 And so we have three, well, two lovely women and me presenting their work today. We'll start with Helen Crump, who is a good friend of mine, a lovely, lovely human being. And she, her presentation is about her interpretation of open practices. And her title is Enacting the Value of Openness by Sharing. I'll leave you with her and then I'll introduce the next speaker, who is me. So you have everything, here's your clicker if you need it. Okay. I'll check the time for you, don't I? Okay, yeah. Why shall I tell you, wait, let me put the clock. I put 15, okay? So I can tell you when you have five minutes. Yeah, so, yeah. I say 15 and then you know, yeah. So ready? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hi, my name is Helen Crump. I'm a PhD research student at the Open University in the UK. And my research is into open educational practices within the context of networked participatory scholarship. In this presentation, I'll outline how I conceptualize openness and how I utilize the idea of self-OER, that Suzanne Kossioglu and Mahabali proposed at OER 16. And how I used it as an interview prompt for discussion about open practices and the relationship with open educational resources. I'll then go on to outline how my analysis and interpretation is progressing, highlighting the role of sharing and little OERs in open practices before going on to consider how value is created and the nature of labor that this involves. In the term self-OER, Kossioglu and Mahabali propose that understanding of open educational resources should be widened from one that primarily regards open educational resources as openly licensed content to include individuals in the learning community. That is to see individuals or their practice as an open educational resource. They contend that an individual or the self and their practice can become an open educational resource by the process and products of open scholarship. Essentially, this is the connections or relationships that are formed and resources that are produced. Within this, they also contend that many individuals hold openness as a worldview or are open as a way of being. The idea of openness as a way of being really resonated with me. What's more, I was certain that it would resonate with others, so I used the idea of self-OER to facilitate interviews with 11 participants. Relative to their own practice, participants were asked to comment on the particular framing of openness and the depiction of practice within the idea of self-OER and to present a selection of texts or resources that exemplified their openness. This show-and-tell method proved a very useful way to surface aspects of practice, particularly the meanings that participants attribute to it and the relationship between practice and resources. And yes, the concept of self-OER resonated. All 11 participants, for a whole host of different reasons, said openness as a worldview or as a way of being was how they framed their practice. And for many, openness directly equates to sharing. Participants said openness for them was sharing. It was the human element. It was identity. It was being open to others. It's about life and it's about freedom. Before I move on, I have to say that I was really challenged in the early stages of my research with questions like, how does the self become an open educational resource and how might practice be seen as a resource and also the nature between discourse and materiality, which came out of my Emirates study. To resolve this, I adopted Karen Barad's idea of a phenomenon which derives from quantum physics. Instead of focusing on separate entities or agencies with inherent boundaries and properties, it means that openness is seen as a phenomenon in which there are no predetermined boundaries between the individual self, the resources produced, and the technology. Consequently, openness in my study is regarded as a single phenomenon. It's a process or a doing and it's enacted in practice. And my study is an interpretive case study which essentially seeks to describe openness in its distributive nature. At this point, I need to highlight the sorts of texts and resources that participants presented as exemplifying their openness and that they shared in practice. But let's see what Anna and Kimmons regard open or networked participatory scholarship as referring to teaching and research practices that espouse openness. And this takes three forms, open access publishing, open education, including OER and open teaching and networked participation. Participants refer to all these forms of scholarships and the texts or resources they presented covered this spectrum. But what was most noticeable was that everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, positioned their openness in relation to networked participation. This was either exemplified by their blog, their Twitter, an online community they belong to or a combination of similar things, Flickr and Instagram even. It seems that the aspect of social media and networked participation adds a certain vibrancy to openness. That is, it adds the human element. I was really struck by just how much meaning, purpose, desire, care and support that was on display. Honestly, there was just so much life and so much humanity. As such... Right, you got it, there's humanity. As such, the majority of texts or resources presented were not typical OERs. They were what Martin Waller refers to as little OER, individually produced, low-cost resources that don't have explicit educational aims or learning outcomes. Consequently, their use can be unpredictable in unpredicted contexts. So broadening the definition of OER to include little OER means that we can now consider a continuum of resources. But this begs the question, how little can a little OER be and what exactly is viable as an OER? Back in 2006, Stephen Downs asked whether people could be considered open educational resources. And since then, a number of people have asserted that yes, they can. Okay, so when researching a phenomenon, Scott and Orlikowski ask, what does the phenomenon depend on? What drives practice? Well, overwhelmingly, and no surprise, openness is enabled by sharing. Kennedy points out that all those sharing is a central concept of networked culture. Its conceptual boundaries with other social theories of exchange haven't been established. Nor has a concept been adequately critiqued. And moreover, there are few empirical studies on how sharing is practiced when mediated by social media. Added to this, the notion of sharing presents many possible meanings. It relates to the distribution or division of physical resources, as well as to the sharing of an experience or disclosure of personal information. Good shared can be material or immaterial, and immaterial goods are intellectual or affective. Consequently, sharing has both social and economic dimensions, which are counterpoised in networked culture. That's a condition in which opposing forces are equal to one another and have balancing or contrasting effects. Typically, sharing in networked culture is explained in relation to gift-giving and its feature of reciprocity. Across the board, in some way or another, participants in my study equated openness with reciprocity. Explaining sharing in terms of gift-giving and reciprocity distinguishes it from commodity exchange. But you know what? Turns out there's no discreet theory of sharing. Following the work of Marcel Maus in 1954, sharing has conventionally been explained as a subcategory of gift exchange theory. However, anthropologists such as Wiedlach, who mainly study hunter-gatherer societies, have a host of empirical evidence that refutes sharing as being reciprocal. Gift-giving involves giving, receiving, and reciprocating, as such it's a two-way exchange between two people. It's about establishing and strengthening social bonds as in kinship relations. But sharing, on the other hand, is not reciprocal because although you receive something through sharing, you're not obligated to give something back to the same person. Sharing, then, is a one-way transfer that's multi-directional. It's not about strengthening social bonds per se, it's about enabling, indeed maximising, access opportunities all around. It's an economic mode of transfer that enables others to access what's needed or resolve intrinsic value. Sharing provides an alternative to both gift exchange and market exchange. And whilst more sharing is not initiated by the giver, rather it's prompted by the receiver in the form of a demand. This demand is on the basis of individuals, humans, sharing needs derived from the fact that they share the experience of life itself and that they recognise this as such. So this demand can be spoken or silent. The silent demand is founded on bodily presence. In the context of human sociality, bodily presence by itself constitutes a demand, a demand for being acknowledged as a human being with legitimate needs. For example, in anthropology, it's frequently observed that a person who silently positions themselves next to a fire or a cooking pot will most likely be given something by the person tending to it. And online, bodily presence equates to embodied presence and the invisible other or the lurker. Sharing practices are established, as I've said, through bodily co-presence. Ah, and Kate mentioned co-presence earlier. But they also involve communication or speech acts to structure the process. Plus, they also depend on the relationship or affordance of the thing being shared, as well as being influenced by the nature or materiality of the physical space involved. So the internet then is fundamentally a sharing technology. Its surveilling properties enable us to imagine the watching presence of others. Its infrastructure facilitates efficient resource sharing. And the addition of social media enables a social dimension of communication. The upshot is that the internet enables both the sharing out of resources and the sharing in of life experiences. In like this, and in contrast to gift giving, sharing is about creating opportunities and gaining access to what's needed or valued. It's not a matter of obligation and the imperative to reciprocate. Rather, it's about the opportunity to request. Which means the initiative is with the potential recipient. It enables them to request what they need. Things that are not already out there or not easily located. Sharing is a way to achieve one's needs or reach one's goals through the help of others. It's the recognition that fellow human beings can provide what's needed and it's the power that's asserted based on the recognition that we share life and we understand what others require. Oops, have I got the wrong thing? Oops, sorry. So, given this understanding of sharing in relation to openness we can see that when Pearl in my study says I ask for help that we're not talking about gift giving because people don't generally ask to be given gifts. She's demanding access to what she needs. Pearl was struggling with an aspect of her research so in order to get help she set up a Facebook group to get the help she needed. Now others can join the Facebook group and ask for help. Then there's a silent demand from the invisible imagined other. It was noticeable just how many participants were conscious of having an audience and the possibility that there were people out there with unfulfilled needs or who'd find something that they had to be of value. They hoped their posts, their comments or their resources would be useful to others. It was also noticeable just how much the texts or resources presented exhibited personal or social aspects. That is affective goods. There was such a lot, such a lot of lived experience on display relating to both professional and personal life. Jeff narrates his course Design Decisions. Sheila blogs about her struggles with openness. Rebecca shared her best cancer story and now research is in this area and Laura openly documents or narrates aspects of her professional life and professional life and personal practice. As we can now appreciate, sharing is about opportunity. The opportunity to request access to things we need or solicit opportunities for ourselves. Laura puts her finger on it when she says, the interrelated practice of sharing and openness is partially controlled and partially serendipitous. Either way, it's about it's about creating opportunities for yourself. She gives the example of provoking a discussion on Twitter by making a deliberately controversial statement. The exchange resulted in her being asked to contribute to a podcast. Maybe I should click this in more often. Right. People participate in communities and networks because there's value in it. People don't get value. People don't get value. People can't participate. In the first instance, value is derived in the immediate term from the experience of participation itself. This can simply be through connecting with others, asking a question and passing on information or providing feedback or just being with others who understand your challenges. On the other hand, value in the form of knowledge capital is something that can be realised later and this can take a number of forms. Participating in communities and networks helps develop an individual's skills and competencies. That is, it helps develop their human capital. Social relations and connections are also a form of knowledge capital and the cultivation of one's reputation is a social achievement that can also operate as a knowledge resource. Undoubtedly, open practices contributes to a reputational economy. Amongst the participants, there was no shortage of benefits derived from cultivating one's reputation. Invitations to speak at conferences, for example, reputation translates into a form of value as does... reputation translates into a form of value exchange as does human capital. However, it's the role of use value that intrigues me in all of this and commodification. It seems that open sharing practices are built around the concept of use value and that this helps foster the way in which value is created. Scholars such as Bertha and Bowens argue that the peer-to-peer sharing economy is founded on the promise of use value over exchange value and the partnership between the peer-to-peer economy and the market. However, I'm not sure how this works exactly because we've already acknowledged that once something like a little OER is out there its use is unpredictable in unpredicted context so it could easily become a commodity. As Kennedy points out, the exchange of information, data and immaterial labour that constitute open sharing practices gets transformed into a commodity to be exchanged. As Audrey Waters has highlighted, the aspect of value and the invisibility of labour in open practices. The relationship of openness to the labour market and the precarity of higher education was a noticeable feature in my study. Five out of eleven participants related to it in one way or another. Maeve and Libby acknowledged that they could see the benefits of sharing open practices in order to secure employment in precarious circumstances and Gabby said she was appreciative of the identity and support that open scholarship afforded her when she was in between institutions. It's important to analyse what's not included in material discursive practices. What's excluded matters because it remains in play as a constitutive element and guess what's not included in the discourse of open? Labour. Well-meaningly, the emphasis is on the product not the producer. Labour is downplayed and labelled as creativity and possibly and care. Considering that networked participatory scholarship requires the construction and performance of identities which are essentially established through a range of strategies involving some aspects of our life or our bios I'm drawn to Foucault's idea of bio power a disciplinary form of power over life and how this seems to have been appropriated into the workplace for productive processes, purposes. Moreover, how sharing seems to feed into this, considering that we're practically compelled to share as we recognise the needs of others. So under the term biocracy, Fleming highlights how productivity is increasingly dependent on social and personal aspects of human life for its value-creating qualities. Much of this tacit dimension can't be sourced or nurtured inside the institution. It's not just a matter of formal learning and explicit codified knowledge anymore value is increasingly derived from aspects of tacit knowledge that's learnt socially or informally. Moreover, it's generally developed beyond the formal remuneration process and as such it takes on the form of free work. Free work or free labour in the Biocratic Academy harnesses our free time and our self-organisation and our capacity for self-development. So why does this matter? What's at stake? Because it represents the enclosure of social value. It's the social commons that's at stake. It's the onslaught of the social factory. After transcribing participant interviews I wrote in my notes the word total capture and I've been trying to understand what this means ever since. In closing social value and the capture of the social commons in closing social value and the capture of the social commons forms a basis of neoliberal human capital theory that is we're no longer just participants in an economic exchange relationship rather we're the living embodiment of capital. Sharing practices capture value production from forms of socialisation founded on a communistic nature. Utilising our bios the diffusion of sharing practices promotes a systemic integration of ephemeral forms of sociality into value creation chains. Consequently scholars are beginning to see sharing as the indication of a broader process that re-socialises economic exchange. That is market exchange or commodification is becoming increasingly embedded in society in new and antagonising ways. Ok so yes life is sharing ok. But to what extent is life capital that is a question and to what extent is the self an open educational resource or simply a human resource. As Maeve concludes in my study ultimately I am the resource I have explained my research clearly and my concerns and apologies that I read it rambled. Thank you. Perfect timing. Is there any question? No, you don't want questions. It's a very dense work very theoretical and very incredibly well written. Ok, no questions then? Yes. Helen I'm sorry you have one. Sharing an example, I had an email the day from somebody who was struggling with something they wanted to understand and so I devoted a couple of hours of my time to this person because I believed they were acting reasonably but sometimes people come to me with a question and I know they haven't really tried to answer it they just see me as a short cut so that seems unfair so if I am an open educational resource I exercise a judgement whether the person is being reasonable fair, whether they merit my time or whether they are just being lazy so there seems to be a dimension here that's missing. Correct, because as there are three parts in my reading to giving, receiving and reciprocating there are actually three parts and it's a demand to request but you are also not obliged to answer the request I don't know what the third R is it's reject, you can ignore them and then the final one is relinquishing it's about giving things away just giving up something so you're right there is actually a little bit missing there you can actually not acquiesce to the demands but basically from what I'm reading is not a gift because it's like two way reciprocal kinship thing it's not about obligation it's the emphasis is on opportunity so that person asks you for something you don't do that in gift giving you don't ask for a gift so yes there was a little bit missing thank you any other question