 Well, good afternoon everyone. And thank you for the invitation, thank you for the introduction. But I want to ask you, for a moment, I want you all to close your eyes. I can see from here, so close your eyes. And just feel the chair you're sitting in. niddwch. Niddwch y dyfodol ag y chrodd ddechrau, niddwch eich rhan, niddwch ar y gwasanaeth ddweud, niddwch eich llwynt, ti'r cre correlation yn teimlo i'r amddol, ac rofynu ei gennym uwch neu ydy? Ac oeddwn i chi'n mynd i gael y methu os un o greu cyfrifio rhai syael i gael eu Dyfodol iawn i gael o'r unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw sy'n dysgu'r rhaglen i'r llunio mewn yma i'r ymgylchedd yma i'r BTAC. Mae'r llunio'n tynnu, hyd yn fath, er mwyn i ddim yn yr hollwch. Mae'n mynd i dda i'r parolau Cyfrwg, mae'n mynd i ddim yn edrych ar y cyfrwg. Mae'n dda i'r llunio'n cyfrwg, ond mae'n ddim yn ddweud yn ddweud ar yr hollwch. but if you were interested in fabric making you would know that the warp threads, the threads that run along longitudinally of those that are kept stationary on a loom, to keep the structure, so they will intention the whole time, but they're there so that we can use the other threads arall, ar gyfer y myllafol, o beth oes eu bwysig i'r panherau a'r hafau y clywedadau o'r panherau oes eich clywedadau masgol. O'r hoffi, rhaid i'w gweithio'r idea o'r wabol a'u bwysig a'u arddangosu syniad hwn yn yma I help us understand how open education and social justice are interlaced, interweaived, and that we can't think of them separately? because in fact the idea behind open education is something where we implicitly think of a social justice imperative. but today I want to be using the metaphor, so this is a metaphorical idea. I'm using the metaphor of the warp and weft to help us understand the structure upon which our open education is built. And to make visible perhaps some of the invisible or assumptions that we make where we're not quite certain or they're so implicit mae'n cael eu ddod o'r cymdeithasol oherwydd, i adnodd ar gyfer ymdweithio'r cyfle yn ymgyrch i ddod. A oes eu ddodd i'r ddodd yn fawr i chi, i hefyd, ymlaen i fynd i'r ddodd o'i ddodd o'i ddodd o'i ddodd y gallu ddodd i'n ddodd i'r llwytoedd o'r cyfwyr ymgyrchu'r Llywodraeth, i'r ddodd i Ynesgoion. Felly, mae'n ddodd o'i ddodd yn ddodd o'i ddodd o'u ddodd. Ond ydych chi'n gwybod, rwy'n credu'n gwybod, a'r ffabrif yn ymddiadau swerthwyr, oedd yw swerthwyr, sy'n gwybod yn ymddiadau'r ffabrif coton, yn ymddiadau a'r ffabrif yn ymddiadau, ond mae'r ffabrif yn ymddiadau, ond mae'n cael ffabrif yn ymddiadau, ac eich oedd y ddweud yn giligol yn cael enhygoel. A, yn ffapt, yn South Africa mae'n dod ymlaen chi'w fabryg South Afreecau, mae'n gilydd ar hyn sy'n gwybod Chromysgol Saeon o Ddenom ac Tarthon, na ran hynny. Ond mae eich troeth Cymysgol South Africa. Ond yw'r cyd-fraeg i'r gweld yn llygau o'r peth o'r hefyd, we come to understand that Shreshway material was actually brought in to an African country by the settlers, primarily from Europe. The Dutch and German settlers came in with an Indigo fabric, which in fact they had received from India. So there is a whole history around how we have built upon previous technologies that now seem to be our own, but in fact have histories that go back centuries. So just making the point that South Africans feel that we own this fabric. What was really interesting and you can't see it so well, but that's the image I have, just last week UNESCO had a big congress and they had an exhibition around the perimeter of the offices in Paris at the UNESCO headquarters and they had an installation called Walking the Indigo Walk where they had, I think it was 34 installations of Indio fabric where people were invited to present their versions of Indigo fabric. There were many different countries, 34 I think in total, but not South Africa. For a South African this seems incredibly odd because we see this fabric as our own, but before I continue a little bit about my positionality, I'm in my late 50s, a white South African woman of English, 1820 settler and German heritage. In fact next year we would have, my family would have been in South Africa for 200 years, but yet I am a particular race within South Africa of a white race. I've had a Protestant upbringing, but I now attend a Catholic Church. I have a Western education background, majoring in psychology, read, speak and write, English and Afrikaans, which is one of the traditional languages, but unfortunately despite much, well many attempts and a whole year's worth of university of learning Zulu and Atrosa, I have not mastered them to be able to speak well enough or read better and not write at all. I was a primary school teacher and then moved into being a learning designer for computer assisted instruction and for those of you sitting in the audience who are 50 and above, we'll see in that terminology that I've used, computer assisted instruction, that kind of puts me in a category of people in the early 80s, where this was seen as a fairly top-down, behaviourist informed approach. That moved into becoming a university lecturer in learning design and research design and of late I have been far more involved in research and a principal investigator of international and national and institutional research. Philosophically, I come from a position of a critical realism and I just say that up front so that you know that I have nailed my colours to the most. I'm happy to take questions in the light of that later and I'm married to a former academic who sadly is not very well at the moment and why I say that is because my positionality that I bring to this discussion this afternoon that we're going to have influences what I know about open education what I understand social justice to be so what I would like you to do is now just on your own think about what is your positionality what do you bring to this meeting this afternoon sorry so how might your stage in life your nationality your race your ethnicity your religious or spiritual affiliation your disciplinary tap roots your philosophical assumptions your language competence your experience your relationships and life crises how might these influence your perspectives for a moment think about your positionality and how it may impact on your idea of what is socially just I needn't tell you that we are an economic crisis it's growing by the day and so are the inequities we know this we also are living in environment of extreme social uncertainty and inequality we know this we are also living in times of extreme political illegitimacy and exclusion to what extent we're beginning to understand thinking about the protests around the world this year we are in a crisis as a world and that is going to impact on education as well this is a world yearning for socially just education so what is social justice and there are many interpretations so today I'm going to be using the work of Nancy Fraser who is a political philosopher to help guide me through this presentation that I'm offering you today but it's not to say that this is the only way about thinking about social justice there are many different ways and in fact how we theorize social justice and how we actually implement social justice are in fact perhaps two different things so if we see social justice as a concept that requires some kind of social arrangement that makes it possible for everyone to participate equally in society that is one interpretation of social justice Fraser talks about social justice as parity of participation being equal but not just equal generally she divides it up into being equal economically culturally and politically so she talks about social justice or the injustices rather the economic injustice or what she terms male distribution so we've got funds that are not well distributed the male distribution and she explains that people can be impeded from full participation by economic structures that deny them the resources they need to interact with others we know this well in our own education environment what we are needing is economic equity this is a big ask but this is what we are needing to look at likewise culturally Fraser talks about cultural inequality or mis-recognition so in other words we are not fully recognizing other cultures we disregarding cultural histories cultural practices and other values what we're needing instead is more cultural diversity politically the injustice is one of inequality or what Fraser terms misframing and this is quite an interesting topic because what she's talking about here is who has the decision making power who is included in and who is excluded from those people who are making the decisions around the the economic decisions and making the cultural decisions initially when Fraser wrote her theory about social justice she just had the first two concepts economic and cultural and through critique of her own work she realized that there actually was a political issue around who makes those decisions and in fact that's what i'm hoping to show us today is that we have all three issues to think about what we're looking at and aiming at is political inclusion so social justice can be understood as an outcome where all our relevant social actors can participate as peers in our social life as well as a process so it's not just a thing that actually we achieve at the end but it is a process in which we are involved and social open education has an explicit social justice intent where we explicitly look not necessarily under these names but we're looking for economic equity cultural diversity and political inclusion and in fact if we go all the way back to the Cape Town open education declaration 12 years ago um which I and Waddeno, Waddeno are you here Waddeno, Waddeno and I anybody else who was there that I've missed Waddeno and I were privileged to be part of this amazing group of people who put the Cape Town open education declaration together and looking back at phrases theorising and re-looking at that definition that people work through for days and days on end I see that we had those threads there all the time it's just it's almost like a recognition of what was there I mean look at the phrasing everyone should have the freedom that is a political statement for education to be accessible and more effective that is an economic argument and the participatory culture is a cultural statement so all along these threads were there we just may not have recognised them as succinctly as it is using a theory such as Fraser to help us think through what open education might look like if it's socially just and open education itself and there've been many different interpretations of open education at this conference and it's a movable feast and in fact even for myself when I first got to understand open education it was through the idea of open education resources but even then I have to say there was a there was a move in 2002 to from UNESCO to call this area open education resources but when we were at the Cape Town open education declaration meeting we actually made a decision not to limit it to resources and in fact to take the broader concept open education and for a while what happened is after 2002 our focus was on open education resources and we went down the resources track for quite a while until we started realising but underneath these resources are open practices you can't actually easily make a resource without some kind of open practice and so the open practice movement ideas I mean Catherine Cronan's quite well associated with these but there were others who were speaking about this idea of open sometimes open pedagogy sometimes open education practices but for me when I look at products now I think of not just open education resources or open textbooks or open MOOCs forgive me with the two opens there but we know from some of the discussions here that MOOCs are not necessarily open in our understanding but also open data because one of the things that in fact we may still need to recognise is that we've been perhaps excluding our research gaze from our education gaze and in fact we perhaps need to bring in our understanding of how we share research data into the fold of the things that we actually use as education resources likewise with open educational practices I'm making space in my head for open research as well because it's some of those practices and open research that in fact help us understand open education resources open education practices better and that's certainly been my experience and likewise our communities we talk about open education communities and at this conference those are some of the ideas we've been sharing but it's also part of the broader open science movement so how can a social justice lens help us better understand how to optimise open education what is the economic value proposition of open education yes equitable access and in fact we understand from what most of the research that's been undertaken so far has focused primarily on this this issue the issues of costs reducing costs to the individuals directly their parents the bursars the government whoever is involved in finding and sourcing and paying for the resources it's also another value proposition is that it gives us an opportunity to get students to be able to have access to current research and hopefully enable students to study at their own pace and time and anywhere without the associated costs of traveling and staying at a residential university so what I'd like you to do now is find somebody next to you and if you can't find somebody get up and find someone and I want you to think about and talk about what examples of more accessible and affordable education have you heard about in this conference what examples of more accessible and affordable education have you heard about at this conference okay I'm going to give you two minutes because there's two of you right thank you thank you thank you thank you about those right now because the conversations that we have having in these small groups are the important ones so I'm going to move on from this idea to sharing some idea of what how I have been working looking at creative ways of using funding in an open environment and this happens to be open research right now but in fact it's a project that our South African government have actually given us funding for and we're doing two things firstly we are investigating what they term open learning so we're looking at cases on open learning and I have to thank Sukena Walgy for the little abbreviation the cool project and in our cool project we are both investigating open learning in South Africa so it's a national project but at the same time we are employing young recently graduated master's students or phd students or even somebody who already has a phd to also build their research capacity and give them opportunities for publication so where we would have thought about open research in one way we have now got two ways of looking at a process and an outcome so our outcome is looking at open learning and our process is a research capacity building I must say at the same time I am learning so much in the process of working with my researchers as I have a group of mentors and advisors as well I'm not sure whose capacity is being built but nevertheless that is a it is a way of using funds in a clever way to try and extend the remit of a way of using our economy economic with work within our economic constraints so just as an example getting now to the cultural value proposition Fraser thinks about the value proposition culturally as deconstructing and in fact my colleague and I Henry Trotter and I wrote a paper in 2018 that actually made an argument for what we termed reocculturation so in other words in order to achieve cultural equity and diversity it's not just deconstructing so that we land up with all the other the pieces we're trying to get to a position where we reocculturate to a position where we have a plurality of epistemic positions in other words different ways of understanding the same concept because given the fact that we have got a crisis in our world and we've been following a particular view of knowledge perhaps it's a good time now as any to be able to look at other interpretations of how we might run a society so what we want to do is perhaps be re-evaluating devalued knowledges and I say this whether you come from Africa Asia Canada the United States Europe Asia wherever you come from where have we been devaluing knowledges and in fact maybe we've also got to be acknowledging and respecting prospectors from various marginalised groups religious groups differently abled a range of gender ethnicities nationalities as well as asserting the value of lesser used languages the fact that I'm speaking to you in English and that you are needing to ask questions in English is around a cultural hegemony English has claimed the space this may be for a number of years but maybe there will be a different language in time to come we have got to realise that there's not just one language that actually predominates and maybe technology will help us maybe one day we'll be able to be communicating in different languages and and understanding each other mutually but in the interim we need to be conscious about the languages that we don't necessarily value and how to promote those that are lesser used so now in terms of looking at the culturally inclusive open education I have heard quite a few very interesting presentations so in groups of three see if you can come up with at least one idea of a culturally inclusive open education project that you have heard about in this conference and you have three minutes thank you very much thanks everyone thank you by the volume in the room it would sound like you have more than one idea just to give you an example from one of the national project I'm running this is just a little screenshot for which I have permission by the way to use of a zoom meeting of because our researchers come from all different parts of the country in South Africa Cape Town Johannesburg Bloomfontein Port Elizabeth Hoover Johannesburg so we can't get together in fact we have yet to meet some of this the researchers face to face we have only seen them on zoom yet we are running a collective open research project and in fact we need to be very mindful about how we did this in terms of being sensitive to languages so even though English is our language of communication most people don't speak English as their mother tongue secondly in terms of understanding who feels confident enough to talk we had to make sure that we were actively being trying to be socially inclusive and in fact my challenge to you today is even though we're talking about these big cultural diversity issues where where it's enacted is in the particular the the every single moment decisions is where you make that happen so you can talk about social justice and cultural inclusivity in general but where it happens in is in the moment where you take a chance to sit back and look at who's actually being involved in this conversation and who might need an invitation to have their opinion heard all right so the third element we're looking at the political value proposition so this is what Fraser calls reframing so in other words we've got a frame right now that is quite western quite English dominated in terms of how we understand it who's deciding about what curricula are out there who's deciding what textbooks are out there whether they are open or not there's some political decisions being made around what gets valued so what we want to be looking at is to challenge some of these hegemonic knowledges but also in this in this case i'm actually speaking directly to those from the global south and saying we have got to contribute it's not a case of just saying no well we don't want it was all well what do you want instead let us hear about what those alternatives are so that we can give people a choice likewise we need to think about decision making power to those who are usually seen as subordinate to the dominant power and that happens right from the top level from UNESCO recommendations etc all the way down to how do you actually get students to contribute in your class and i was very struck Robert which i have added to the presentation after I heard you speak was around trust your students and I think I hadn't phrased it quite like that but I think if I've got to say trust my researchers it would have an impact on my own practice and in fact even though I hadn't phrased it like that what happened I was going to hop here for a second what happened in the cool project is one of the researchers suggested that they had a private reading group one which didn't include the principal investigator and the advisors and the mentors so we re jiggled our funds a little to have a little extra money made available to the student a student she's a phd student but um she's a researcher to gather some of those materials she's had a little bit more experience in social justice and to run these reading groups so in this sense I was actually trusting the researchers even though I hadn't phrased it like that Robert so just going back for a sec um if you had been good and followed my flaws but that doesn't matter if you can think of examples of and you can't have Roberts opening up power to decide about curricula assessment and accreditation that you've heard about at OE global technology supported or not four minutes right thank you everyone thank you thanks everyone so one group said this was a hard one can I see some nods okay so this is where our future thinking comes in this is the stuff we've got a grapple with um and it's not easy there's no clear idea but I think what I want us to just take away with us is a sense of when we talking about how social justice can help us to better develop OER open education practices open education communities I think the thing is what we need to be foregrounding is that we need to think through the economic issues for each of these layers so it's like a fabric where every thread counts you may have your economic warp thread that's holding it tight but the way you weave your open education practices the different programs you create if it's a MOOC or materials or a set of beautiful simulations that we heard about this morning you need to think through the economic issues right from the start not as an ending of itself because the costs don't go away as James just said it's it's cost shifting somebody is actually paying for this and I think my challenge is who are the people who are actually going to benefit from students having more efficient and cheaper educational resources who are these people we've got to try and think with the end in mind Lena you talk is that Lena you're talking about that earlier likewise we've also got to think when we're mediating things digitally that we've got many people in the world who may not have this kind of access it's so ubiquitous here but it is not necessarily I'm not just talking Africa so we need to think through the economic but at the same time when we're talking about open education resources we need to be looking at the disciplines and we've heard such wonderful examples I think of projects that have been based around a particular problem so it wasn't just open for open sake and I think we as a community need to be very careful that we don't slip into that because it's open because it makes good sense it makes good economic it makes good cultural sense and often the problem arises right in the particular the particular discipline and we've seen many examples of those who received awards and we've seen many examples of projects that have actually involved whether statistics or medicine or whatever they have involved a particular problem and we need to be thinking quite carefully culturally of images that we have used to represent things it's little it's these tiny changes likewise we need up front to think about how might something be disability friendly even it's in the simplest way in using styles which a an e reader can translate into appropriate heading levels something as little as that can make the hugest difference for somebody who is differently abled likewise we want to be looking in looking at an inclusive set of opinions that we include obviously and then likewise politically when we're looking at our materials who is having a say over those perspectives who who's making decisions whose perspectives are actually being included or not so it's great that we've got the open education declaration that's been accepted by UNESCO because that too is a political statement and the fact that countries have to report on that is absolutely fabulous because they're going to have to have something to say we hope it would be very silly for them to go up and say we've got nothing to say so maybe that will help in terms of understanding resources but that's not going to be enough we've got to look far more carefully at the practices that underlie these education resources and I'm not going to go through each one of these but just to highlight in terms of taking time and we've seen people here taking time to reuse adapt and reshare materials because one of the challenges in the OER movement has been that people have been so ready to put materials out there but really not to reuse in ways in which would be optimising open education likewise we need to look quite carefully at the cost of co-creation and collaboration how much can you expect your students to give of their own free time how much can you expect of academics lecturers to give of their free time we've got to understand that there is a decision to be made here and not to try and paper it over likewise in terms of our cultural content the inclusivity of diverse opinions the perspectives the decisions all come up again but this time in the practices and likewise in our broader communities and I mean I see us here as an open education community the fact that OEC is the same abbreviation as the open education consortium may just be accidental but I certainly see the OEC as a community in an abling space to kind of hold together this community but there are costs to participation costs for us to be here today have been immense whether you're coming from Japan or South Africa or China we we need to be aware of those costs of participation and think through how we might ameliorate those the values the cultural traditions once again the diversity and here we need to be mindful of our positionality and one of the things that I have learnt some really hard lessons is that we can be very blind to our own position and we've got to relearn new ways of being with people and it's hard and I'm not talking in theory now I'm talking in practice and likewise to look at the the decision making around these communities that we are participating in and the big channel challenge to us is that the economic and the cultural and the political are inextricably interwoven so we can't really pull just one piece out and that may be why in many instances some of our materials on being those created aren't actually being as well reused as they should be because it's actually come with just an economic benefit it'll be cheaper if you use the same material but if the same material is not culturally relevant then it doesn't matter how cheap it is so this is the the issue and who's deciding about what actually gets out there we need them all together and likewise we're needing them simultaneously so while we can think about then okay let me think about the economic issues here let me think about the cultural let me think about the political in action they all happen simultaneously in those moment by moment decisions that we make whether it's in our own classrooms or whether it is being a representative on a UNESCO committee so for a moment close your eyes and think about three things that you might do differently after this conference thank you are there any questions in one minute otherwise you can nail me tonight at the dinner and I will be around tomorrow because there are people here who I can just see I'm going to want to have many conversations with I know we've got a dinner coming up so unless there's a pressing question don't see any hands everybody's one going to get ready in their glad rags just one last comment by the way the presentation that I ran is actually in google docs and you all have commenting rights so please feel free to comment challenge the position that I've taken thank you