 We'll see how this goes. OK, so let's just jump into this because we don't have enough time. We're going to run out of time. No, take your time. No, no, we're not fine. You think we're fine. We actually intentionally left this particular slide blank because this would be the part where we might talk of it. I think one of the nice luxuries of being in a group like this is probably most of the people in this room could make a more compelling argument for why in the age of surveillance capitalism that we need to be mindful about what learning in the open means and what we're exposing our learners to. But that is essentially the theme. And actually, I wish I could recall the phrase that Javier finished with in the previous session, that notion that when you are in these kinds of spaces, how do you meaningfully allow the participants to actually kind of co-create the spaces they're in and how do you be mindful of what these kinds of effects might be? So I'm going to leave it at that just because we're going to run out of time. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Lucas. Great. So I'm Lucas Wright, and this is Brian Lamb. Just I'll take a little bit of time for those intros. I work at BC Campus and at UBC in Vancouver. So I have two hats on here. And Brian works at TRU, and you all probably know him. So what I'm going to do is go scattershot through a few slides and ideas about examples where we can engage students with shaping the web and openly participating, but at the same time, think about Amy Collier's idea of digital sanctuary and how we can deal with giving them resilience and helping protect the vulnerable on the web. I'll stop with the owl now. So can open textbooks help save the web? This year I've worked around open textbooks quite a bit. And what's interesting and what we've found this year looking at the analytics is that actually they're not just being used as textbooks. They're being stumbled on all the time in Google searches. So now when someone searches for ear irrigation, instead of just looking on WebMD, they're actually finding an open textbook around ear irrigation, which is interesting, as someone who spent a lot of time on WebMD when I shouldn't. Another thing about open textbooks is right now you're probably hearing a lot about inclusive access. So publishers are deciding that they can use OER, Cengage, Pearson, et cetera, but they see a model in it. And part of their business model that I didn't realize is analytics on those textbooks. So looking at how students access that textbook and coming up with reading analytics. This is just from an article around inclusive access. Gather data that could influence changes made to future editions of course materials. That data can also go to a lot of other places, as we found out recently. So do open textbooks actually provide a digital sanctuary for students reading data? Something I never thought we would need is to think about preventing someone from knowing all of our reading habits. Oh, I don't know this new fangled website that well. Here we go. You just scroll down and hit the arrow. There we are. Squawk away, ladies and gentlemen. Second of all, a really quick example is can we help educate students and mainly connect with students and help raise awareness around what it means to be a digital citizen and digital identity. So this example is from the University of British Columbia, the Digital Tattoo Project. The Digital Tattoo Project is a collaboration between U of T, UBC, particularly the libraries, as well as students. And students create articles. They do research on what their digital tattoo is. But this year, it's taken an interesting slant. They're looking at things like, what happens to my data when I put it in the LMS? Where does my data go? They've been interviewing Michael Geist. So by bringing these students together and connecting them, we're changing the way and helping them think about different ways of interacting on the web. This is the most awkward slide switcher ever for me. Sorry. That's part of my shtick. Can we create open spaces at our institutions where students can create and share? And the example here is the UBC Wiki. So at UBC, they downloaded a version of Media Wiki. And rather than having students participate in the great wide open, they have them create articles and contribute to articles. This is an article about pop tarts that a food science course added. I added this one because for this instructor, the UBC Wiki was training wheels for using the main Wiki or Media Wiki. In this case, the student talked about food science. The next year, the instructor had their same students contribute to Wikipedia. It worked really well. It was really exciting. But someone named the pink beast. I don't know if anyone here is the editor of the pink beast. Deleted two or three of the articles right away. And these were student assignments. So it's awesome. But sometimes the training wheels are quite useful for students to help experimenting in the open before going to the full open space. And finally, safety in crowds. Again, at UBC this year, there's been a bit of a shift away from just using Wikipedia for course assignments to having students participate in editathons. So having them work together as a group in a certain time and space and edit articles about science literacy, where they added female scientists to Wikipedia. This was done across five institutions in BC. Edit articles about women artists, female artists. This is a North American movement around women in art called art in feminism campaign. So by being in this single space and time they can support each other, help each other both understand the system, but also deal with trolling and deal with some of the challenges that come when we're participating in the open. All right, I'm gonna turn it over to you, Brian. So, Lucas actually prepared materials and worked through his points in an orderly and clear manner. So that was good while it lasted. Part of what this theme, when I was thinking about how we were gonna do this, actually came out of last year's OER 17, which was a really, actually every OER event I've been to here has been very meaningful to me, but it came out of last year with this really pervasive sense that this was kind of a watershed moment in terms of the open web and our learning on the web. And then right after OER 17, Daniel convened a few of us in Coventry for this really intense day long conversation and Audrey Waters was there. And the folks who did the safety and online learning workshop here last year, the towards openness folks were there. And we gathered and we talked and we just depressed the hell out of ourselves. Like we were just like, the environment we find ourselves in is just completely intolerable. What can we do about this? And we sat there and Daniel, if I'm misrepresenting, but my recollection was that we just kind of sat there in silence and kind of shook our heads. And I remember actually Audrey turned to me and she said, well, Brian, I've been to Thompson Rivers University. I've seen what's unique about your institution and the community you serve. What you need to do is think about how you can serve your community and let the wider world take care of itself. And that was a really kind of intense moment for me now. I'm not going to presume we did that, but I did want to kind of point to a few of the things we're doing here locally. So I'm not going to talk about consent forms, but it's actually really interesting stuff. So yes, I wasn't going to talk about splots, but a couple people actually asked me to talk a little bit about them. And it's actually fortuitous that we're here because actually, so splots are a co-creation between Alan Levine and myself. So all Alan did was come up with the concept of how the tools would work, all of the coding and all of the development and building and maintaining the sites. I came up with an acronym, although I haven't quite figured out what they stand for. So it's been a really great kind of 50-50 partnership to this point. And just to kind of boil down what a splot is. God, I wish I could just hear. I wanted to show an example of the writer tool. There we go. So essentially what a splot tool is, even though we haven't quite figured out what the acronym is, is the idea of creating the simplest possible learning online tool you can. And the thing that's notable about a splot is once it's kind of set up, you shouldn't need to provision accounts or collect any data whatsoever from the participants. So in other words, if you're creating a course blog, the students don't need to give an email address. They don't need to put an account anywhere. They don't need to give their name. You'll notice we default anonymity in terms of identity. The participants decide how they'll determine themselves. The other thing is, they don't actually have to learn WordPress. Now learning WordPress is a good thing, but maybe you just want to get these students writing on the open web. So that's kind of the thread that runs across all the different splot tools is minimal data collection and trying to just simplify the process and moving that along. So that's essentially what splotting is. I won't get into too many of the examples, but it's been used a lot at TRU. A huge advantage of the splots. And by the way, the splot writer theme is just a theme you can install into a WordPress site. So this doesn't require any major overhead to install this on your own thing. And Alan's done a really nice job of documenting it. It's fantastic for supporting course blogs at an institution because account creation is probably and maintenance is one of the biggest issues. And essentially too, we don't even have to do introductory workshops on how to do it. We pretty much create the site, spin it out and we just sit back and enjoy the writing. A link to one that's from apps for access justice course. There's a course on law at Thompson Rivers University where the students actually use the Naota logic platform to build actual legal expert system apps that essentially will guide you through a process. It's actually was inspired by, there's a tool in London for people to fight their parking tickets. That apparently a lot of times there were fallacious parking tickets being given, but it's such a process to do the appeal that they were getting away with it. So this tool apparently walks you through the process, submits your appeal and often will get you off. So they've created ones for things like dealing with spousal abuse issues. They actually have one as well to document annual cruelty. So this is a project of real apps for real students where they literally are helping puppies. Which is pretty fantastic. I was a little hesitant to point to this, but I think when I talk about our community, we have a very, very high proportion of indigenous students at our campus. And I just think, I can't go into it, but the Canadian history is we really have a shameful history there. And we have a gaping wound that is not even beginning to heal. And there's some interesting issues around what it means to be on the open web around indigenous issues. I'll just point to this paper. And the McCrew2CMS, which apparently reclaimed hosting is the preferred provider. I wanna chat with you guys about that. But I just wanted to point to this knowledge makers project just because there is still something to be said for students being able to tell their own stories on the web. So when you see things like saying, my grandmother attended a residential school in this territory, today I stand on that same land, a first generation published indigenous researcher. So there is still power in that basic concept of being able to tell their stories. I've only got a minute or two to go. So I'm just going to jump to, I'm not gonna be able to do it in an actual live demo, which is probably a good thing. The concept of cloning is very powerful in terms of supporting websites. So one of our students for this project, the knowledge makers, a student actually created a starter portfolio, embedded it with critical questions to aid the reflection process. And the students essentially could build on top of it and create their own spaces. And then finally, I just want to give a little shout out and it's so fantastic that our collaborator, Brian Mathers is in the room. And this is the open ed tech co-op. We were calling it the co-op actually, but we weren't really a co-op because we were too lazy to actually incorporate as a co-op and it was actually Brian who had the brilliant idea to kind of just take that notion of ed tech co-op, ed tech collaborative and make it open ETC, which I think just kind of has a poetic ring to it, open, et cetera. It's something open. It has something to do with technology. And Grant Potter and Tannis Morgan have been my collaborates on that and it's just been such a blast to work with them. I know I only have one more minute to go, but if anyone wants, I can demonstrate this process later because this is something very slick that Grant Potter has done. Essentially, we can create pre-themed, pre-configured sites ready to run. And then when people sign up from an open ETC participating group, enter their email address, determine which of their sites they want created and hit the create site button and they will get, so you can install the splot writer, the splot collector, a set of pre-configured e-portfolios just by going to the site. So I don't even have to create sites now for students creating portfolios. This is a process that works really well and again, Grant Potter deserves the credit for that. So, again, another shout out to Brian. It was such a joy to work with him on this and he's also kind of to blame for the chicken becoming, I think the reason it resonated with us is kind of, I think as ed techs, we often kind of feel like battery farm chickens trapped in our little cages and just kind of with no room to move at all and the badass free range chicken ready to run really resonated with us. So thanks again to Brian for that and I'm stopping. Thanks. We'll take this work from the public. So actually, you know that I'm on my own work, so it's been nice to be here and I would like actually able to thank so many people for doing so many great things and actually, thanks for your collection of stickers. It's great, but you can have a seat by the means in here. I don't actually see anyone having questions. Oh, no, yes. Okay, let's start with the keynote. No pressure. I'm going to do that classic thing where I'm going to say, not so much a question, but a comment. But it will be a very short one. Now, I think the issue of anonymity is really, really interesting. I think the way that you've worked so hard to facilitate that. And I just think there's an interesting interface there with the way that so much openness depends on licenses that require attribution. So, I mean, I don't really know what I want to say about that, but I just think there's a lot more that we need to explore there about anonymity and attribution and when we need one and when we need the other. So I don't know if it's something that you've had, I think. Yeah, that is an excellent question. And I'll just kind of dodge it just to once again, they'll give a shout out to that paper on questions related to indigeneity and openness. It's a really interesting critique of some of the embedded assumptions around openness and that kind of naive information wants to be free ethos that, I mean, I think it inspired me at the time and it was partly what got me involved with communities like this one. But at the same time, I think as we go deeper into this and really start to look at the human dimensions of the work we're involved with, I think it's really great to have voices like that raising those kinds of questions, not just for those specific communities but for everybody. So when using Splat, how do you track your students if all of them can post something anonymously? So when people are gonna do graded assignments and you're using a Splat, I usually encourage the student, first of all, Alan actually coded in a little area where you can put a message in behind the scenes that will not be on the website itself. And the other thing you can just do is create a student in him and as long as your instructor knows what your pseudonym is, that tends to work. I mean, we've never done a Splat like that at a scale of hundreds and hundreds of students. Typically our typical groups have been around 20 to 50 students and at that level, it's very manageable. I'll let you answer a question. Can you talk a little bit about the infrastructure you're running the Splats off of for the, that grand potter? I'd love to hear more about that. Okay, so the specific tool is a plugin called NS Cloner and the free version actually runs beautifully with WordPress Multi-Site. I think anyone that's running WordPress Multi-Site for an institution, I highly recommend the plugin. Even the free version just lets you take any site you've built and clone it. And that's just such an incredible lifesaver when you're trying to not just, let's say you have a site that's kind of set up for courses and you have a discussion area and a drop box and once you've done that kind of work, you can really build on it easily. The NS Cloner paid version allows you to do pre-figured templates that can be public facing. So that's essentially the technology that that grant built on. And so obviously too, the cloud around stuff you guys were talking about this morning as a cloning kind of principle and moving stuff around across domains is something I think we're gonna be looking at. That was really interesting. We have to move on to the presentation. Thank you, Brian.