 Okay, aloha everybody. Good morning. Good almost afternoon. My name is Billy Mikey. I'm from the University of Hawaii at Manoa By quick show of hands who's been to Hawaii before a handful of you awesome You wish not yet. Not yet. You will soon Since today, I'm going to talk a little bit about the politics of technology and the politics of open I've quite a few slides, so I'm going to move pretty quickly. Here's a brief outline of what I'm going to be talking about Open it assumes the use of technology in most cases Where our activity and open is changing practices and pedagogies are sort of coming to the forefront Technology is not neutral. And so I'm going to show you why we should be asking non technical questions of it It's pretty obvious But our practice actually influences the emergence of new technology and then what I want you to be asking yourself is Do you have a free relationship to technology? And do you have a free relationship to open? So real quick my background. I earned a master's degree in ed tech in 2012 I wandered around professionally a little bit. I spent a couple years at Creative Commons learned about IP and open licensing and how great that is Technology obviously was a very big part of that And then for the last few years I've worked at the University of Hawaii I'm the OER coordinator or your technologist. I build textbooks with faculty We use press books and we do everything technically open legally open and Now I've actually re-entered the Academy. I am a PhD student with the Hawaii Research Center for future studies Futures is not like looking in a crystal ball. It's really there is something to it There's a method and I don't know a lot about it, but I'm going to show you what I do know This is Jim Dater. He he founded The the research center at Manoa the Manoa schools they call it in 1971 the Hawaii State Legislature actually established the research center It's in law It actually would take an active law to remove the research center from the University from the state which is unique these are the four futures that He he claims that most predictions actually fall into continued growth essentially would continue on the same path Collapse which you know, we might be looking at right now Disciplined future is where we sort of learn to live within our constraints And a final one is transformation transformative future We actually learn not only live within our constraints, but develop new technology new ways of working together And sort of break free of what we're you know looking at right now My research interests. I'm I'm very critical in my work I'm very critical in many aspects of my life. Many of you know me on Twitter for being that way But really what I'm trying to do is question power structures and sort of look at what's enabling or hindering collaboration IP law is a passion of mine. I've been very focused on that since my time at Creative Commons I'm very focused on self-determination and people being able to do more and how law and policy actually influence that And I'm trying to myself and help you all do that to encourage The cultivation of a free relationship to technology and to openness So what is open and what are we actually doing here? Open some of us see opens open as an end some of us see open as a means to get somewhere You know, you're probably met very familiar with these These parts these things come out of the UN UNESCO Openness equal access to knowledge and education something that we're all sort of fighting for These are these come from the mission statements the vision statements from these very prestigious organizations in the open movement Mozilla Tech Tech focused Wikimedia Foundation and the OE consortium these are folks I look to you know, you can my slides are online You can click through if you'd like to but these are folks basically focusing focusing on many of the same things and that is Trying to help everyone everywhere gain access to to what they what what we can we have to to better themselves Social justice is a is a big theme. It's very important. It's sort of intersecting my work becoming a strand of my work It's something that you know, I've always sort of implicitly known. It was something That we worked for in open, but now I'm trying to look at the research and figure out You know who's published on this what the themes are in that and how policy and law and technology Influence our ability to do that But the main thing to take away from this is that social justice open a lot of it relies really on technology these practices That we've been promoting. We're sort of developing and researching on they really do rely on technology But at the same time open is not a binary open as a spectrum open is something that is different to everybody in your own context and so, you know quoting Catherine here we have to move beyond the open closed economies and And even unified conceptions of openness there will be new organizations coming about the organizations who have never actually considered open before That all of a sudden think oh, well, let's let's have a special issue of our journal that talks about OEP Let's do this and that let's let's try open and we should be open to that If you're familiar with Larry Lessig 1998 he made a publication He recognized there are four constraints to human behavior Law social norms the market and architecture you can think of architecture as technological infrastructure And so law we have open licenses to help us get around that Social norms we're still working out how that's gonna how it's gonna happen the market or the financial end of it Open is not free open cost money And we're looking at sustainability models around that and architecture the underlying Technological infrastructure is really important and it's often overlooked, which is why I'm here talking to you Again, this was an article focused on openness and social justice And again these four themes came up the social the technical the legal the financial barriers to openness. So openness is not open clothes It's not a binary. There are multiple Barriers to it. And so we need to think of it in in multiple ways Again open washing anybody heard of open washing before f open. It's pretty fun to say pretty fun to poke fun at people It's a real thing, you know But arguments about open have existed for a long time Richard Stallman is sort of held in line with what free software is The typical person you run into on the street when you sit when you say free software They think of free as in cost and that's it That's where the conversation ends if you look back free versus open-source software free software It really comes down to a matter of Principles and sort of the ethics behind it not only can you just not only can you see the source code running the software? But you have certain freedoms and obligations associated with it And a few years ago when the hoop when the MOOC hype cycle sort of leveled out We looked back at Coursera and edX and and those folks and we realized that you know, how open were they? Open is also complex and stewarding open is quite complex Creative Commons They sort of ran into something late last year Flickr decided to change what they're doing change their model and Essentially a quarter of the digital Commons globally was put at risk This is something we should pay attention to this was a financial constraint a financial barrier But it's writing on the technical infrastructure that we all use I have thousands of photos on Flickr But as it a few months ago, I have not uploaded anything to Flickr partially Because of my own values but partially because Flickr is still blocking me from uploading even CC licensed work If you're in the EU, which many of you are Article 13 many parts of the copyright directive are sort of problematic in terms of Digital sharing digital linking and that sort of thing and then we have Syhub on the right-hand side and Syhub as much as you'd like We think Syhub is actually expanding our access to knowledge. It's very problematic in a legal sense And I believe her name is Erica the one who founded Syhub. They're constantly moving the URL the domain Because different countries different jurisdictions are sort of blocking allowing They're always sort of playing whack-a-mole trying to stop what's happening in Syhub but let's look back with rewind a little bit and What what is your philosophy of technology? I'm not asking you so you can yell at me right now But I want you to be thinking about this. Are we only thinking about technology in Technological ways is something we really should be thinking about who controls the pipes and the roadways of information These are Google slides, right? That's problematic and if you're tweeting about this presentation You're probably doing it on Twitter and that's problematic who owns those roads who owns the pipes So looking back on some earlier theories of Technology Martin Heidegger is problematic as his career ended up being He did recognize that technology is a human activity As humans we sort of bring forth technology bring forth things from nature And nature it doesn't doesn't reveal technology on its own humans have a role in that Technology is not neutral. I think many of us can agree. It's it's absolutely not neutral But when we regard technology as being neutral Heidegger said We will be delivered over to it in the worst possible way. That's a really scary thought but again, this is from 1954 This is not new. We've had warning signs for a long long time Foreman to matter this is Gilberis and Mendoen 1958 he talked about this idea of form and humans revealing Technology bringing it into matter There's continuity between the technical and the natural Technology will not reveal itself to us on its own. It takes us sort of bringing it out from nature Simon don't also commented on Our relationship to technology and he sort of defined, you know as much as we don't like binaries He sort of separated humans into two groups the major techniques and the minor techniques. I'd consider myself a Major technique, you know I would do that. My mother is probably a minor technique But again, it's our relationship to technology Do we choose to lift up the hood and see what's running underneath there? Or do we just sort of put the key in and turn it on and drive down the road and sort of it's our responsibility to Have both both groups if there are two groups or the entire spectrum involved in conversations about technology Technology if we really want it to to bring about equity We do have a very complex relationship to technology technology has changed the last 150 years have brought about technology that just kind of blown the doors open you think about the clock is something of convenience but keeping time and sort of Quantifying our day-to-day life is something that on its own is problematic. It's it's part of our lives. We cannot escape it We need to be really careful about this I'm capitalism economic forces are really sort of leveraging technology. This has been happening for a long long time Mumford he recognized this a while ago and he he recognized how capitalism and folks that are in charge of big businesses We're going to leverage technology for their own purposes to serve themselves But probably not always to serve the common good And obviously our contemporary interplay of tech and policy is just frightening if you've read any of my blog posts about Surveillance technology. You'll know that I am highly skeptical of what we're doing and how we're being tracked around the world This is our friend Yeah, I'm gonna move on And so you take you know technological dystopias we can we can really fun I'm gonna run through it through a few of them, but I don't want to burden you with them Today's technology really is different. It's different than 10 years ago different than 20 years ago We got to pay attention to what's happening Martin Weller he reluctantly published a blog post Not that long ago like last month and he was asked to sort of look at the future of technology just to reiterate reiterate this point Technology is not neutral. It's not ethically or politically neutral at all And we're gonna see this come up more and more but again, you cannot look at technology and say that on its own It's not gonna do anything or on its own. It's it's neutral. We are humans We are involved in it and it's it's just rapidly it's speeding ahead We're seeing technology that reinforces biases The folks that design the algorithms help you find information locate knowledge. They have their own biases They they're looking at not only How people are searching for information, but also when they write code They are doing so with their own personal experience built into that I recommend checking out algorithms of oppression by Sophia Noble if you have not Obviously, I know brexit probably came up once or twice. I apologize But it's pretty obvious that technology is sort of interfering with politics And we're not really sure what to do with that and it's sort of a train that's running off the tracks What's really frightening because we're here for education right ed tech is how Technology is shaping students and shaping the future the students that we're teaching the students were trying to Help out they are the future, but when we have a lack of trust when we have a lack of personal interaction and Sort of a rush to jump on the AI train and surveillance train. This is just really freaky So, how am I doing on time? Left okay great so just to close because again, I'm in my first year my PhD Program and my my advisors don't really know what to make of me, which is kind of cool This is just the beginning But I want you to be thinking about your own philosophy of technology. Are you into open source? Do you care at all? Do you use do you write in markdown? Do you use Microsoft Word? Are you a pragmatist or do you just kind of do what's convenient and How much of your philosophy of technology is influenced by your philosophy of open open as a spectrum? We all have our own entry points into open, but it's heavily influenced by technology. We cannot divorce the two We also should be learning to question open this was Viv Rolf from open ed 2016 I'm really surprised this kind of this hasn't come up more But she says the open education community is critical within itself, but not of itself Huge point really really important. I'm probably gonna be publishing on critical approaches to open And open technology, but this is so easily forgotten Popful futures, so this is Debbie Halbert. She's my PhD supervisor right now She says futures can open our eyes to how we colonize the future with assumptions about linearity and inevitability And help us decolonize the future by opening up alternatives. I mentioned the four futures earlier on Again, this is not crystal ball magic This is looking ahead and seeing what are the constraints we're working in where might things lead to what are the worst-case scenarios? What are the possible trajectories? And and look at where we are where we'd like to be but also plan for like wow if this really goes bad Where white world might we end up? Last thing and kind of rewinding again to Martin Heidegger He said the closer we come to the danger the more brightly the ways into saving the saving power being in the shine and the more Questioning we become for questioning is the piety of thought. This is really important. Never give up your curiosity Always question things even if you you are so certain of certain things Always question them and I think that that's part of the responsibility of being in open is to keep an open mind and never be Never take a positivist approach So I'd like you to do more or do difference and maintain a free relationship To open if you can if you can't then let's talk about it. Let's figure out how to actually do that I have lots of citations or a few rather at the end, but I'd like to just Open it up to questions and please use a microphone for accessibility purposes really I just wanted to link to the things he said towards the end of your talk and and ask your question about them They've talked about being critical of our, you know Open being critical of itself and then you mentioned Futures which I just wonder how often We or other people go back and look at the futures that they envisaged As a way of being critical about themselves Futures seem to often just look forward really not Go back and look at what they said five years ago ten years ago. That's a great comment great question Yeah, you know futures as a field it's been around since the early 70s or even before that if it might not have been formalized Yeah, quite a bit longer, and we don't often review what the the futures that had been projected are That's a great point. Absolutely Or brain You made a provocative aside about flicker I won't delve into the why you're not allowed to upload unless you want to elaborate But it reminded me of I think we had a Twitter exchange a month or two ago There was a good news story when flicker was bought out and And then there was the good news stories was the images that were CC license were not going to be deleted And that was caused for a lot of celebration online And then it was maybe just a coincidence But as it was enough of a coincidence to stuck my paranoia that I think is that about a week later We learned that flickers creative commons licensed images were being used by IBM to I developed their facial recognition software And it got me thinking about the extent that or a critique that's been leveled that things like creative commons and certain elements of kind of the open industry that are Funded by corporate interests to an extent that open is something of a stalking horse for corporate Interests, and I just wonder if you have thoughts on that critique Yeah, not too much Just to say that Open can also be fragile and so when we looked at how easily A quarter of the digital commons were put at risk by flicker and our ability to grow the commons was put at risk purely based on market forces that just shows that You know, it's it's not certain. There are there are things that we are not anticipating that will come up This is not the end of it What has already been built, you know, it there's no guarantee It's going to be there tomorrow And so we kind of have to turn it back on ourselves To to look at our own practices and figure out, you know, how to do better do different Thank you, Billy. That was really fascinating and very provocative. I think it's good to be provoked in these Sessions At the University of Edinburgh, which I've just joined so I have no involvement in this work They've just done a piece of work led by Sean Bain called near future teaching Which is imagining what they're calling a preferable future And I just wondered with all of these possible futures and you put up the slide with the four different kinds of future Do you have a sense in your mind of what the preferable future of open looks like? That's a fantastic question Simon. I don't I really don't but you know Being able to outline what preferable futures or aspects of a preferable future might look like that's a great exercise And maybe we should be doing that more and incorporating that more into open