 So hello everybody and welcome to Tanya Elias who is talking to us on agency scale and holistic and prescriptive open education. The presentation is 15 minutes and there will be five minutes for questions at the end of the session. So over to you now Tanya. Thank you and I am still trying to figure ahead and navigate this a little bit. Okay so my presentation today is about agency scale and holistic and prescriptive open education or or approached education. I am going to share my screen. I realize when I share this larger I can't see the chat anymore and I don't know if anybody can talk in this session. I'm just going to talk but if you have the ability to talk jump in at any time. All right so here we go. So I'm going to go over I'm going to talk a little bit about what I mean when I talk about prescriptive and holistic technologies and then I'm going to talk about the study that I did and then share some of the models two different models of scale that I'm looking at at this point. What do I mean when I talk about holistic and prescriptive technologies. So at a domains conference I think the first domains conference so a few years ago now I did a presentation on boots and I talked about a hand sewn pair of gummicks at the top and commercially made boots at the bottom. I have since been introduced to the idea of holistic and prescriptive technologies and learned that those gummicks those handmade gummicks are a wonderful example of holistic technologies where artisans control the process of their own work from beginning to end and boots store bought boots are a great example where it's broken down and every worker does a separate step so these definitions have really become quite central to my research as I've gone forward. Alright so what did I do so looking at my research sometimes I don't even know if I'm talking about open education anymore until I saw this iceberg and then it made me feel a little bit better because it made me realize where I am is really at the bottom of the iceberg really talking about the philosophical foundations of open education so it makes me think that maybe I'm still talking about open education. I'm using situational analysis which involves a bunch of maps so positional maps situational maps and world arena maps and we'll take some a take some take a look at examples of those so my study had three phases I did an anonymous qualitative survey online followed by collaborative mapping and some focus groups so out of the original anonymous survey I had about 20 respondents who who wrote a lot I gathered all these terms and then I had a smaller group of six open educators who I invited into this space to make connections between them and as you can see they created a mess a really good mess and and then they had annotations so most of these lines were annotated and then I had to do something with it so I mapped it and I wrote all of their wonderful annotations a little stickies and stuck them on by hand and out of that came this relational map which which gives a view of how this small group of open educators view the field and you know you can see open educational practices and open pedagogies access social justice reading what reaching wider audiences going beyond the course and ideas of overwork as well sort of emerging as themes from there this is the second way to map things is in relation to the social world so when we think about open education and open educators there's so much going on here and I think sometimes we don't think about the bigger picture and where open educators fit within that bigger picture but if you can see them there they're there you know they're they're a small group in a in a big puzzle of a lot of different a lot of different groups with a lot of competing interests which which I think sometimes there's a lot of value in stepping back and thinking about how the big picture impacts our work impacts the field impacts the decisions we make in the tools that we use so that those two maps really that that was the foundational work that then really got me back to my initial question was talking about scale and about mechanisms of scale in open education and really what I found in and what my open educators described to me is really that there's two approaches to scale and as open educators we tend to have experience with both but we're not very good at naming them and and we don't we don't talk it we don't explicitly talk about them in ways that make them easy to understand but in talking to them what I really found was that there's there's this one model which is a production model of scale which you know things start high levels of agency independence small and then as they grow they get you know they we lose the customization things get standardized this is the model going back to the boots this is how those commercial store bought boots are made right they started cuts they started very customized and then we standardized standardized standardized most of the world that we live in this is this is the growth model that's applied to things this is the growth model applied to our technologies this has become such a dominant model that it's hard for us to even think differently and and so when we talk about scale when we talk about technologies you know they tend to follow follow this this trajectory from from right to left the good news is that at least to me the good news is that what the open educators that I talked to spoke about was another model of growth or another model of scale that aligns with a growth model of scale and in this model you don't have to lose your agency and localization as you grow instead things things move more from from left to right as they grow but but the key is that that it's it's you know it's not a straight line it's not necessarily efficient it doesn't always scale the way you expect there's lots of surprises along the way and there's increasing levels of customization so things things change and and and move and grow in ways that that you never anticipated or expected and what I find is that most open educators this is the model that draws them to open education this is what they love about it this is what makes them excited and yet going back this is what they find themselves falling into right the patterns of our institutions our technologies follow one model where our experience is with open education and our desires and dreams for education follow this other model so so that's that's kind of what I have to share so maybe I'll stop sharing if that's something I can figure out how to do and I don't know if we can talk or chat or I don't know what the capacity is of the system we're using here there we go I don't even know if there's anybody out there am I talking to myself maybe maybe I am talking to myself you should be able to see questions and comments pop up on the screen awesome oh I see Francis hi Francis yes the growth model is realistic in the first yes I agree I 100% agree it's a myth the production model is a myth but it's a myth that we've bought into so so wholly and completely that it's challenging to know what what or you know to think differently about where we're headed I think there was also another question Tanya earlier on that I saw people were asking actually where there where they can where they can actually have a look at the at the network that you were presenting earlier on I think there was an interesting slide so and Emma Jane said they will be they can be found in resources yes I want to yeah I'll put my slides yeah absolutely I'll share I'll share my slides there they're somehow I'll figure out how to do that later and then what I what I would like to figure out how to do I just need some more time to do it is to figure out how to create that map in a way where those annotations can pop up I haven't quite found a tool that will do it easily yet but I certainly something that I'd like to share maybe while we waiting for more questions to come on and it would be really interesting to to hear what was the most the sort of surprising thing that you found in your in your research that surprised you about you know the different models that you that emerged yes well so I think I mean I you know I think for me it was two things it was one I've been you know I've been talking about this difference between gummicks and boots for you from essentially four years went all the way through all my research and I you know and I just never quite found anything to connect it to and then I just happened to be listening to the to the CVC radio in the middle of a pandemic and I heard somebody talking and it turned out that it was Ursula Franklin from 1989 being you know and and it was just everything came together right so I think one thing for me is this reminder that we have to go backwards it's so important you know the things that we're dealing with things that are challenging us nothing none of it's new you know Ursula Franklin talks about how you know cars and sewing machines and telephones they all they all started with with people at the center and these really vibrant communities and then turned into something else and so you know thinking that we're different or that weren't we're doing something different I don't think it serves us I think it's really important for us to recognize that we're following the same patterns over and over and if we want to change them if we want to change them we have to acknowledge them I'm just looking here yeah I mean you know is it a myth the first model I think it's a myth that that's the only way to do things and that that's the only way to grow I think that it's it's absolutely a true model I think the production model is what drives the world that we live in and I think it's a myth to think it's the only way that's what I would say if that helps and then in terms of other I think the other really interesting I think I found was that open educators really don't like to talk about scale he was really hard to tease it out of them they want to talk about intention and great things and wonderful things and they do not want to talk about scale it makes them uncomfortable and I think that I you know I knew that going in I think that what is interesting is that they do really deeply understand it there's there's a very nuanced understanding of it that just hasn't been often words put around it yeah everyone should read Ursula Franklin for sure and sorry I think there was a comment that I missed I'm not fast enough on that yeah yeah I think that's right I think and that's what when we look at those social worlds in terms of the you know this is so many of the social worlds that we work within an open education they're all those linear they want us to standardize they want us to grow in linear ways and so it's how do we fight against that how do we keep the organic approaches how do we how do we grow in localized and unique ways and take the risk to do it because that's that's one of the keys with the growth model is it there's no guarantee that it's going to work and there's no guarantee that it's going to grow and there's no guarantee that where you start is where you're going to end up or where you hope is where you're going to end up and we have to be okay with that so a lot of it's about giving up control I think as well or and seeding control to communities and people perhaps yeah I mean absolutely a car I mean that it's interesting though because Ursula Franklin talks about cars initially being considered mechanical brides where where the people who own them love them and cared for them and looked after them and there were vibrant communities of care car loving people and and so I think it's easy now for us to think about some of those technologies is different but when they started they were very much like like like the technologies that we use you know that she talks about how how important phone operators were they were like a core central it couldn't imagine a telephone without telephone operators and now it's almost impossible to imagine a telephone operator you know people at the center there's the warning in that that we have to be very careful it's interesting that he's saying that about telephone operators here because my understanding of telephone operators at the time where that they were actually mediators as well between people and technology so maybe we need to have more mediators yeah and we don't yeah we have to be careful not to lose them like you know we've been encouraged and invited into to use these new technologies and new and exciting ways and there's there's these companies who are more than happy to to have us do that work but they're not necessarily invested in keeping us right that they'll use us they'll use I mean that's the reality of it they'll use just like they use telephone operators to to connect and figure out what matters and and and to build build an audience and end it you know like a customer base for this technology but there was no commitment to those telephone operators they were more than happy to let them go and when we look at what's happening with AI we're playing that we're playing the role of those telephone operators and so I think it's important to think about where it's headed and and not not get confused oh what's next oh what's next so I'm gonna I'm gonna try and I'm gonna try and finish my dissertation that's the primary goal and then I don't know I'm sure you will I'm sure you will and then I don't know what I don't know what's next after that you know there's there's more to think about and more to talk about I'm happy to happy to have these conversations with anyone and everyone who's out and about yeah that's right absolutely autumn it starts being novel and and people centered and it changes for sure awesome alright so are we exactly I was gonna I was gonna say the same time yeah so are there any more questions maybe coming in from the audience we've had quite a number of questions already and as you can see Tonya this is such a big topic so here's another one for you I probably I mean yeah there's there's so much fear right so it's so much so much fear around academic malpractice it makes me tired honestly I I don't have the energy to talk about people being afraid of other people people stealing and plagiarism in these things and I think we need to think you know I I mean I think that comes it's comes back to to thinking of an education model where the idea is to replicate replicate standardized gets us there and I think we have to think completely differently about education open education if if we're gonna let go of those fears and and build something new oh I don't know so much I it's a good I feel like it's a it's a life worth of work to figure out what we identity what we lose as we scale I mean I think I think that's you know that's I've got a whole dissertation Francis that'll share got thoughts awesome thank you everybody for coming and I'm excited to to to be a part of we are 21 in the domains conference of the two together and hopefully I'll get to see more of you over the next couple of days thank you for this really enriching presentation Tanya all the best for your dissertation your thesis and thank you so much to the participants for these really these great questions which which actually open up the discussion to so much more beyond today's presentation so thank you very much and see you around