 Good afternoon, thank you for joining us. We're here today with Tanya Elias and she's gonna be discussing mapping the social world arena of open education and she's joining us from Disney. Thanks Tanya, I'm gonna pass over to you now. Thank you. Hi everyone, happy to join you. I'm joining you today from Disney World. You may see giant top hats behind me. And so yeah, I'm going to talk about the mapping social worlds, an arena of open education. So this is, yeah, so this is me, this is not, I haven't been to this castle yet but I expect that I will get the opportunity to go in the next couple of days. And I have to say it's a little surreal given that what I'm talking about and what my research is about is about standardization and issues of scale and corporatization in open education presenting this from Disney takes a little bit of a new spin and really makes me think about this in a slightly different way. So a little bit about me and my experience with open education, I've been involved in various forms of open education for 20, 25 years. So, I think of it now as my many opens, my many different types of open education from open universities to transcending limits of distance, place and time, flexible self-paced learning, completing courses outside of programs, reducing barriers to entry, online cohorts, increasing accessibility, OER, open data and software, open colonialism and increasingly I think open educational practices as well. So as I go through, my research is really thinking about how these various types of opens have shifted over time. So my research is using a methodology called situational analysis. So it really thinks about the situation of open education. And when we think about the situation of open education right now, I don't think we can talk about it or at least I can't talk about it. Without thinking about the impact of COVID-19, when approximately 1.5 billion students around the world went online for in various ways. And clearly teachers and researchers responded in different ways with articles and journals on social justice. At the same time, ed tech companies and technology companies have also responded in a variety of ways. And some of those ways have been quite a great way and quite aggressive. And so my goal in this presentation and this research is to really think about how those two different approaches intersect and overlap and converge and impact one another. So the more things change. So large-scale open education initiatives have regularly been positioned as a response to a crisis. So I made a note that in 2017. And as I just mentioned, was certainly the case with COVID-19. And throughout all of this, there's been silence with respect to the implications of scale as it relates to internet-enabled open education. And that continues today with very few exceptions. So in my work, I've adopted this idea from Madeleine Tien. I think we keep repeating the same mistakes. Maybe we should mistrust every idea we think is original and ours alone. And so in my work, I really take a critical approach to say, where has this been done before? Are we doing something new? Or are we really repeating the same things that we've done before because we think that we're doing something new? So as I said, situational analysis is my methodology and it's a qualitative inquiry approach that takes into account post-structuralist ideas in terms of going beyond the knowing subject, taking into account non-humans and highlighting relationalities within the situation. And the focus really is to foreground process, emphasizing fluidities of power relations. So my study has had, it's pretty much over now, hopefully over, three phases. I started with an anonymous online qualitative survey. I then did a collaborative mapping session with annotations with a smaller group of participants. And then I did two one-hour focus groups with the folks who helped me with the map annotations. And so out of that process, I developed three different kinds of maps. So situational maps, the social world arena maps and positional maps. And the one that I'm gonna talk about today in more detail is the social world arena maps, which is the one in the left-hand side of the screen. So these social world arena maps, they're intended to analyze social design. And so they explore two analytical questions. Who cares about this situation and what do they wanna do about it? And the purpose of doing these social world arena maps is to really look at grasping the big picture, something that we don't often do in qualitative research. So this is when I mapped the social worlds of open education. So you can see the arena of open education is the gray egg. What I did is I took all of the words and terms that people put into the anonymous survey and I mapped those against the field. And then I looked at those social worlds, so the other circles and identified what those actants and actors that were identified, what social worlds they belong to. And as you can see there, there were plenty of references to publishers, LMSs, ed tech companies, tech companies, foundations, governments and organizations, educational institutions and administrators, educational technologists and teachers, librarians and faculties. So as I mapped this and as I really started to look at it in more detail, what I really saw were patterns emerging in this space. We see this widening sphere of technology companies. If we'd done a similar map of open education, I don't know, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, I don't think we would have seen that heavy participation of the tech companies and honestly those ed tech companies as well. So we see these new entities entering the space and impacting the space in various ways and not only having a direct impact, but also having an indirect impact in how they fund fundamentally, foundations and how they provide funding for governments, organizations and educational institutions which really leads to convergence between these worlds. And we see the same thing between publishers and ed tech companies. Publishers are more and more, when I looked at my research, the publishers are more and more. They don't even frame themselves as publishers anymore. They frame themselves as anything but publishers, right? Really ed tech companies. It's all about the ancillary materials, quizzes, interacting, proctoring. All of these are connecting and becoming really one in the same. And with these dynamic intersections, what we see is these trends towards this ever-increasing massification and the applications of more and more prescriptive processes and technologies across all of these various worlds. And so when you step back and take a look at what is going on around open education, it can become, it's overwhelming, but I think it's also important that we take that step back and see what role these companies and these organizations are doing to influence the space. And like I said at the beginning, really think about why? Why do they care? What is it that their goals and initiative, their goals in terms of being in this space? And are they aligned with our goals as open educators? So you can see there in the blue circle, that's open educators. So they are an overlapping world that have interactions with all of these other worlds and they're not a homogeneous group, which makes it even more interesting. And it means that they're being tugged and pulled in different directions by all of these different worlds and by the needs and desires of these different worlds. Oh, what did I do? Yeah, I missed something. Oh, that's okay. Okay, well that puts me at my end of my presentation. I'm just going to escape for a minute because I think I should have more here somewhere. Oh, here we go. Okay, let me just present again. Fine, we will do this instead. Can you, hopefully people can still see it. It doesn't really matter if you can see it. These next slides, I don't know why. Oh, because I've got them hidden. Okay, so fundamentally what this really means is that open education sits at the nexus of these very powerful and big social worlds, most of which have significant interest in seeking to maximize financial gain versus via very prescriptive methods, including increased efficiency and divided labor. Controlling open education is an effective way to both accumulate and exert more control over broader educational systems and entire populations because education matters and who controls education matters. Throughout my research, I've mapped the pervasiveness of prescriptive patterning throughout these social worlds and it's apparent prevalence within the arena of open education. So I think it's really important that we think about how the patterns, the business patterns that impact these worlds also impact what we are doing as open educators. And with that, with ed tech companies, textbook publishers, governments, institutions replicating these prescriptive approaches to their technological patterns, it makes sense that teachers, librarians, and faculty feel caught in these bureaucratic patterns. And we see these same bureaucratic patterns in institutions, in post-secondary and educational institutions. And sometimes I would suggest that open educators look to technology, look to open spaces to escape those bureaucratic systems only to find themselves caught in different systems but that are still following those same prescriptive patterns. Yeah, so that's, it's really interesting to see this replication of these prescriptive approaches to technology. And the open educators who participated in my research really did tend to recognize the harms of these dominant prescriptive patterns within traditional institutions. And they also tended to see open education as a positive alternative. At the same time, they did demonstrate an ambivalence with respect to the use of big technological tools and their prescriptive tendencies. And although some of them did express a preference for smaller open source tools, the overwhelming effectiveness and efficiency associated with the big tools makes them really easy to use and really difficult to avoid for open educators. And these tools are often deeply embedded within our practices. And I can't think of a better example than Twitter right now of, if Twitter is at the center of open educational practices, what does it mean when that software is purchased by Elon Musk? I think these are the complicated questions, they're difficult questions, but I do think that they're questions that we need to interrogate and answer. The good news, because I don't want this to be completely depressing, is that change is possible. If we can recognize these patterns and we can recognize that social worlds and arenas are not fixed, but rather fluid entities constantly changing in response to interactions with one another, change is possible and we have the ability to enable that change and to reopen systems that seem closed or repattern prescriptive systems in more holistic ways. And so really the question becomes, what role do we as open educators want to take in terms of affecting that change or not take? Because I think that that's the question that we're left with. All right. So I will close my presentation and return to the screen. So I don't know if there's any questions. Oh, I can't hear you. Sorry, I was on mute. I've just asked everyone to post their questions in the comments. So if anybody has anything, feel free to ask. We've had a couple of people sharing comments so far, about how they've been using Twitter since 2009. So the research is very timely. So, yes. Jenny said, I like the indicators for different types of stakeholders and players in the big picture. Awesome. Hi, Jenny. Hi, Jenny. But we don't have any questions so far. So it seems that you might have already answered them with your presentation. All right. Well, so I have tons of questions. So I don't see, in general, my research was not research intending to come up with answers. It was, it's really research intending to trouble and ask questions. And I think, certainly, I've come out of my research with more questions than answers. So... Can I imagine? My, you know, is that, you know, but I, you know, and I think my key finding is that it's so important that we critically question everything that we're doing. And, you know, really think about the trade-offs of easy technologies and hard technologies, how we can just do that. I see Gabby saying, just gone back to Mastodon. Yeah, and it's interesting. So this research, my research on scale actually was originally triggered by being part of a small community on Mastodon approximately five years ago. So again, in the number of things that have been surreal for me in this week, starting to see that return to Mastodon as well, I think is certainly one of them. And I mean, I think as I see people coming back and, you know, I see people saying things like, oh, but the technology is not very good or it's hard. And I think that's kind of the point. Like, if we're looking for things that are easy, the answers will be prescriptive. The answers will be big and they will be corporatized. If we want things to be small and holistic, they will be hard, they will be work. They will be, they will take us to take things that are imperfect and be okay with it. And that to me is really what we need to think about if they were willing to do that. Yeah, it's a lot of questions to answer isn't there with all these changes and things. Awesome. I've got a couple of people commenting about how they're going to try and find some spare time to investigate Mastodon. 20-25. Good, there'll be another resurgence about them. I don't see any other comments, Tanya, sorry. So, and if you have anything else that you want to add or I'm happy to close off the recording now. Nope, I'm, yeah. I appreciate everybody taking the time to come out. And yes, Sarah, I will look for you again on Mastodon. I had to start a new account, but yes, I hope everybody has a wonderful time. And I will sign off from the world of the giant top hats. Thank you everyone for joining us. We really appreciate your time. Bye.