 Well, okay. Good afternoon. I think this is relatively self-explanatory. I'm hoping this is easy. It makes sense to me, but I'm judging my performance yesterday. It's a bit of a stretch to make any sense to anyone else. As I said yesterday, I'm slightly repeating myself for understandable reasons. This is an attempt to merge, if you like, some theoretical speculation with some practical possibilities. I'm the theoretical speculation, and Tim is the practical possibilities. That's what we agreed, isn't it? Yeah. Okay. So, my concern has been, I suppose, a view that implicitly the open community and OER are, I don't know, tacitly or implicitly globally northern or Eurocentric, and was there possibly a way of addressing that. And I suppose my thinking is then that actually what underpins pedagogy is culture in some way or another. And when we try and use, if you like, OER, I'm kind of assuming it's a default position, it's unprovable, it's a default position. If I'm assuming that the OER are somehow tainted with a specific culture and I'm then thinking about how can we make OER more relevant or more appropriate or more applicable to other cultures, I then say, ah, okay, so I can talk about cultures being different, but can I then kind of quantify or objectify the distance between them? Can I, as it were, calibrate them so that I can say, I don't know, Chinese culture is in some ways similar to culture in Saudi Arabia, therefore what fits in there in Saudi Arabia will fit in China or not. Do I have a way of calibrating culture that would make that kind of measurement and that kind of inference possible? And if you like, just as a kind of modernist something for the sake of argument, I pick on Hofsteder quite a lot as a way of provoking my thinking about it, or just provoking everyone else. And he says, yes, you can, as it were, calibrate culture. And there's lots of critiques of Hofsteder, I mean, one of them of course being it's modernist and cute and not much else. Another being that level of granularity is national. So, you know, you could argue we ought to be looking regional or any other finer gradations. And you could argue that we're all at the intersection of various cultures, which might be our institutional and professional culture and our ethnic and spiritual culture and whatever else, not just our national culture. But nevertheless, he says if you choose that level of granularity and that way of looking at things, then in his empirical work, he says you can identify several different axes or several different dimensions of culture. For example, is the country you're looking at highly individualistic or highly collectivist or somewhere in the middle? And so the classic one is the United States of America is way over there in terms of individualism and I don't know, maybe People's Republic of China is way over there in terms of collectivism or communalism, as it were. Is there a great deal of difference between the highest in the society or the highest in the country and the lowest? Is it very hierarchic or is it very flat? And again, I'm sure one can think of classical examples of either extreme. I imagine maybe Holland or Sweden are way over there. And so on and so on. Low or high uncertainty avoidance, is it risk taking or is it risk avoiding, risk averse? Does it have a long term orientation or short term orientation? Does that drive people's values? And I suppose part of my argument would be if you thought about specific teaching techniques like project-based learning, group-based learning, game-based learning and rather than assuming they're kind of unconditionally benign, do they have some kind of resonance or dissonance with any of these particular dimensions? So I've encountered the problems in maybe in parts of Southern Africa where individualised competitive group-based, individual and competitive work is problematic in collectivist cultures, for example. And so there are various versions of this. So this is one putting actual real different countries on some of the axes. And probably the decoding is commonsensical like Italy, France, Belgium, Great Britain and so on. And so you could argue that, or what I'm trying to argue is that an OER developed in, this is Great Britain there isn't it? Do I mean even the United Kingdom? Well, anywhere we live is no great distance in terms of these dimensions from the USA or Australia or Canada or New Zealand. And therefore it's no great stretch to see OERs developed in one as being relevant in any of those others. But on the other hand it's a big stretch to Turkey, Mexico and whatever it is, Guatemala, you know, way over there. So that's the kind of basis of my argument. There are other models. It's not just Hofsteder and his disciples. So this is a different set of dimensions, if you like, that put the countries of the world on, what would you call this, triangular axis of active, linear reactive and so on. The advantage of Hofsteder, you'll be pleased to know, is there's an app for it. So maybe that's why it would win this game, that you just put the appropriate country in and you get the numbers. And so, and this is another one from Hall looking at low and high context cultures. I'll skip that, skip that. And so our proposal was the idea that OER metadata should not only include all the things it currently includes, but some indication of culture. For example, the appropriate numbers from Hofsteder's six or seven axes so that then one could talk about its transferability from its country of origin where you know the Hofsteder numbers to somewhere else where you can look up the Hofsteder numbers. And on that note. Thank you, John. So much for my half of the talk. Briefly, very briefly to tell you that the context of this is an Erasmus Plus programme using MOOCs to help refugees and migrants with their linguistic skills and entrepreneurship skills for social inclusion and employment. And we're at the stage of the project where we're developing language MOOCs and meta MOOCs to help with this project. And the way we actually started to do this, from previous experience we've found trying to recycle old courses for this isn't necessarily effective for cultural reasons. So we actually got together 20 refugee support groups in Madrid a couple of times. These are NGOs, support networks, et cetera. And we actually asked them how do they carry out their training. And from this we were able to identify roughly almost 100 specific, what we believe are refugees, specific learning criteria which we were able to classify into four categories. And then we actually started to think, OK, if we've got this then how can we actually use it to actually specify the dimensions of the course we're actually going to give to them. And we're going into the details. I don't have an awful lot of time here on the technological aspects. Then we really need to focus on mobile deployment because without exception all of them have mobile devices. This is a main computation apparatus. The linguistic factors is actually very important. The sub languages we use are simple and that we subtitle appropriately. So in the case of our refugees that need to be subtitled in French and Arabic from a methodological perspective, then it's very important the role of proxies in the facilitation process because obviously if we're typically white European males then we might be pushing people out of their comfort zones depending on the audience and the way we actually run the courses so it's actually quite important to actually get the refugee support groups to actually participate in this project. And we are really, really happy of really, really grateful for the work they've actually done in this area because they've actually helped generate the content and they're helped facilitating and I think this is a really good collaboration. As John was mentioning before, the important things here is also some of the cultural factors because it's quite a heavy oral learning tradition so we need to try and incorporate a lot of this, try and keep the amount of textual artefacts to a minimum and think about the way these courses can actually be run. So the question there is are we actually in a position to be thinking about producing a refugee metadata profile? Is it worth the effort because to some extent you might think well if we have to adapt these courses just for refugees I mean I didn't mention that the courses aren't just for refugees they're for migrants and anybody who are wanting to get an A1 level of Spanish related to daily life in part the reason we're doing this is to try and achieve some kind of implicit social inclusion because if in the MOOC they're mixing with other kinds of social groups then hopefully that will facilitate social contact etc etc but at the end of the day we need a way of representing this information so at least we can know what we're doing and think about how we use it in the future but then what should we actually do with that? If we do have this metadata standard what are we going to do because the platform we're basically using is our in-house installation of Open edX I mean what are we going to do? Are we going to hack the platform so that the course can be adaptively given to people? I mean if we're giving this same course to refugees and migrants can we just give the same course to everybody? Is it going to be equally popular? Because another one of the cultural aspects are that the people that are appearing in the video are culturally diverse and reflect all the different ethnic groups will that have problems with our typical white European audiences for the course? So there's lots of research questions there in the future and we are focusing a bit in this area on this cost benefit analysis of what we can actually do with this representation of information and how we should use it in the future moving forward to new kinds of courses we might want to run with our social group. I think with that I'm just about on time. Thank you. You'll turn to answer the questions today. There is time for questions so does anyone have any questions after the presentation? Yes. Oh sorry, right. Sorry, my interest was actually just in raising the question maybe rather than thinking there was an answer or that there was a practical answer I don't know if there is a practical answer and it clearly requires a lot of work and I guess I pointed at some of the theoretical reservations and I suppose if I had an objective in this talk or this discussion it was about just sensitising people to the fact that OER may be culturally specific and we can't assume that they're universal and if anyone else wants to go and think about moving to a next step that would be great. I mean I don't know what it is. I'm certainly not advocating Hofsteder. It's cute though I think all of those pictures and diagrams are. We shouldn't be giving the impression that refugees are going to be culturally homogenous they're no more culturally homogenous than the rest of us but it would at least kind of challenge the assumption oh we can get the infrastructure right we can put a platform up and it won't be a problem after that. So you know if we get any further than that fabulous. I mean it is very quickly ready it is very difficult to answer and actually think about how you might actually specify an application profile etc. How will that be eaten by the platform? It's difficult because I mean I found it interesting David Wiley's comments this morning about learning objects and I burnt my fingers bad making all these lovely learning objects in funding projects which no one actually bothered to reuse again and I don't want to get down this this dead end again so I mean how can we actually do this? I suppose there is a slightly more general reservation and that's actually in relation to refugees we might succeed in making something that was more culturally appropriate to them and yet actually not close the distance between them and the European environment which they're trying to enter so it's not straightforward that it has to work for them if it doesn't actually help them understand the cultural environment into which they're moving so I've only just thought about that so I'd better retract everything I've previously said. That's exactly the challenge we're trying to figure out if there's a mapping we can do Well you could argue that actually I mean you could argue that even introducing these ideas to refugees or if you like non-Europeans would make them critically aware of the cultural divide or the cultural distance that they might have to traverse rather than necessarily putting the owners on us as it were as the educationalist to say that you're going to struggle with this reasons Hofstadder 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. That sounds like a kind of advert for critical digital literacy I suppose but no harm in that. Okay we have time for one more question. You have cats on the table when we do this kind of stuff and say look this is where we're coming from this is our approach metadata has a role but I don't know if this is it. Oh maybe so. I mean yes my argument would be slightly flawed if in getting all of this culture incorporated into metadata it then turns out metadata is unhelpful and unused that will be kind of moving the deckchairs around on the Titanic really. Well and a kind of modernist flaw might be to imagine that culture is somehow fixed and you know to reify culture into something that is actually fixed and stable and measurable so again that yeah maybe but well you might argue that's just academic. And you I'd say you have to be careful because there's more or less formal aspects of metadata. I mean metadata is data about data so you know I wouldn't be wanting to suggest using LOM necessarily for this. I mean you could use XAPI or something else but I think it's very important to have an explicit semantic representation of how you set stuff up because if you haven't then you can tweak the variables for the next edition of the course and you lose sight of things. Perhaps a way of expressing that is a kind of description of statement at the beginning of the learning resource that says this is where we're coming from. Hmm. And I'm going to ask you to park that until after the session just because I don't want to run out of time for everyone else but thank you both very much.