 All right, thank you, everyone. So my name is Michael McNally, and I'm here on behalf of my colleagues. Dana Taylor, who can't join us, and Rob McMahon, who can't make it as well. We're going to see Kyle Napier interspiced into the presentation at various points. And we're here to talk today about digital NWT, which was a multifaceted, government-funded project to do digital literacy in what most of us would call the Northwest Territories. But what is better, perhaps, known as Dunende and Inuvialuit Nunanagot? Well, hello, everyone, with the Open Education Global 2023 meeting in Edmonton, Alberta. Sorry I couldn't be there in person. I look forward very much to discussions as they unfold based on the topics and the presentations that you've been privy to during Open Education Global. My name is Kyle Napier. I'm from Fort Smith Northwest Territories. I'm excited to co-present with Michael McNally. And Kyle also forgot to mention, too, that he's a part-time instructor here at NorQuest as well. So I want to begin with a land acknowledgment. And of course, acknowledging that I and many of my colleagues who worked on this project are based here in Amiskuchi, Wisconsin, which is Treaty Six territory, Métis Region IV. But also that much of this work took place on lands that are made up by the Inuvialuit, the Gwichin, the Satu, the Dene, the Decho, the Tliccio, and the Akaicho, and Métis people who inhabit the Northwest Territories. And we'll talk a little bit about some of those tensions in relation to how we tried to incorporate and reflect indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing into some of the work we did in the project. So we're going to talk about some of the challenges involved in creating these resources. And then in the second piece, I really want to draw on two frameworks. One is Hagerty's Open Pedagogy Framework that I think most people are familiar with. And the other is Larsen's 6Rs for Indigenous OERs. And of course, if you're not familiar with Kayla's work, she's going to be the keynote speaker on Wednesday morning. So this project was a multi-partner project brought together by a range of institutions. At the upper level, it was governed by four indigenous governments, so the Gwichin Tribal Council, the Satu Renewable Resources Board, the Tliccio government, and the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation. In turn, those four governments partnered with Computers for Schools in the Northwest Territories, the Smart Community Society in the Northwest Territories, and Aurora College, which is the only post-secondary in the Northwest Territories, along with the University of Alberta and hands-on media education, to develop and deliver the digital NWT program. This was funded by government of Canada, Innovation, Science, and Economic Development specifically, and just so that everyone knows, this was a $3 million project. So it was a well-resourced project. And the entire project was ultimately undertaken and governed by Makeway, which you might know previously as the Tides Foundation in Canada. They provided the platform and a kind of operation for the project. So many stakeholders involved. And I'll turn it over to Kyle here to talk a little bit about the approach and initiatives. As Michael has just addressed, this project wouldn't be possible without project partners and the steering committee. We took a multi-fold consideration in our approaches and initiatives, as we thought about capacity sharing among these. So we featured digital innovators, made up of predominantly indigenous change makers across the Northwest Territories. These are Juneau award-winning artists. These are creatives. These are movie makers. These are people experimenting with virtual reality or storytelling in different ways. And so we showed and demonstrated the types of skills and capacity already coming out of the Northwest Territories. We also developed courses and delivered them with community partners and community trainers. And this is through a train-to-trainer approach. We ended up including all of the research that emerged from our calls out to the public and putting it together as a submission to the CRTC. And so that was put forward in 2020 and it addressed barriers to internet access, the digital divide as experienced by Northerners and particularly indigenous people residing in remote and verbal communities in the Northwest Territories. And again, Kyle's gonna talk a little bit about some of the context and challenges. And of course, a project doing digital literacy in the Northwest Territories where there's very poor connectivity. And COVID happened in the middle of this was not without its share of challenges. A major focus in our work with Digital NDBT was addressing the digital divide and then responding to it. So Donald and Beaton in 2018, write about the paradox of telecommunications in addressing the digital divide among the Northwest Territories, we realized that the communities which would benefit the most from access to telecommunications had the least amount of access to telecommunication services. And it's particularly highlighted during COVID-19. So in realizing that this was indeed an issue, we put forward solutions that responded to this issue. And this included various efforts in creating intranet hubs for communities to put forward their own community networks which wouldn't rely on the internet but rather local connectivity. In doing so, communities maintain sovereignty over their own programming and locally accessible telecommunications. And of course, one of the other big challenges is a lack of really Northern reflective openly licensed content. So a lot of content that's freely available through various open repositories doesn't reflect life and ways of living in the North. And so we, at one point found, we found a lot of good content that was particularly Northern looking. And then we discovered all the, we could see language and markers of signs in behind and we discovered all the signs were in Russian because it had come out of Northern Russia someplace. So we faced a lot of challenges, finding content that was truly reflective for the learners of the way that they live. In terms of the curriculum, it was made up of three different courses with varying numbers of modules. The first course started with really basic digital literacy to the point where one of the opening slides was, what's the difference between a laptop and a desktop and a smartphone and a tablet? It then worked through a module on the internet. Of course, that was a big area for Northern residents is understanding things like speed and bandwidth. We then had a whole module on social media and then a module on what was called being proactive online. It was really about online safety. But when we were working with community members, we were actually told, don't talk about online safety because many of the people attending courses that run from Aurora College and community settings in the Northwest Territories don't come from safe environments and communities themselves. There's a lot of women especially who are facing or living with domestic abuse. So we actually dropped references to safety and paralleling online safety with physical safety altogether. In the second course, we had an introductory set of activities and content around creating digital content, walking through people through some basic open source office tools, open office and Libra office in particular. And then we had an interactive guided learning exercise where people would make maps of their community or use maps of their community in 3D printed pieces and plan out community networks. And then in the third course, which was really kind of the highlight, the crown jewel of the curriculum because we kind of knew what we were doing best by that time. We ran a digital storytelling course. And so each of these courses was about 12 hours in terms of length. We did ultimately work towards building a community networks course, but unfortunately the project wasn't funded in the future to go through this. And in terms of what we did, there's slides, there's guides, there's activities, there's videos. I think all told it was about 188 different files within the curriculum all openly licensed. So this gives you a sense here of the curriculum. This is a summary table on the left hand side. There was for each course, a facilitator guide. This was a pedagogical instrument. It teaches, it walks people through how to teach. So for every slide, there would be some notes about what you might wanna consider in teaching that. In some cases, it's very basic. Like this slide compares desktops to laptops. Be sure to note these key differences or you might wanna ask this question. In other cases, the facilitator guide might be much longer. So in being proactive online and in digital storytelling, we were well aware of the history of trauma in these communities. So there might be an extended discussion in the facilitator guide saying, before you get people to tell a digital story, you need to be aware that some of those stories are going to deal with people covering their own traumatic histories. And you need to think of the different supports for them and of course we would include material like that. So all told, across all three courses, there were almost 500 pages of pedagogical guides. They accompanied over a thousand slides. So this was a very large curriculum. And then there were a number of additional materials. We had a number of videos. We also included maps and 3D printed files at various points. So all told, an extensive range. We also had activity books, which were very introductory. Things like word searches, matching exercises. And we were told specifically by adult educators and community members that these were the types of activities that they wanted. So despite being a digital literacy course or series of courses, we had a lot of pen and paper activities. And that was also a recognition too that for some of the learners, they might be trying to do the activity book at home and wouldn't have necessarily the bandwidth to wanna do rich digital activities. So all of the curriculum is made available on the digital NWT website. It's all openly licensed. There's different licenses for some different things, but most of it's under a CC by NC. So Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 License. One of the challenges is because it's so many files, it just sits in a Google Drive. I supposedly don't have time to describe metadata for 188 files. I don't have time to archive each one individually. So it's poor discoverability and I'll be the first to admit that. We used a couple of different licenses in a few different places. So most of it was under CC by NC. We did do some 3D printing for the community networking equipment which we ultimately never built a course for. That came under CC by NC SA License. And that's in part because we were using materials that already had that same share alike license. And then I think the last one is really interesting, the digital innovator videos. And on the next slide, Kyle will talk to these. These were four or five minute videos featuring various tech champions from across the Northwest Territories. And we really tried to think through how do we deal with the intellectual property in these in a way that balances open, as well as concerns with the indigenous knowledge creators and the communities from which these come. So I'll turn it over to Kyle to talk a little bit about these. And this is the copyright and licensing information slide that would appear at the end for the various videos. This one for Agnes Mitchell's video in particular. Thank you, Michael. And on the topic of digital innovators and tech champions, we wanted to ensure that sovereignty and copyright was retained by the indigenous knowledge holders that we were featuring in not only our digital innovator videos, but across all the content that we were including. And so here's just one example. This is actually drafted by Michael McNally and approved among our team. And this is an example featuring Agnes Mitchell, who is a Gwichin elder and a musician. And so we wanted to recognize all of the rights to the music and the representation of Agnes Mitchell in that we were just the stewards of the video. She actually retains the rights to her own voice and imagery and performance as it relates to this digital innovator video. And of course, in that second course on digital content, where we actually talk about copyright, it was one of the units within the module, we really tried to unpack that problem that Western IP is fundamentally incompatible with traditional indigenous ways of knowing and the way knowledge has been stewarded. So we were kind of constantly struggling throughout the project with, how do we both teach about open licensing and promote open licensing, but then not at the same time, appropriate or exploit others intellectual property. And so we really tried here to balance that in a somewhat complicated way, but to show that there are two systems that work here. And of course, everything from the digital NWT project was openly licensed, but what had come from community members, we wanted to ensure that they retained their rights and were recognized. So turning then to thinking about the project, this was, as you probably saw with the number of slides and pages of facilitator guides, and we were trying to run this in, there's 33 communities in the Northwest Territories and we were never operating in all of those communities, so we were trying to run this in 14, 15 of the communities at a time. There was a lot going on, but we had in the back of our mind Hagerty's framework in particular. So you're probably familiar with the eight attributes of Open Pedagogy. What's I think really notable about this framework from Hagerty in particular is it doesn't actually center OER specifically. It has eight facets, all of which relate to Open Pedagogy, but they don't necessarily, you could use Hagerty's framework and not actually use OERs. You could use it, it could be detached. We were also doing much of this work thinking about things about relationship with community, and it wasn't until 2021 when Kaila Larson first articulated her six Rs that we were able to really say, yeah, this is a lot of the same ideas we'd been thinking about. So Kaila's six Rs, and of course they were adapted from UBC's four Rs for education and a play on David Wiley's five Rs. Respect for Indigenous cultural identity, communities and topics. Relationships connects to the concept of all our relations and building relations with communities. Responsibility, responsibility to share only when we are allowed and to publish in an ethical way while considering ownerships, protocols and community practices. Reverence, respect for the sacred, relevant, legitimize and incorporate Indigenous knowledges into the curriculum when it makes sense. And reciprocity, both receiving and giving with communities. And so particularly as we got to the digital storytelling course, we were really starting to think about how does what Kaila is thinking and talking about reflect our thinking and what we've been doing. So in terms of Hegerty's framework, we found at different points throughout the curriculum and the project as a whole, we really touched on all eight aspects of the framework. So we've used participatory technology. We actually, because of the partnership with computers for schools, gave all of the learners a free refurbished government laptop. And then I'll quietly say in this room and hope no one is listening from the government. Some of those laptops were pieces of crap and didn't work that well. So that was a limitation of the project. But by and large, we were able to address some of that device level digital divide. We encouraged creativity, digital storytelling, I think is an example, sharing of resources and ideas also ties into that. In terms of connected community, for example, we were talking about not only social media connections in that first course but the network level interconnections as well. So trying to include something like broadband literacy as part of digital literacy. There were learner generated materials so the digital stories themselves in the third course and there were other digital artifacts people might create through the second course in particular. And peer review is a really important one for us. So we used community review wherever we could. So we'd have indigenous community members review the materials and comment on them. We were using a train the trainer approach. So we had Aurora college instructors reviewing materials we would use when we could get available time and that was a very difficult resource to get the steering committee members to go through the resources and comment on them. And we learned many incredibly insightful things. Like I mentioned, not making the analogy to online safety. At one point we were going to talk a lot about gambling and online gambling, the dangers of online gambling. We thought this is probably pretty relevant and we were actually told in one of the some of the communities that gambling in person is a very pro-social activity and they didn't want content problematizing online gambling. So we didn't cover online gambling. So things that we thought clearly, clearly this would make sense really using the peer review to get back. And so there you can see a slide from the end of the digital storytelling course. So over the six or over the 12 hours people using a combination of open tools and I will say ultimately we used Microsoft video editor because of the learning level required was at the level of our students. We looked at open video editing programs and actually we ended up going with the Microsoft one. It's not open but it was on all the computers. So using that we'd send people to open repositories to get music or images or they could create their own and they'd ultimately narrate as well. They'd use the voice recorder program in the computer and they'd create these short little digital stories. And then we talked about of course the implications of sharing those stories whether it was in a room or more broadly and there would be ultimately a film festival at the end. In terms of aligning with Kayla's work and there were some challenges in this. First we had done a lot of the work before Kayla articulated her framework so it was more of seeing where that alignment existed than having Kayla's framework in advance. Another piece too is it's important to keep in mind 95% of the content in digital NWT was not indigenous knowledges. It was information about computers, information about networks, information that we were trying to work with communities to provide. And of course the steering committee, the indigenous governments wanted this kind of education in their communities. We did though at times find places for it. So on the far left is a slide there featuring Nigital Norbert. Nigital is an illustrator based in Nubik and Nigital created this beautiful artwork for us on a canvas tent in working with Jenny Vandermeer who is a resident of the territory. She had done some work on digital storytelling before and she had said, you know, don't go in and teach it as pre-production, production, post-production, which is your typical arc of how you create a story or how you create a video. She said, you know, maybe there's a different way we can tell or relate to digital storytelling. And so Jenny Vandermeer working with Jesse Carell who is from Hands On Media, one of the project partners, they came up with this canvas tent analogy about how telling a digital story is like putting a canvas tent together. And then, so that gave a northern context to the digital story. And then Nigital was able to create these beautiful images. In the lower, or in the center, that lower kind of image of the tent, that's an image from the end of the course. The wood stove of the canvas tent is the part of the digital story where we acknowledge others. So we, you know, talking about giving credits, you know, copyright side of things, we might, or library side of things, we might think about citations. We ultimately summed it up as a wood stove within this canvas tent analogy. That worked really well in course number three, and I think that's where we see the strongest alignment of Kayla's thinking and the project's own success. In some of the earlier material, like I still struggled to this day, you know, what does decolonizing the difference between a laptop and a desktop look like? You know, to some degree, we continue to struggle with that. But we would often try and highlight northern-based examples. So we had the digital innovator videos. On the lower right-hand side, you can see we're talking about digital catalogs. This is from course number two. And of course we highlight the GTCs. They have a catalog dealing with plant biology, so local plants. Wherever possible, we would point to what's going on in the territory and try and have a local example. And generally, we were able to find local examples of pretty much everything we were talking about, whether it was social media stars, to data breaches. We found examples of where this was happening in the territory. So some good alignment with Kayla's thinking. And I've had the good chance of talking with Kayla this morning. I know Kayla well. I really think her framework does provide a really rich framework for thinking about how one can work with indigenous communities. Not just if it's an indigenous knowledge subject matter, but if you're working with community on a kind of more Western or our other area of information. So I've got some time for questions. I again want to thank the Gwich and Tribal Council, the Saatu Renewable Resources Board, the New Vialoate Regional Corporation, and the Tliccio government. Without their time, energy staff, and their people, this wouldn't have been possible. And of course as well, funding from the government of Canada. And I'm happy to take any, and Kyle's gonna thank you too. And as with Michael's appreciation to the steering committee, I also appreciate you and your time and consideration in understanding how we put forward open access resources and co-developed open access resources with remote and rural communities across Northwest Territories. Hope you're enjoying the rest of your time at the Open Education Global Conference and look forward to the discussions that flow from this. Masichu. So I'm happy to take any questions. Yes. So the question was, how do we reconcile the idea of stories and knowledge being owned by everyone with at the same time respecting intellectual property rights and promoting open licensing? And I think in the digital storytelling course, we spend a lot of time after people have produced the stories. So they've done the mechanical elements of pulling everything together. There's a series of slides talking about ideas of sharing with others and what does that mean and what needs to be done. So the wood stove idea was the framework through which we tried to unpack ideas of ownership to some extent and ideas of licensing. The wood stove being the key piece that ends up heating the tent and making it warm and inviting. And so we talked a little bit about that and we would always give people, too, the opportunity when they were creating stories to not share their story. For some people, just the process of going through and creating the digital story is what they want and they don't want to show it whether that's within the little classroom where it's being held or more broadly. And so we've always, with the social media side of things, unpacking some of the implications of what happens if you put a Creative Commons license on this and put this out there in the world, well then it can be transformed and remade and who knows. So we tried to talk through some of that in the slides through that third course. So the question was do we have a sense of how these have improved digital literacy? And actually we did. So one of the requirements from the government of Canada was that we do pre and post testing. And that was largely a demographic collection of information that that's what government of Canada wanted. I said innovation science and economic development. We asked specific questions. Now they were affective, qualitative questions. Do you feel that your digital literacy has improved? And throughout all of the courses, we would always see an increase in, you know, confidence and feelings from the pre-test to the post test. So there was always some evidence that these courses were viewed by the participants as enhancing. We also would do pre and post tests with the instructors as well from Aurora College. And they generally agreed that the courses were valuable. You know, one of the challenges is these were, you know, they're not for credit. They're optional courses. So they often run with a handful of learners in the classroom, like three, four, five. So, you know, it's difficult to say if there are any large, you know, major gains. But certainly within the pre and post testing, we did see evidence of people feeling that they knew more. Yes. So the way the courses were structured is course one, two, and three each ran as their own separate 12-hour course. Courses two and three were effectively linear. Like you took digital storytelling, you'd do digital storytelling for 12 hours. Course number one, there was actually more content than could possibly be instructed in 12 hours. And so the way we dealt with that is we, it was feedback from the Aurora College instructors that said, let's run it a la carte. So they would meet with their learners and they'd say, we could talk about internet. We could talk about misinformation online. We could talk about social media. What do you want to learn about? And then the course would be structured for those learners. And so I think that worked relatively well as a way to meet the learners where they were. Everyone got all of the course materials on a USB. In fact, that was one of the things I didn't mention. To get around some of the broadband restrictions, I would mail boxes full of USBs to tiny little communities, along with all the printed curricular materials. We'd print everything as well just to get around broadband. So you could go to course one, you could learn about social media, for example, but you'd still have all the rest of the curriculum. And you'd have that facilitator guide, which could teach you some of it. We tried to keep the materials, the slides at a grade three level, which was guidance from Aurora College, that that's the level we should be creating materials at. The facilitator guide, often we couldn't keep that at a grade three level. Time for one more question, I think. The demographic is actually, it's fascinating. It's primarily older individuals, but some younger individuals as well. You had to be 18, but 18 all the way up to 70. And we were in, we had the most success, and this goes back to that telecom, paradox of telecommunications. We're the most success in the high Western Arctic, so communities like Inuvik, Aclavic, Tuktayaktuk, et cetera, where these, they're furthest away from Yellowknife or Alberta or British Columbia. And so that's where we tended to run most of these courses. Very remote contexts, often with, like I said, a handful of learners in each session, but usually a mix of age. Sometimes when you advertise, you're giving away a free computer, people come, but often with more senior members of the community. And we knew going in that device ownership rates were 66% in some communities. So one third of the community didn't have a computer or a smartphone or any sort of digital device. So thank you very much, and that's all of my time, so thank you all.