 Yeah, okay. Okay, if you can start out by just introducing yourself to us and, you know, where you come from or who you work with. Hi, nice to meet you. I'm David Kernahan. I work for JISC in the UK. I'm also an independent, I suppose, analyst on higher education. I write on a couple of blog news sites, including my own blog site, Follows of the Apocalypse. I've had a long-standing interest in open education and I do like to take a critical perspective of where I can. So we'd like to ask you, why does open matter for students, faculty and institutions? Okay, I think open matters much more widely than that. I think open matters for everybody that uses the internet and or wants to access information. Ever since the beginning of time, information has always been a scarce good. It's been privileged. You have to ask for access. You have to be granted access and you have to be deemed worthy of access in order to find out information about the way in which the world works around us. I suppose openness came from the spirit of scientific inquiry initially. I mean, science just works much better when things are open. So there has always been calls for people to write academic papers and to share all the details of their experiment, to share their data, to mean that other people can verify the experiment. I'm in this with an argument that while society in the UK were having back in the 1700s, so this is all old stuff that the more access we have to information and to the conditions around information, the more we can verify information. As the internet developed, I mean it's a perfect platform for replicating information. It makes the storage of millions of copies of a resource not much more difficult than storing one. It makes it possible for millions of people to own their own copy of a resource at no cost. And unfortunately as the internet expanded, a lot of people tried to import all the business models onto the web, including in many cases institutions, including in many cases institutions. I mean I'm thinking about early web education products like old learn and fathom in which it was just another wire of buying access to a course or to published material. But the possibilities of the web for sharing have transcended this. That even where information is supposedly scarce, it's still accessible, it's still possible to get it. I mean you think of stuff like the ICANN has, a PDF hashtag where academics are sharing copies largely of their own papers to people that want to read them but can't or are unable to or don't wish to pay 60 pounds to Elsevier or Pearson in order to get access to them. You see the same thing happening in music, in film. Piracy tends to start where the business models of scarce content are just breaking down. And it's possible to see fixes for that. I mean services like say Spotify or Apple Music, they've actually cut piracy because they support access to multiple songs. They're still not open because we have the second big cultural chivalrous. It's the idea of people are paid for their work. They're paid for what they have done rather than because they're people or because of what they can do. And they need to be paid in order to live. I mean open I think is the first flowering of a much wider critical perspective that will probably lead to something terrifying like the end of waged work and a completely different way of organising society and opens on the vanguard of that. So for institutions, for academics, for students, you're supposed to be on the cutting edge of the cultural movements that are happening in society and I think open is a perfect example of that. I guess, I mean that was very large scale. Perhaps this is too near a question. I should open via default at universities. Why do you think so or why not? I think that open does need to be a default at universities. I think that the days of restricting access to information, I think they're finished. I think that apart from information linked to personal activities and privacy that there's no longer really a reason to pretend information is scarce actually when it's abundant. This however has to be coupled with a way of supporting academic staff a way of making sure that it's still possible to actually make a living or to exist as a human being whilst being an academic. How do you think we can engage our faculty, students and people at these institutions to be open to this kind of... There's a lot of theories of change around this and there are different answers depending on how cynical you are feeling. The worst one I think I've heard which I will repeat here as a quotation, not my actual view is that we just need to wait for them to die. The younger academics, they get this, they're growing up sharing stuff, they get the way this works and the older academics are more set in the patterns of old fashioned publication and of publication as an achievement as something that you should be proud that you've been published. Younger academics I think see publication as just something that you do. But as I say that is terribly cynical. I think that the benefits of open are starting to become more and more apparent in terms of practice that the questions come when openness appears to be affecting people's livelihoods people's practice, people's jobs, that the big barrier the open agenda has to overcome is not any facet of openness itself. It's the way it interacts with systems of prestige, power and money. So addressing those issues I think is key. And everyone likes a big audience if you want to share something. Isn't that a benefit? The audience has been shown in numerous studies after study after study if you release an academic research paper and it's openly licensed more people will read it, lots more in order of magnitude more will read it that makes you more likely to be cited, that makes you more likely to be invited to collaborations to conferences like OpenEd because people can read your stuff and they can see what you're doing. I mean I was invited to deliver a keynote at OpenEd in 2013 and I was hugely flattered to be asked. That's because of the material I was publishing myself openly on my personal blog it had nothing at all to do with the work I was paid to do it had everything to do with the work I was doing because I wanted it to do. And that I think personally that was a big changing point it's like okay this stuff I'm just doing because I'm interested in it because I like writing because I like to make sense of stuff because I like to share things. That's actually been much more beneficial to my personal career than a lot of the stuff that I've done as a paid policy officer or a program manager or anything like that. I mean that's not to say I've not done some amazing things in those roles and I've had amazing opportunities but in terms of what's actually shaped the way that I live my life it's been open publishing. And maybe lastly anything here that you've seen, learned about that really surprised you or sparked an interest? This is a weird conference this year. It's like it's two conferences that are superimposed. You've got a stream as a conference that's all about open textbooks it's all about demonstrating open texts are as good as paid for texts and that they can replace open texts and you can also link to that the agenda around analytics. But there's also been a really prominent critical strand of people looking critically as openness saying okay is openness and alloy good? Is it something that is just the best possible answer under every circumstances? Is it something that we've not actually properly critiqued? And I found that really excited. I mean I'm looking forward to Roland Mose presentation after lunch today. I loved Amy Collier's stuff this morning. That was absolutely fantastic. Paul Stacey on business models was really interesting as well. I mean he's just such an amazing person and he's really taken a critical look at open business models. I got a lot from that. So yeah it's been a really interesting conference. Lots of arguments I always liked that in the conference. I think a really good academic conference should have at least one session and you can sit in and think I completely disagree with everything in this session including basic underlying premise. And that's always a lovely experience so I'll add a couple of them too. Thank you so much for talking to us. No thank you very much. I hope that's useful or interesting.