 There we go. Welcome everybody. It's good to see everyone from many parts of Europe this morning for the first webinar of this year's European Distance Learning Week. The European Distance Learning Week is full of very interesting webinars that are arranged jointly by Eden, the European Distance and E-Learning Network, and the American Equivalent USDA. So it's a transatlantic cooperation. This webinar, everyone who's registered will be getting the link to the recording afterwards and you can stop and start it as you like. Just to say that you have chat rights and you will be asking you to do a lot of chatting during this session. It's going to be as interactive as we can make it, but only the speakers, the invited speakers have video and audio rights just to let you know that. So my name is Alistair Creelman. As you can see on the map, I am in the southeast corner of Sweden at Linnaeus University in Kalmar. And it is a privilege to introduce you to two of our two guest speakers for today. And we're going to be talking about the future of openness or a crisis for openness. Where do we go from here? And I'd just like you to introduce yourselves briefly, Catherine. Good morning everyone. It's wonderful to be here and to see you all, some familiar faces and some not so familiar faces. My name is Catherine Cronin and I'm based in Ireland. I'm speaking from my kitchen today in Ireland in Galway on the west coast. And up until two weeks ago I was working at the National University of Ireland in Galway where I recently completed my PhD in the area of open educational practices and how they are used and not used in higher education. But last week I started a new position as a strategic education developer at what's called our National Forum in Ireland for the enhancement of teaching and learning in higher education. And that is a neutral academic led body, small group of people that fosters collaboration across higher education in Ireland. So I can answer a few questions about that but I've really just started looking forward to the challenge. But mostly really looking forward to the conversation here this morning with you all. And Martin? Martin Weller. I'm a professor of educational technology at the Open University. And I'm a contrast to Catherine where she's in a new job for two weeks. I've been in the same job for 24 years. We're not exactly the same job but in the same place. So I run a research unit called the OER Hub and we do lots of research on things like OER MOOCs, open accesses kind of things. And I'm particularly interested in digital scholarship and open scholarship. So looking forward to the chat today. Okay, and the wonders of social media networking that we all are part of is the fact that I've followed Martin and Catherine for a long time and had the interaction via various social media. But this is the first time I've actually seen them actually face to face or moving. And it feels, you know, you feel you know someone and then you realize you've never actually met them. So that's a little bit of a wonder here. However, the theme for today's webinar is about openness. And all of us I think are very familiar with open education. We make open education resources. We share them. We are involved in various types of open courses. However, I felt really in the last two years has been a bit of a crisis because again and again almost monthly there are new sort of scandals or problems with some of the platforms that we know and love and have become rather dependent on and we find out that well, they're not really we didn't realize what they were doing with our data or we should have realized. Where do we put our where do we put our information when so many of the channels are highly commercial? And where is it? Where does that where do we have to find our own tools for things? Or can we continue to use those commercial platforms? Some of these questions were in my head and I think we'll get some insights into that from Martin and Catherine. Before we do that, however, I want to get a little bit of input from you. So I'm going to change the view here and I'm going to share my screen. Now, I hope you can see my screen and what barriers to openness do you see today? And if you go to www.menti.com, you can do that on your mobile or you can open a new tab in your web browser and go to that site www.menti.com, use the code 922686 and just write a few words that come to mind. What barriers to openness do you see today? And it'll take a little bit of time to thanks, Gabby, for putting it out in the chat, the link directly. We've already got an answer earlier, GDPR. Is it a barrier? Is it an opportunity? Lack of culture? Well, Catherine's getting her glass of water. Martin, you're welcome to comment. I wonder if it's the lack of culture, lack of culture around openness. Is that what I think? Two for GDPR, it's interesting. Yes, it's interesting that GDPR and I think both Catherine and I will touch upon this. That kind of gets to one of the kind of paradoxes about openness in some ways. In some ways it's a good thing. It's about trying to protect your privacy and your data and those kind of things. But at the same time, it does restrict what you can do. And a lot of things we used to just do openly and not worry about these things. It suddenly becomes, as Alistair was saying, you've got to make sure that all these things are GDPR compliant. Any reactions, Catherine, on the comments coming up? Yes, I'm just thinking that a lot of them point to just the need for us as individuals and as educators to be constantly educating ourselves about these kinds of developments and risks and everything. So there are the benefits of openness, but this is added work, if you like, in terms of doing openness well and safely for ourselves and our students. I also think things like GDPR often become an excuse. I'd like to do it, but GDPR, you know, it's like, so they just like, without actually knowing what it means, it just becomes an excuse not to do these things. Indeed. Another dreaded full letter acronym. Yes, that's what Anna is saying. Some used GDPR now as an excuse to stay close to the material. They've never been open yet, exactly, Anna. And language, somebody has written there, which I quite, I think, I assume you mean the lack of linguistic diversity, but that's only a guess. The fact that the overwhelming amount of OERs and open courses are in English. Someone's got the dreaded neoliberalism faces in there. I think basically we can blame neoliberalism for everything, can't we? I've just been reading a PhD thesis about neoliberalism and open access. Interesting. Lack of understanding, yeah. Irrationally sharing everything. I think we all know people who do do that. The over-sharers. Everything, everywhere, all the time. Okay, I think I will return to, you're welcome to keep adding to it. I'll try and put that, I'll put the results up somewhere once I get some time to look at it. Thank you for some input there. And that leads us quite nicely into Catherine, who is going to kick in with some input. After Catherine's input, you'll get plenty of time to discuss and ask questions and remark, and you'll do that in the chat. But for the next 10 minutes or so, it's mostly Catherine speaking. You can think of your questions and remarks as she is doing so. So the floor is yours, Catherine. Okay, thank you so much. This thought this might go somewhere near the beginning, but basically we've already done our introductions about ourselves. And in terms of my presentation and Martin's presentation, my presentation will be a short one. And what I am hoping to do is just to pose some ideas as a way in and an avenue for thinking about openness in a sense in the context of the current challenges that we've all been talking about. So this slide I have used before, many, many people struggle with not only the definition of open education, but the definition of open. And I'm sure many of you who are in this webinar engage in these kinds of discussions yourselves with people. But a couple of things I think that are important, not so much in converging on a definition, but really recognizing some of these key features. And the first is that open, of course, is not universally experienced. So open practice is mediated by many of the things that have already come up now in that initial whole. So it's mediated, of course, by geographic location, our institutional location, perhaps our discipline, and also by factors such as gender and race and personal circumstances. And these factors tend to operate together. So choices about openness that we may feel may not be positive for all of our peers or all of our students. So we have to navigate that in some way. That recognition can help us figure out how to navigate that. So it's complex, of course. It requires digital capability and agency, certainly. Another feature that I think is useful to think about is the notion that openness is both descriptive and aspirational. When we're talking about a particular resource, open educational resource, or a license, we're describing how open it is. But when we're discussing openness in the context of values or even practices, open is often aspirational. So we talk about things that might be increasingly open or open in specific contexts. So again, we're getting away from the notion of open as a binary and the opposite of closed. So physical discourse is the piece that I'd like to say more about in my few minutes this morning. But the quote I included from Tracy McMillan-Cotton at the end there, I think, is possibly most important. And that is that the open movement and our understanding of open education is moving beyond open access, which admittedly is important, but is not sufficient. So we're moving from access to equity and justice. So when openness is under threat, the kind of things we're talking about today, we don't just mean that people cannot access educational resources, we mean that equality is often under threat. So this is a vitally important discussion, I think. So what can we do in our respective locations as educators, as learning technologists, as leaders in various contexts? One of the things I feel is very important is the need to develop networks and tools that help us to look really beneath the latest developments and the latest article that we read about the latest scares and really to develop a critical approach to openness, as mentioned here. And this is possibly the aspect of openness that people ask me about the most or that I engage in most discussions about. And certainly critical approaches to openness is an area that I think many of the people here in this session are working in. It's becoming more of a topic of conversation in conferences about open education. But defining what we mean by critical approaches I think is important for people who aren't engaged in that work. So the way that I have found useful to describe it is that there are really two aspects of criticality when I talk about critical approaches. And one is a critical disposition. And the full quote by Michael Appel I have here, which I think is wonderful. Michael Appel says that our task as educators requires criticism of what exists, restoring what is being lost, pointing towards possible futures. And sometimes it requires being criticized ourselves. This being something we should yearn for it since it signifies the mutuality and shifting roles of teachers and taught that we must enhance. And that is from a foreword to a book called Politics of Education by Michael Appel. So that's probably the first aspect of criticality that I would foreground. But the second is critical approaches to openness arise from really critical theory. So critical theory is a focus as it says here on power and the operations of power and the rejection of all forms of oppression and justice and inequality. Now that's a huge statement, but what that means for me with respect to openness is that if we use a critical approach, we ask questions in the face of the kinds of risks we spoke about at the start of this webinar. So things like who is defining openness, who is included and who is excluded when education or a particular aspect of education is opened. And in what ways are people included and excluded? We might also ask if specific open educational initiatives which have stated aims of fostering inclusivity and access and so on, if they actually achieve those aims. Do they actually enhance learning, fostering inclusivity, and empower learners? And also we must acknowledge that open education initiatives sometimes can do the opposite of what they intend to do, can actually further inequality rather than fostering equality. So that is why I think the critical approach and the asking these questions is vitally important and having that kind of critical mindset. So in practice what does that mean? Well firstly I think it means developing our networks and our own reflective practice so that we are aware. But secondly as educators I think we can foster this in our teaching, in our interactions with our peers and our students. So as a couple of examples, a recent article by the wonderful scholar Zaynep Tafechi, some of you may have read this, how social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump. So in this article Zaynep talks about that progression which Martin is going to talk about more in a few minutes about that progression from the heyday of openness and isn't it wonderful and isn't it liberatory to the issues we have now around surveillance and oppressive power and access and so on. So in this article she concludes that the way forward is to figure out how our institutions, our checks and balances, and our social safeguards should function in the 21st century. Not just for digital technologies but for politics and the economy in general. And she concludes that by saying this responsible isn't on Russia or on Facebook or Google or Twitter alone, it is on us. So we are the agents of change in the context that we operate. So having the mindset to be reflective about our own practice and also to guide and model and help learn us to develop those practices is also important. Another example of a resource which I think is useful. There are so many but I wanted to highlight just a couple. I was at the Mozilla Festival just over a week ago, Moz Fest, and I was in a session talking about the Internet Health Report. This was published for the first time last year and it's going to be published every year. And it's a kind of open consultation about the health of the Internet, you know, what's positive and what issues do we have. And there are five areas that the focus is on and one of those five areas is openness. The others are inclusion, privacy and security, web literacy, et cetera. So we have wonderful resources that we can use as lenses to problematize and find ways forward through this rising tide of risks that we're aware of around working on the open web. And not only can we use that for our own reflective practice but we can engage our students with resources like these. So an example of how I have done that recently is for the past few months I was working with Mia Zamora in the U.S., Mahabali in Egypt, just pulling together what we're calling an emergent curriculum of equity focused open connected resources. We knew we wanted to do this work with our students. So this resource is open and available for everyone. We started teaching using this curriculum in September and many people have added ideas and activities that have become part of the curriculum. So it is truly open in that sense. But one of the reflections that we had recently was that we thought initially, as Mahabali said, that the resources would be really useful for our students directly. Things like the article by Zainab Tafekshi, the Internet Health Report, and they have been useful with students. But the most powerful impact has been for us in terms of being better teachers for our students. So in other words, not only sharing these resources but inviting conversation and difficult conversations often about these issues with our students because we feel it is really important to help prepare them to deal with these issues as they go through education and beyond. So the final idea before I hand over to Martin, because I think probably the discussion period will be most useful for us, is my feeling is that I hope that those of us who are working in open education can engage in what I call a critical advocacy. So we recognize the benefits of openness on global institutional societal levels. But we're fully aware of the risks. And I hope that we'll be able to talk about the difference between openness as a value as an individual practice because individuals navigate the tensions between the benefits and the risks of openness in their daily practice. And practices that may be very positive for us in the open terrain may be highly problematic and even dangerous for some of our students because they are marginalized in particular ways, not all of which are visible to us. So it needs great sensitivity and reflection on our part in order to practice openness well. And I think this notion of having a critical approach helps us and equips us to do that. So particularly for educators, I think we have a responsibility to support learners in developing their skills and awareness to navigate the open web so that they can participate fully and safely and with confidence. So that's probably a lot all at once. But before I hand over to Martin, I expect we might have a time for discussion in between. But before I hand over to Martin, I just want to remind everyone that the open education community, one of our upcoming conferences is the OER conference, which this year will be held outside the UK for the first time in Galway. That's OER 19. And the focus of the conference is critical and global perspectives. So the co-chairs of the conference are myself and Laura Chernewich. But the true organizers and hosts of the conference are ALT, the Association for Learning Technology. So the title is Recentering Open, and that's really about acknowledging the fact that open is often centered on the perspectives of those with power and privilege. And we want to change that discussion to talk about re-centering open on the perspectives of those on the margins in whatever ways it may be. And then to conclude, I sent a message to Martin and Alistair with my slide saying that this would normally be a slide that I would include in a presentation such as this. And I wasn't going to include it because I thought, well, Martin can speak for himself, but they both agreed that I could leave it in there at the end. And Martin will expand on this more fully. But I think this really encapsulates so much of how we feel, but it's also quite empowering. So it's never been more risky to operate in the open, but it has also never been more vital to operate in the open because our culture is increasingly open, networked and participatory. And we need to engage in that. So that's all I have to say. I'd love to open up the forum for questions or conversation. Okay. Thanks, Catherine. Now we can, I've made the chat very large because it's over to you, please. Some questions already. Annika would like to hear more about the equality perspective. And Marcus was asking what are your top five suggestions to move forward with open education in the sense you described it so you can take one at a time. Okay. The equality perspective is, I mean, it's very interesting. One of the glossy headlines of any kinds of openness is that it can reduce barriers, it can increase equality. And I think one of the things we've learned over the last number of years is that at a personal level, specific open practices can actually increase inequality rather than equality. So for a very small example, I'm an open practitioner who has been open for some time. I started engaging in social networks when they were much less sinister and there was less surveillance and there was less of a role of capitalism and so on. So I built up my network and it was all very positive for me. And now I have the benefit and beauty of that network in my work. So if I'm working with students now who are thinking about engaging in the open web, I cannot with good conscience ask them to just go create a Twitter account and let's have a conversation. Because Twitter is a very different place now than it was. So speaking from my standpoint, sure it's very positive and I have a position in my work and in my field that allows me to use it in particular ways. But for someone who's marginalized in any number of ways, who's in one of my classes, that may not be the case. And it could be in very simple ways. I taught in IT for years so it could be even asking students to contribute in a class or a cohort of students where very few of the students are female in an open forum. That's being marginalized, that's being very visible in particular ways and of course there are many, many others. In terms of the five suggestions, Mark, that's quite a question and I think you could probably have some good suggestions there. The first list that I showed has a lot of them I think. Helping individuals to develop digital capabilities and agency and networks is key. Providing support at institutional level for those who want to engage in open practices in particular ways, resources and support. Because one of the things I certainly found in my research was where there is no policy or strategy around openness. Many individuals, both students and staff, feel that if they make a mistake they will be in peril, but the university may not have their back as they say. So the absence of policy and the absence of strategy speaks very loudly to people within higher education institutions. Martin, I'd like to open this up to you as well if you want to add anything here. I don't think this all pertains to what I have just said. Do you want to add anything? I'd agree with everything you said. I think Peter raised the point, do students demand openness? If I'm getting the question right. I think that's an interesting point actually. Students don't come in onto campus or whatever, teach me how to be open and often they actively resist it. I think that's understandable. I've been a student myself recently. I took an MA in art history which isn't my subject area at all. It really reminded me how much learning is a vulnerable process. I think people want to feel safe. If you're forcing people to go out in the open it exposes that vulnerability. But at the same time I think getting our students to develop those skills to be able to critically engage in this space is something we need to give almost like one of those graduate skills we need to develop now on how to be a good network and how to make effective use of the network. So it's a tricky balance I think. Lots of students don't think they need lots of skills, but they do often. Students often don't like group work for instance, but we know it's one of those skills that we can help develop them with. Can I add one thing to that? Do I have time Alistair? Just about that students demanding openness. That's so interesting because my perspective is that we like Martin said about this notion of graduate skills. We are helping to educate students to be not only professionals and engage in a particular discipline they're in but also citizens in an increasingly open network and participatory culture. So if the fears about surveillance or the risks of being online prevent people from engaging in that then their voices will not be in that culture and they cannot advocate for what they believe in and what will help them in their communities. So I think it's vitally important and essential for higher education institutions to help students to develop those kind of network and open skills. Yeah it's about helping them negotiate different layers of openness because sometimes you want to be on a fairly low layer and then other times you want how to move between them. It's not as you said it's not open or closed. It's many layers and which layer is appropriate for particular students at a particular time in a particular situation. Catherine can continue to answer questions in the chat actually but I'm going to let Martin get started. I'll just move over back to the presentations and Martin gets your turn now. So off you go. Okay hi everyone. First of all if you hear some noise in the background my dog's decided to start throwing his bone around on a hard floor so it may sound like I'm in the middle of a building site. Okay yeah so good. When Alastair said let's talk about what now or the crisis in open education or open scholarship my approach to thinking about this was maybe a very academic one is to start looking backward in a way. So in 2011 I wrote a book called The Digital Scholar which is open access if you want to read it. And I think in many ways it could have been called The Open Scholar because it's really the openness that's the important part of that. As a scholar if you create your presentations in PowerPoint but just store them on your hard disk there's nothing interesting about the digital aspect of that. It's the openness that's interesting. And so one of the things I wanted to think about was to think what's changed since then. And at the time when we looked at it around 2011 there's been quite a lot of studies around 2010 looking at scholars, academics, educators, use of new technology. Web 2.0 was still a usable term back then. And in general they all sort of found the same thing really. So this study from Procter Williams and Stewart said frequent or intensive use of new technologies is rare and some researchers regard blogs, wikis and other novel forms of communication as a waste of time or even dangerous. So it's this whole kind of like approach with caution feeling at the time. And so for people like me, you know I've been a blogger since 2006, 2005 I think the role I took and a lot of similar people was one of advocacy really. You should get online, it's great, everyone should start keeping a blog. You should all be on Twitter, it's going to change your life. I think for those of us who are there early, being there early is a kind of a form of privilege in itself. And we kind of wanted other people to see that benefit. And I think we were probably guilty, although I tried to sort of present a balanced view in that book. I think in general it was a kind of an advocacy book. And I think we were slightly guilty of glossing over some of the downsides. I think particularly because we knew that people would jump on those straight away and say, look we're having a GDPR on the way, so people go, oh there we are. It's a bit bad, we don't need to think about this or engage with it at all. Sometimes getting academics or colleagues to engage with things that we think are useful can be difficult. So at the time I think that was the kind of stance. So I wanted to go and think about what's changed since then, in the seven years since then. And in doing so I sort of brought out five main themes really and some conclusions at the end. So the first of these is in many ways it's kind of become mainstream. So I mean at the time it was still slightly unusual, so it's my dog climbing off me, slightly unusual to me, an academic with a blog or a Twitter account. And that's not the case anymore, I think that's almost the norm. And there was a study recently in 2017 where they found that online distance education enrollments were strong and mainly growing across universities. Existing institutions were increasing the online distance education offerings. And there were many new institutions were offering online distance education. So that whole kind of area of open online education has kind of really become part of the mainstream now. And also part of your mainstream practice as an individual. And related to that there's been a shift to open I think in many ways. Like I was saying that book was called The Digital Scholar and it was the digital part that we were excited about. But really it's the open part now. Open has become a real modifier for many terms in education now. So we have open textbooks, open data, open pedagogy, open science, open educational practice and so on. So Open has seen lots of large scale recent developments. And I think the economist even declared recently that open versus close has now replaced right versus left in kind of political discourse. So we've seen this kind of shift of openness becoming a kind of prominent discussion point in academia. And again perhaps related to this is development of policy to kind of help that mainstream in a way. So there's Royal Map which is the registry of open access repository mandates and policies. So it tracks open access policies. So in 2011 there were 387 such policies and there's 887 now in 68 different countries. So there's been a kind of gradual if not radical growth of policies. So as well as open access publication mandates in many countries also have policies relating to open data. There's a European framework for digital competence for educators which says that for all educators a key skill is to be able to effectively find and identify resources. And UNESCO made OER kind of central method for realising their sustainable development goal. So we've seen kind of development policy around openness and open practice and those kind of things. So those first three I think kind of lay a kind of bedrock if you like for open practice within higher education. I think the other kind of key area of interest I think that's developed is this idea of network identity. Or what George Flexianos often calls network participatory scholarship which is our academic shoes social networks. He says to pursue, share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate and further their scholarship. And there's been some, this is the area I think it's kind of richest for research. So people like Bonnie Stewart and Catherine herself have written a lot on this. So Bonnie notes for instance that establishing a network identity increases visibility for pre-tenure academics. And this increased network and impact can offset some of those effects of a kind of precarious academic labour. Christine Acosta has also written excellent stuff in this area. She talks about how sometimes the online culture and that network identity culture is at odds with the formal academic culture. And she talks about people who haven't, scholars haven't adopted a double gamer strategy. We have to play both of those games in order to be effective. So in some ways it can be quite liberating. I think as Catherine was talking about you know I think for instance I've seen a lot of the good keynotes I've seen now aren't necessarily people with a strong publication record but they're people with a very good online identity and who contribute a lot to the community. And I think that in some ways that is quite a democratising space. But at the same time it's also an area that's become very negative. So Bonnie again talks about network platforms are increasingly recognised as sites of rampant misogyny, racism and harassment. So it's not the kind of friendly space that it once was. Which I think leads on to my fifth point which I think Catherine covered more effectively than I can. I think we have seen a kind of criticality digital scholarship now, an open scholarship. And I think this is in contrast to the kind of just pure advocacy that we saw previously. So people have been thinking like what's wrong with this? What are the areas we need to be critical of and bring attention to? Things such as data privacy, data capitalism, political movements that are driven by social media, fake news, all of those things. And so that's been good to see. So I think Catherine talked about the OER conference. I've seen a real shift in that over the years from basically here's my OER project, isn't it great? Very useful to have a much more critical approach to thinking about what does it mean to be open? How can we improve this space and those kind of things. So I just quickly come on to some conclusions now. I hope we do have time. So I think it's fair to say that actually much is quite unchanged now. This is academia. We don't really go in for revolution so much. And people have probably heard me before at the moment about the whole idea of disruption. Just basically disruption is a really bad idea for technology. It just doesn't apply to our sector at all. Nearly all the examples are of quite slow adoption. So although some things change, much is unchanged in how we go about education. But there is a kind of picture of gradual acceptance. I remember when I was doing this stuff, first of all, like first of all I was told you, don't publish an online journals which I don't think people would say now. But also like why would you keep a blog that's just a waste of time whereas now I get asked can you promote that thing on your blog or on your Twitter account? So people kind of accept that this is a valid part of an academic's profile in a way and not something to necessarily be sniffed at. But I think what you see is this kind of dialogue between traditional and open scholarship. I think at the time people, particularly those in the digital scholarship, open scholarship world is going to be a revolution that's going to replace traditional scholarship. And I think it's much more, we're beginning to see where they're complementary in a way. And I mentioned having a good online network while reputation and persona leads to getting keynote speeches. And I think how those things feed into each other is what we're seeing. We're seeing how some processes in traditional scholarship are being affected by open scholarship. So I think open access is a good one. But also when you have research projects now trying to make sure that you're using different forms of dissemination to get the results out. I do another talk sometime which is about the paradoxes of open scholarship. And that's a way for me to kind of think about it. It's neither good nor bad now, if it was ever one or the other. So things are true simultaneously. So it's true that it's both, for instance, it's both the democratizing space, but also at the same time people who are disenfranchised in conventional space, if you like, are increasingly disenfranchised online. So both of those things are true simultaneously. And that's quite difficult to negotiate, I think. And there's a number of these paradoxes. So I did a bit of research with Katie Jordan. I'll say I did. Katie did most of that. Katie Jordan, Viv Wolf and Irwin DeVries, which grew out of a kind of conversation, a conference we were having where we were sort of being grumpy old people complaining that people don't refer back to a lot of the older open education stuff, particularly when the open university model was being adopted in the 70s globally. There's a lot of work on pedagogy and social implications of openness. And we felt, we kind of felt this, but we weren't sure if it was true. So Katie's always at the stuff. And she did a citation analysis where she took a number of, so she did a search for open education, then found all of the articles that they had been referenced, and then built up a kind of citation network spreading out from those and then found the articles that those papers had referenced and so on. And this was the kind of like diagram that came out of that. And well, we've put these sectors on. But you can see that there's often, it kind of really brought out what we'd thought, what we'd felt in many ways, that these areas don't really talk to each other. So the MOOCs people don't really talk to the area people, obviously don't talk to them. Their papers don't really reference them much. Open access publishing tends to be off to one side. And there's some work around social media such as the work by George Flexianos, I mentioned, and Bonnie Stewart. But then over on the right, see we've got distance education and open learning. So that's very rarely mentioned in all of this history around open education. And open education schools is also a kind of off on its own. So the one area that seems to be perhaps a kind of glue in bringing these things together is open educational practice. And maybe that's where we're moving to now more of a focus around what does all this stuff mean for us in education. So I think trying to build bridges between these sort of islands of expertise, islands of practice will be a useful direction to go in. So I've got to end with a poll. I think I still need to fire this one up. So when I start, I think I'm going to ask, should we reward open scholarship? So by reward, I mean give people promotion for it or credit for it and those kind of things. And the reason I'm asking this question, and perhaps I'm going to lead you on the answer, is I think when I started out, so that thing about five years ago or seven, eight years ago, I think I would have always been an advocate very strongly that we should reward it. And I worked within the Open University to try and get the tenure and promotion criteria changed to reward it. But the reason I guess I'm asking it as a question now is that by rewarding it, you're placing pressure on people to play that game as Christina Costa would put it. So you're forcing people to go online. So are you then forcing other academics and staff to have to deal with all those kind of problems and issues that Catherine was talking about about playing the data capitalism game or open up to potential abuse and harassment, those kind of things. And so by saying we want to reward it, we're encouraging people to do it, but also are you then also forcing it? So that's my pitch about should we do it. I'll let the votes come in. Okay, interesting. So we added not an easy question in at the last minute. So it was just going to be yes or no. But I think that, I think it's interesting. I think had we done this with this audience sort of five, six years ago, I think the yeses would have been pretty much 100%, but I think that the fact that not an easy question is also getting quite a lot of votes. I think people, you know, there's a, we have to say no, we shouldn't, but I think people are, they're not an easy question, sort of hints at the complexity around this thing, I think. Okay, so I'll close the poll there. Yes, all my photos are from Unsplash, which is why they look nice, got my mind. And up for discussion now. Okay, thanks Martin, lots to think about there. We'll just have a little bit of time if there are any questions in the chat there. I think it's the answer to your poll was yes, but I was, sorry, Martin, there you see a... I was just going to say, shall I dip in and answer some questions or do you answer for anything else? So Marcus asks, do you think academic culture and digital scholarship continues to play two unrelated games? I think the Venn diagram of the intersection is kind of increasing, if you like. So I think in some ways they often are different, but I think increasingly people do see the benefits of them. And I think, particularly where they're complementary, so there's research that, you know, if you have a good online identity that helps with citations of papers and having citations of papers generally a good thing to have, you know, if it increases your H index. So you can help one play the other, I think. But I do sometimes feel that there's a difference in culture sometimes, you know. So the blog culture for instance is very much about kind of informal and immediate, which is kind of totally different to the published journal kind of world which is kind of take your time to publish and use very precise language and those kind of things. But I think those two things can be complementary in a way, you know, so you can publish your paper which no one understands but then produce a nice sort of five minute video explaining it to the general public. So I think it's in more of an overlap between those. Yeah, there's Anna says she comes from a faculty with no understanding for open scholarship, I recognise that. I think there are many places where there is very little understanding of that. So when local initiatives come up they aren't rewarded. Yeah, okay, so I think one of the things there is that academics in general can be quite competitive, I think. And so I always think if they start seeing the person down the corridor he's getting keynote invites because they have a good online reputation and they think okay, it's worth pursuing this. In some ways I think you can nudge people to that kind of behaviour. But by reward I think so for instance it's a very small change but we got the promotion criteria and you changed to say you have to demonstrate excellence in research as evidenced by publication in academic journals or, and this was the key bit, or other forms of digital output or something like that. So it allows you to, it gives you room to make the case, you know, that this person's online reputation is worthy, is always equivalent to a kind of research process that happens in a journal. So some of you may know my colleague Tony Hearst who keeps an excellent blog and it really operates in a completely different way to kind of a lot of conventional academic stuff. So he will find some open data, play about with it, and some tools, present a kind of network analysis, post it up on his blog and he'll do that like in a day. But he then might follow up and write an article about it. But I think you can make a case with like over a prolonged period where Tony's blogging activity represents scholarly activity that should be rewarded. We need to move towards our close there but Fabio has had a couple of questions there. Okay, so that's one for you there, Catherine. Oh, it's for Catherine, yes. I think she's answered in that. Yes, well there's two questions I think. One, Fabio, I just put a one-liner there that notion of critical advocacy I think is really powerful and I think it means moving away from the advocacy around openness which you often see in some university training about branding yourself online, that kind of advocacy or openness and moving more towards openness with a sensitivity to risks, particularly risks that are encountered at the hard edge of personal practices and that it's very individual and continually negotiated. And I think going in with that awareness and sensitivity results in much better conversations and much more productive forms of openness for individuals. So I think we can advocate for openness at an institutional level wholeheartedly. This is the difference. But when we're engaging with individuals having a much more sensitive and person-centered acknowledgement of the risks. I wonder myself, is it time given the fact that many of the commercial platforms that we use, I mean Twitter's come up here but Facebook groups, Google Plus and all these other places have been compromised more or less. Is it time to revisit safe trusted spaces for collaboration like we used to have wiki educator, wiki versity, they're still there. Maybe is it time to rev them up again? Is it time to move to mastodon instead of Twitter? Should we be moving towards trusted spaces for sharing rather than the compromised commercial sites? Alice, without answering your questions I would just like to point out that that is a wonderful example of this continual negotiation that I often speak about and that is what being open is about is that continual negotiation and actually modeling that for our students and any staff that we may be also working with because there's no such thing as flicking the switch of open and saying these are my tools, these are my platforms. So I think modeling that it's messy and that it's never fixed is really important. And I think it's a great question and yes, I think we do need to use a broader suite of tools to enable us to be open and closed in different ways. Lorena says trusted for whom and yes indeed, I mean you decide what's trusted the way we have. Who do you trust? It was interesting. And that's the important of our networks. Just that you mentioned Mastodon, it was interesting last year when a few of us had a play with it. Just kind of go to a new social network site and think okay, knowing what we know now about how this stuff works how do we want to start changing our behavior? You can start with a blank slate but with the kind of knowledge previously when we were on Twitter we didn't know how it was going to evolve. So you did see people I think behaving differently on Mastodon but having said that, I think Marcus Nakes makes the point, the network effect is crucial. I've stopped using Mastodon because well, everyone's on Twitter and I've only got so many spaces I want to go to. So it is a kind of very difficult thing to negotiate. I do think in some ways the point that Jim Groom and Alan Levine and those people make about owning your own space is important. That's something we could probably help students with. So a domain of one's own. So you can use third party tools but ultimately you have your own space which you own and control I think is important. Okay, nearly time to wrap up here. I just want to move as you see the chat continues. It's down in the bottom right corner it's just a little smaller. A little fine finale here how can we make openness and education safer for students and teachers and that is really a lot of what Catherine and Martin were talking about really but any practical ideas what are you doing to try to be open but safely or safer and just type your answers you can write a whole sentence if you want just down here. Welcome to comment Martin. Very much about critical skills, criteria for safe. That's one of the things isn't it. I think things can become very quickly unsafe. It's very difficult to predict when that happens. We can all think of examples of people who said something in one space and it's just kind of off the cuff comment to friends or whatever and gets put out more publicly and suddenly people are calling for their jobs and things. I think it's very difficult sometimes to know where the people around you sit around these things. That's a nice little meme of recently where it was a Venn diagram and there were two totally unrelated circles and one was internet and the other was privacy. That's right. The more we encourage students and staff you're forcing them to give up privacy. There may be people who really don't want to do that if you're making it possible for them to participate without doing it. You need to take responsibility for that. Sometimes we need to construct safer areas for the students to share in a protected place rather than letting them go out. It's come up here about the digital literacies for students and teachers. That is key because certainly sometimes the people who wrestle most with dealing with how to protect their privacy in particular ways are ones that haven't developed the digital skills and capabilities to enable them to have different spaces to use for different things and even to make productive use of anonymity like you spoke about at the start of this webinar Alistair. That's all part of this notion of digital capabilities. That's just an essential foundation I think for all of this. I'm delighted to see it here. And continue our reflection absolutely. Okay we're getting up to the top of the hour and I just like to move on to wrap up. We'd like you to say some comments on today's webinar. It's a little bit of quick feedback. The chat's there as well. Down at the very bottom there are some web links where you can pick up information about the OER 2019 conference about the rest of this week's webinar program. Sign up for some more if you like this. And you can follow Catherine's website and Martin's blog and Catherine on Twitter. Just click and go to them. Some final words of reflection. Who wants to kick off Martin or Catherine? How do we put a full stop on this? Martin. I don't think I have any wise words of reflection. I think we're at an interesting time. We've had the initial flourish of enthusiasm around these things and now we're seeing some of the downsides and things. One possible response to that is just to go, I'm out of it. I'm not going to engage in any of that kind of stuff. There are a lot of benefits for it and generally it can be quite a positive thing. But also I would be low to just seed all that online space to the Nazis. Let them have it. The trolls and the idiots. When it's such a potentially rich space. But also I think there's a real duty on academics and people in education to be part of that space. We can't ignore it. It's like it's with the President of the United States pretty much running the country by Twitter. We can't say it doesn't affect you in your normal life. So there is a kind of duty in us to participate in this. But it's a much more complex space with a set of issues around it now. Perhaps even more now than when it was all good and fun that we need to engage with it. Catherine. Thanks. I agree with all of that, Martin. It's very powerful. This notion of reflective practice and modeling that kind of messy reflective practice with our peers and our students I think is so important and it's just another aspect of us being learners as well as teachers. None more so than navigating these open spaces and helping students do the same. The only other thing I would end with is just that I'm, despite all of the risks and challenges that we face, I'm just immensely hopeful and feel that this is, it's so important that all of us are here in this space doing this work right now because if we are not here with the experience that we have and the sensibilities that we have voicing what we are talking about today, then other voices will prevail. Just like it's so important in a civic sense to always vote I think this is, you know, this is the work of openness just now, this kind of critical work. So I'm just delighted to be doing it with you all. It's pretty much. Okay, I would like to thank everybody for being here. It's been, we have loads of good comments in the chat which has been going excellently and plenty to think about for the future and as I said plenty of webinars this week. If you have the time, if you can take some time from your daily work to jump into one of them then please do so. I'd like to ask the Secretary of Eden to stop the recording now and