 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to day two of OER Domains 21. This session is sponsored by the National Institute for Digital Learning, based in Dublin City University, who have also sponsored five of the scholarship places for the conference this year. And from Dublin City University, I'd like to welcome our speaker today for this session, Dr. Eamon Kosselow. And he is going to be talking about University V as a life. And just before I hand over to Eamon, I'd like to remind you that you can use the chat area for any questions or comments throughout the session. And we'll refer to those at the end of the session. So without further ado, I'd like to hand over to Eamon. Thank you. The host will let you into this university soon. Hope you can see my slides. You're very welcome to University V. And I would like to ask you, where do you see yourself in 34 years time? Here in 2054, we are currently accepting a limited number of students into University V, the greatest university on Earth. Upon registration, you will be given a number, an icon, key dance moves, and most importantly, your own unique pedagogonym, which you will know by each semester as you ascend through the plateaus and the student casts until you step through the final fires of graduation. Come as you are. You need nothing. You may be tired, lonely, lost, or even dead, but you don't have to worry. University V is alive. But before we begin, let us pray and let us think. For as Harroway said, we need good things to think about other things with. But what are the good things? Let us listen to a prologue because something has happened to the word. And as trusted handlers of words, we need to tread carefully. We must marshal our words and direct them to the page before they direct us. When something happened to the word, it may have begun in Scotland during the first pandemic, or perhaps before. We know only that a coven of witches or academics, it's hard to tell the difference we can't be certain which, met in a coven on a hilltop of some kind, and they enacted an incantation, somewhere in Scotland, we've pieced this much together, and it goes something like this, double double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble, fillet of a fennie snake in the cauldron boil and bake, eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, adder's fork and blind worm, sting, lizards leg and howl at swing, for a charm of powerful trouble, hell broth boil and bubble. The exact provenance is extraneous to our purposes, we only know that text has been troubled, have become not disturbed but truly perturbed and estranged in many ways from us, it loses some of its forms as it intermingles with others, it becomes multimodal, it lost some of its borders, its power began to leak out like pain leaving a body, but you can take on a new shape, as a student you will change, but we promise that you will stay the same. So we are almost out of time, but we do ask participants, we ask all applicants to our welcome day, to proceed to the main auditorium, and there Professor A will give her plenary address to students, at this juncture we ask all applicants, especially those with relatives who have contributed to their life credit score that has enabled them to meet the criteria to attend this open day, to please move to the main auditorium, and there Professor A will give her plenary address to prospective students, we are out of time for questions, I know that you have them, I know what you are thinking, why is she called Professor A, and I know you have heard the rumours, you may have heard that she hacked her own name, that she cleaved off the other letters in an extreme act, forging herself a scholastonym that would move her further up the alphabetised author list of an academic paper, and I know there are other stories, a student from one of the lower plateaus of one of the graduate castes even claimed to me that she actually has a longer name, and she would reveal more letters of herself to students as they progressed through the plateaus, he told me that hacking her own name brutal as it sounded was still a more plausible explanation, he said to me that high professors are well known for their physical augmentations, the mods that allow them to see and hear us in such high fidelity, in ever greater pixel counts, and those are standard human practices from the dawn of time to sculpt flesh, pierce and augment the body, but to mutilate one's own name, only one of the most brilliant minds of its time in one of the greatest universities on earth could conceive of and execute such a thing, thus via Occam's razor was the truth of it, we look forward to reviewing your application, thank you. Thank you very much, Eamon, that was fascinating and thank you so much for that, I'm just reading through the comments there and lots of comparisons to Black Mirror, so you definitely have, you know, I think we should be getting in touch with Netflix after this, I'm just looking through to see if we have any questions there, and yes, somebody's just said, where do you even start trying to ask a question, yes, so I mean, there's a question from Sheila McNeil saying it was brilliantly dystopian, how can we avoid this in this future? That's a great question, thanks Sheila, and I guess a good place to start is don't ask me whatever you do, I won't give you a hopeful answer, that's for sure, and that's not what this presentation is about, but the UNESCO's future website is very good, Kerry Facer and others have published some really good futures pieces there, talking about the future of the university, and I mean, she's a particularly good thinker on this, but it's a good question, I guess, you know, all we need to do is think about what we're doing now, because the future is here, you know, we're not trying to, I think it's point trying to predict the future, we just need to try and be in the present of it. Yes, and can I just, can I just introduce your colleague here, or do you want to introduce your colleague, Eamon? Yeah, I just, this is my colleague Lily here, who helped with some of the pictures and stuff, and we have a, it's kind of based, some of this concepts are based around a chapter we have coming out in a book this year as well, and we had an article that came out last year, kind of using this idea of speculative fiction, this methodology. I have a question, sorry to jump in with my own questions, I was just, I was really interested in how you're using, in that methodology of using speculative fiction to think about what's going on currently, and I was just wondering if you, if you talk about how you, how it changes, how, where you think universities are at the moment? Thanks, Emma, that's a great question. There's a lot of, like, this is a big thing in HCI in the field of HCI research, people have been using speculative fiction to a design fiction, it's called as well, they actually create artifacts and then have a conversation about how they might be used, the design speculative artifacts, but, and it's been used a lot in education, but you can use this practically with students as well, with, with teachers, you can sit down and envisage possible futures. I think, like, being able to, you can't, the easiest thing to do is just iterate what we have and just keep taking another step forward and saying, right, we just do the same thing we did last year, that seems to be the path of least resistance. So it's good to use, to explore methodologies that can allow for creativity and thinking about future. So it has been you, it can be used very much, there's some good futures work going on in, in Edinburgh University as well. And there's an interesting project there, the data stories creator with Jen Ross and others, and there's obviously me as more and lots of people at this conference doing a lot of, a lot of work with this as well. Yeah. And one of the things that you mentioned, which I thought was quite interesting in there, was the idea of students having a life credit score, was that something that came from the students or from yourself or? And no, that's in university five, that's not, that's not me, that's not to me, that's, but it's, it's, you can have like your family can have a life credit average, and they can save that up and give some of that to you. And you can enter, when you enter the university, we will monitor your life credit average. And as you pass examinations, you can keep it and you may graduate, but you just have to be careful not to lose it because I won't go into that. You can imagine what will happen if you start to lose your life credit average, but I think it's just important that you invest everything in your being in education. And if you can't do that, it was too late for you to put it into one of your other family members and invest your life credit average in them. That's what I'm doing. I'm putting all my hopes and dreams in my kids. And that's my life credit average is going into them. Just right, just right. And also they, I thought it was interesting you talked about the name hacking. I'm sure there's a bit of that that goes on already, but it's a really interesting concept. That is based on the true story. So yeah, that is, but I can't go into the details. But yeah, the other thing that's interesting is I think truth is actually strange in the fiction. Like I guarantee there's some people here, like I see some faces in the chat and thanks very much for all your comments that were coming. But I think people will agree like anybody that works in the academy, like you've seen things, you know, I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. The truth is strange in fiction. There's things that have happened to me in like papers and classrooms and research projects that I couldn't literally write about. They're too strange. People wouldn't believe it. You couldn't make it up, you know. So I think that's kind of useful to use speculative methodologies as well for actually for academics to talk about things that the truly strange things that go on in academia. And I think, uh, Sean Bain has written really interesting about this, this idea of academia, Tron, this kind of surrealness of the university and so on. And I think we're experiencing that more than ever this year. It's hard to know where dystopia ends and reality begins. Absolutely. And I find that actually in the images that were in the presentation as well. It just, um, yeah, it just, maybe last year that seemed really bizarre, but this year it's, it's not that far removed from where we are. I think, um, I've just had a comment there from Sheila again, uh, that this is, it's a really useful way to get us out of our cozy open bubbles. Um, does, but either of you like to talk about that about, yeah, well, you know, the, the manifesto for teaching online is, there's an interesting chapter. I'd be very interested to hear any commentators who are, who have read the chapter on open education in the manifesto for teaching online and if they have any views on it, because, um, they talk in it about openings and closures and that we need closures to have openings and so on and so very well, but it is from a bunch of prestigious, a very prestigious university and a closed access book and so on from another prestigious university. I think the prestige thing is a big university that we have to grapple with in general, but it also says in that book, they kind of say that open education as a movement is very, they challenge, they provoke, there's a provocation that open education is a very, um, is a bubble and I guess the, the title of this talk was slightly inspired by the idea of care and openness and life and it was kind of like, um, and Martin Weller sort of written about this, this, this idea about wellness and, you know, self-care and is that sort of blaming individuals or it's sort of getting this balance between are we in a bubble, is everything great or, uh, what other ways could we look and think about things I guess, but just to have a bit of fun I suppose as well. Absolutely. Um, I think we're, we're just out of time. Um, I think, uh, that from the comments can see people are, it's really inspired people to think, uh, very differently about some of the topics that we're covering, uh, in these past couple of days and I just want to thank everyone for coming and particularly Eamon and Projector for, uh, delivering the session today. Thank you very much. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Bye.