write and vice versa but for me they're just manifestations of thinking and before I became an academic author I used to be well not really a professional musician but I would play a lot of music and I did make my living with music at a certain point in time and it doesn't need to be reading and writing for instance for musicians it can be music for somebody else it can be something else so I don't think that we should monopolize this and say reading and writing is everything reading and writing is really means a lot to me but somebody else can have a completely different way of perceiving understanding and processing the world be it music be it visual arts be it whatever and I think that all those ways of understanding and processing and thinking about living with the world and living through the world are equally valuable and equally important my personal way in these years is reading and writing but for somebody else it could be many different things it's also more efficient because if you're going to write a song about bananas and milk and Weedabix and all these things that you need from the shop that's going to take a long time so although it'd probably be very memorable as well and that's wonderful Petter thank you for sharing that as so much there I love the idea of reading as creative practice quite a kind of huge statement and of course that is the case because reading you're deciding what to read as Mark had mentioned that chat sometimes you have this urge to respond to the text as you're reading you start arguing with the text or responding to it or you start agreeing with it so you have all these reactions and there is this creativity when we're reading and then you said some very beautiful things writing is purification and it's making me understand myself and I love that idea of this we are it is part of an acting and it's something core to our identity as scholars that we're writing and this is just part of our life and our life process and so on so Melissa I would like to ask you about reading and writing for you sure I did pop a couple of things in the chat because I wasn't sure on timing but I yeah to be honest I had no idea how to write I mean technically I'm still an early career researcher and when I first started doing my PhD I'd never published before and had no idea how to approach this thing called scholarly writing and I know I bang on about it all the time but one of the best ways that I learned how to write honestly was through reading and undertaking systematic reviews and just getting a volume of information and ideas around me and I am someone who likes to be fairly I guess systematic about how I do it and I go through and I'll read as widely as possible until I reach that saturation point and then you know as I'm going I'll be thinking about and constructing things in my head and I do take a lot of written notes and things along the way and I am a bit old school I do prefer to see things which is you know necessarily sustainable but I do like to see things in you know on paper and in front of me or at least on the screen in front of me and yeah try to collate these ideas and get them all sorted and then after I've gone through this beautiful volume of information that's when I'm really synthesizing and I'm really putting down my own thoughts and having those discussions with it yeah but again like you've already said you know without the reading I wouldn't be able to do the writing so and also using it to understand how different journals want you know want the writing to be there are certain things we may need to consider in terms of scholarly writing and how we approach certain outlets in terms of how we're writing so that's also something to consider so reading things that have come before in those sorts of spaces was also helpful for me in terms of understanding how I should be formatting what I'm putting down exactly you're thinking about the reader you're imagining who the reader is they're the reader of the journal and you've got this kind of layered approach almost because if you're a writer and you're submitting to a journal for example you're thinking about the reader you're also thinking about the editor and you're also thinking about the reviewer and think these could be slightly different people and to some degree you're kind of writing for these audiences in different ways but ultimately to get to the reader and it's that's a great a great way of thinking about and a very practical and useful way of reading is about this is what this journal community this is what they look like this is what they're writing this is what they're expecting this is the genre I need to be getting into so and I think this the other idea of reading and writing that's coming across as well is there's a lot about writing and there's a sense that you have to write and there's something coming true that I don't know whether I've another I could put this question to Mark in a second maybe but a lot of our panelists have said that we because we read and then you write and so on or there's some interconnection between these two things but there's also perhaps some kind of danger or some kind of sweet spot or when do we stop reading and start writing or do we just are we gonna forever read or get stuck in the reading or something there's a great novel by a guy V.S. Napal he's he's written some amazing he's one of the most amazing novelists most non-novelists and he wrote this one House for Mr. Biswas and it was about it was semi-autobiographical it was essentially about him a very short funny novel that's that's worth the read it's very well written it's beautifully written but there's a lead character in the story and he's going around his village and he's known as a brilliant intellectual and he's this huge weight of expectation on him from the community and he always believes he's gonna write a book but he kind it's almost like he's never gonna do it and he always oh i'm gonna write this book i got this book in me you know it's like oh he's got the book in him and it's obviously there's a kind of a resonance because it's actually about the author V.S. Napal himself and his deep kind of talent but also the kind of desire and and to to to write really that the kind of deep wound of all of that so mark what what do you think about maybe i'll just give you this this kind of angle of this question because if you've you've responded in the chat and some of your thoughts about their relationship with these things how do you know when to stop reading and to start writing or what was the interface between those two those two things what what are your thoughts on that well Aimen firstly i'd completely concur around reading and writing being about thinking it's a cognitive process your question about when do you know when to write as distinct from reading like Leslie i i don't really separate the two although probably we all if we're honest to have times where we're more productive than other times i mean time itself is a variable so sometimes i need that inspiration i need that trigger so that's what the reading sometimes does and anything that i consider that i'm going to take that time to slow read you will typically find in my writing the article that you shared at the outset you'll see me referencing that work from Neil Selwyn along with lots of other work i think Leslie's work also appears in there so they're just intertwined but what i did put in the chat box conscious of time i was doing that folks i'll just pick out one thing which is at a meta level as i said there i'm reading in a way that i'd never used to when i was shall we say a more new and emerging scholar in that i'm looking at how things are constructed not necessarily the body of the content but the way things are put together Leslie mentioned metaphors before i like myself to use metaphors to try and create things that pictures in the mind that push your mind in different ways so for me that's a really valuable part of right of reading is seeing how others go about writing and how can i borrow, steal, adapt any of those strategies and elements of writing from someone else and actually there are a handful very small number of people who i read for that very purpose wonderful thank you mark and this great great connection with them uh the idea of thinking and of writing as thinking and clarifying thought you don't really know something until you try and write it down and explain it to someone that's that's the frightful and painful part what the hell was this thing i thought was nice and easy in my head when i was talking to myself and some great things in the chat and if anyone would like to ask our panelists a question please because that's kind of our what we what we have planned to talk through today and we've been a bit over an hour so it's it's been a wonderful discussion and but i'd just like to turn it over to our audience and ask them if they have any questions for our panelists please and i hope all our audience are inspired to go and start writing and writes up to the amazing by the end of this week just put a few words down every day and thank you slag citation impact role of h index well that is those are those are um if you want to write for those things those are kind of um what is the the role of do you read do you read do you read those um i'm not sure what the question is maybe the question is um do people think it's important to read research that has been highly cited or how do you read research that's going to be highly cited i'm not quite sure um i mean if i could just make one other contribution where you're multitasking looking at the chat box i thought um leslie did this in one of her articles um that was one reason it really resonated but melissa shared two real gems with us with um extending the voice given i was talking about voice um extending the voice to those who might not normally read the normally be heard um students um children in in one case uh we're currently finishing off uh literature review on the concept of student readiness during um the covid pandemic and what we see is just a mountain of surveys of the student experience but none of those really meet the criteria for what i consider to be giving a vehicle for student voice so there's just a couple of publications um and melissa you introduced me to a new one thanks um the value of today's session where that voice is being given to people in a different format in a way that can be much more powerful so i think that's a really important aspect to writing finding that voice and extending voice yeah it actually um sorry to butt in without putting my hand up there um it actually you know those kinds of articles they made me think about my own students as well um and am i giving them a voice in some of the work that i'm doing um and sort of inspired me to maybe think well maybe i should be doing a little bit more with my undergrads for example and maybe giving them an opportunity to also start um start dipping their toes in the research and writing world so yeah anyway sorry peter no no it's fine thank you very much it's really interesting i think that uh well i i was i was inspired by mars question about voice a bit earlier i think that finding our own voices writers as authors as human beings is hugely important and i've been for the past few years i've been become aware of that i've got something called the voice then i've tried to shape it in this or that direction and when you become self-conscious about own voice and own style of writing and own own style of then it's really actually a very difficult thing to manage especially because it develops all the time it's never the same you cannot say i've developed my voice i mean you can but then very soon you become very boring and very repetitive so really voice is something that develops and evolves all the time which is really interesting and it's a permanent battle it's a permanent struggle really to find own voice and improve on voice and see what to do with own voice and as editor it's also a really an art to be able to accommodate voices of others while packing them into a prepackaged a schemes which are unfortunately required by academic articles and this is just i know that i'm taking a lot of time but this is just one minute to answer to slagena citations and roles of age index and so on well it's a there's nothing wrong with it if you want to play this game but it's a i it's i think it's a very restrictive way of looking at writing very restrictive way of looking at reading where things are mechanized they become increasingly similar they follow those very strict rules all those impact factors age index in this season so on what they basically do they make ideas and things in my opinion dull and uninteresting and so so and it's a part of my personal voice is i don't really care about citations and indexes and i simply don't i refuse to write in a way which would abide to their rules but they just mean thank you patr because that that's the you're gonna come in if there's time i mean just yeah too yeah yeah uh yeah i mean agree with everything and that's been said and i think yeah age index and stuff i mean you know i've got a very you know very critical stance towards anything to do with any form of audit of um academic work and quantification of that sort um however you do want you want people to read what you've written you know that's that's what what is a bit more important so i think one thing i i do the less of recent years is um book chapters and it's unfortunate but i think very often they just don't get picked up to the same extent i will do them you're in there but you know it's not something i do as much um anymore because i want you know and i've hard back books as a ongoing kind of um conversation with publishers about that as well because obviously i would rather that they were access or at least paperback first but that's a struggle within academic publishing to get your your work out quickly and not have expensive hardback that hardly anyone's going to look at right and especially i'm thinking in our field we're so fast moving so i feel quite conflicted but about that but i'm drawing i'm now currently writing another hardback right so i'm still in that that that space but i wish i wish there was a way of it being coming out more quickly than that the other thing i wanted to say as well just about the writing process um a really basic thing that i've started to do or i've been doing for a few years now is um in terms of voice and confidence writer's block all of that i think what i do is really simple a bit like mark's saying about you read an article every day i sit down and decide i'm going to write um depending on how much time i've got either two thousand words or a thousand words it's usually two thousand um and i don't i just don't stop until i've got the two thousand words on the page and that is really not at all that doesn't sound creative or um you know it's very unromantic it's a very kind of mechanical approach but actually that rule has served me incredibly well because it means that i do keep going you know i'm not allowed to stop until i've got that that number of words on um written and it has to be proper text as well not not notes and that is um a piece of advice that i give to my students now as well just just hack on and the ideas will come you've got to trust to keep going because that's something i've really another final point really quickly is i i don't know what i'm going to say when i'm about to start writing something right no i have headers doing that i have no idea really what it's going to be about i mean i sort of know a little bit when i get started now might be under a long and it emerges right it emerges you've got to trust the process and just keep going i think that's incredibly important and and it's quite scary i'm at that stage right now with the book i'm writing now that i'm at that kind of high wire moment where i don't really know what it's going to be and but i just keep going anyway so that's just my advice is don't think you've got to have the whole thing in your head first before you start writing you just have to write and and the ideas will come the writing will take you somewhere that that's lovely beautiful sentiment i i think uh thanks for sharing that better i that's a that's some homework for us maybe maybe a good note to end on we have a reading fresh off fresh off the press and actually there was an interesting thing that's you mentioned there but we could go on top for hours but fast scholarship trying to get things out that'll be read and trying to get trying to publish and get things out in a fast changing and moving world and environment but also having the appreciation to take time for ourselves to read and give ourselves i think better something with solitude in this article i think the beauty of reading is you're given time to yourself it's something you do for yourself and it's like it's like an active intimacy that you just curl up with a book or an article and you're reading and you that's that's time for you it's it's you and the text and the author or whatever and you're reconnecting in that way and i also totally agree with petter about this idea of voice and that it can be actually sometimes negative to focus too much on this or that you know we are not a stable there is no stable self or personality we have these sub personalities and components of ourselves that are changing that come to the fore at certain times and the voice it could be very boring if you're writing the same thing all the time every every day or and maybe not some people can do that that's it's people are different and there's some people you you pick up their article 10 years later you know it's going to be the same article they've written 10 years ago and the same about the same thing and the faces change and so i'm rambling a bit so it's definitely time to really just on behalf of everybody to thanks to to eden and i'll put us up a slide to our conference better um put a slide to the eden conference coming up um next and just put to deeply thank our hosts eden and robert and everyone who helped set up the session and just a huge thanks and maybe clap or put some smileys and thank yous in the in the chat for our wonderful uh uh panel members who who shared their time so openly on in open open education week and gave us so much food for thought and so much inspiration to fuel our imaginations and fuel up our writing practices so we can go off and both consume some really good readings and then write up a storm of of uh scholarly work so thank you everyone bye everyone