 My name is Jasmine Roberts. That announcement is always kind of so jarring, right? My name is Jasmine Roberts. You see her, her pronouns. And I am so, so pleased to moderate and begin the session this plenary about the applications of social justice in open education. It has been just so amazing to see the various different topics on this issue of social justice and how it's most certainly applies to open education. We have our two key notes for this hour, Dr. Jacqueline Mechlamaya and Jesse Lawyer, who we're going to delve really into this topic and give you all concrete action points and cognitive nuggets, if you will, to really ponder on. So I'm actually just gonna go ahead and give it away to our first speaker, Dr. Mechlamaya. So Dr. Mechlamaya, if you wanna go ahead and kick us off, I know we don't have much time, so I just wanna go ahead and hand it over to you. Great, hello everyone, and thank you for joining today. I'm gonna talk with you for about 25 minutes on a topic entitled and examination of how open educational resources fall short of being accessible, inclusive, and disruptive. So let me get right to it here, just one second. So I'm just gonna talk to you a little bit about how open educational resources or OERs may actually perpetuate inequity and things to remedy that. So I won't talk about how teachers, practitioners, funders, and institutions can actually disrupt this way of facilitating the use of OERs across the different institutions, states, and countries. So let's think about OERs. They're so close and they're so far away. Depending on who has access to them. But keep that in mind as we think about OERs today. So close and yet so far. And so as you think about OERs, and if you're one of the practitioners or one of the librarians or someone involved at this year, I want to set the infrastructure whenever we think about open educational resources at the baseline who truly has access based on technology and other barriers and challenges that may impede that access. Think about equity. Everything that we do in terms of open educational resources should be about equity and thinking big and thinking about inclusion, who's at the table, who's not at the table and who has access, truly. So if you're here at this conference, you know what OERs are. In digital form, open license, free access, and lots of different forms. But when you think about OERs, think about how young it really is. The whole movement really is. You think about 2002 when UNESCO first coined the term. Of course, there were folks doing it before, especially in the STEM 2000 plus program in Africa, but it really became something known around the world when it was coined officially just 18 years ago. And 18 years ago was very young. So I was going to say at this point, we are truly in an empathy stage. We're learning what works. We're learning what doesn't work. We're learning who has access and who doesn't have access. So it's really important to keep that in mind. Listen to me over the next 23 minutes or so about OERs and equity, diversity, and inclusion. And so when UNESCO coined the term, they had very lofty ambitions. Everyone involved in OERs had lofty ambitions about who was going to have access to all of this innovation, all of these phenomenal professors and educators and companies all invested in making this happen. Very lofty ambition. And there's a particular person here who talked about his perception of what OERs and the internet was going to do for the world. Education through the internet was going to be the great equalizer. It was going to afford a world-class education for everyone, even the student in the most remote areas were going to get access through the use of these OERs. And that's a very lofty ambition. And it has, millions of people have gained access to educational material that otherwise wouldn't have access. It's because of what we're doing around the country and around the world with OERs. But one of the things we have to think about when we think about OERs is the whole digital divide. And one of the things that the COVID-19 showed the world was the disparities that continue to persist and many different ways around the world. And so let's talk for a moment then about the digital divide because that's the platform in which all of this work rests and it's centered. So connectivity. Did you know that 52% of the world's population still has no internet access? That is disconcerting, especially when you think about there's 7.8 billion people in the world and these statistics tell us that over half of those folks have no internet access, which obviously is tied to our work when we put out those OERs. So unless we address the whole broadband issue internet connectivity, we're going to continue to have this divide between the haves and the have nots despite the great intention and all the work that goes into OERs that we're all creating. And so let's look at the whole internet users concept because that's what we talk about a lot when we talk about OERs. But I want to ask that you all look beneath their surface. Look at these numbers. It looked pretty impressive overall. It's looking at 11 countries out of over 180 some countries and numbers look pretty impressive in terms of internet users. I'm going to encourage you all to look beneath the surface. However, look at China, India, the United States, China, 1.4 billion people and the 904 million users. India, 1.3 billion people and 743 million, 100 million users. And look at the United States, 312 million people are users of internet. And it looks like almost everybody in this country has access to the internet. But again, we'll ask you to look beneath the surface when you start comparing the hundreds of millions and the billions in total context. And then the true accessibility behind the numbers. So let's look at continents. Let's look at Africa, the Americas, the Arab States, Asia, the Commonwealth, and then Europe. The number here is very disconcerting. Look at Africa, having access to a lot of the work that we're doing and work that's offered over there as well. 28.2% of Africa, but the continent where there's about 1.3 billion people have access. So literally the country is being left in the dark in terms of all of these opportunities that are being afforded, disproportionate to already high income countries and continents. So that's something to think about. And it's also equally disconcerting. We think about Asia that has billions of people in Asia alone and look at the very low numbers. And if we further dive deep into the data it's gonna show some companies, countries, and Asia are even more disparately treated in terms of having access to what's going on through the internet. Well, some may say, well, Jacqueline, what do you expect between high income countries and then low income countries and continents? It's gonna be a disparate, of course there is, but the United States is gonna be a lot better. I say not so much and not so fast. Let's look at that as well. And most of us have internet coverage at home. We know how fast and how slow the internet is. We know how inconvenient it is when it's down. You know how much we pay when we pay monthly bills. But can you imagine warning that and having no access to it? And look at the United States, it doesn't look so great after all. If you look at the colors that are in turquoise, the states in turquoise, those with the best access regarding coverage, speed, and actual access. 10 states that are doing, okay. Then you have those turquoise states that aren't doing well, I'm sorry, the burgundy states that aren't doing well at all. There are 10 word states, Mississippi, Maine, and less than the Mexico and Nebraska. And then all the rest of us fall somewhere in the blue. And there's a lot of diversity within diversity in terms of accessing equity right there and all of those blue states. Actually gives you a sense that 314 million uses the internet around this country. Things aren't quite equal nor equitable. When you look at it that closely. Well, let me just flush it out a little bit more and dive deeper in terms of disparities regarding even the people who are in high schools. Well, a lot of this data and resources could be used to benefit their educational experiences. You see right here, United States is an acute research center. One in four lower income teams don't have access to a home computer. One out of four low income individuals. And you see 18% of these individuals are Hispanic. And then 25% are in homes of less than $30,000. This is a huge lack of access for this particular group. The data tells more. Look at black teens and those from lower income households are especially likely to be affected by the digital homework gap. Can't get the homework done because of a digital lack of access. Look at the column here about Hispanics, about those who have to do their homework on cell phones. That's come out quite a bit from because of COVID. The number of kids around the country who are doing their homework on cell phones. And this particular study pre-COVID, it was shown that 39% of Hispanics in this particular study was using their cell phone to do homework. In the next chart there, the number who are unable to complete their homework because of not having a reliable computer or internet connection. 25% of black students indicated this, sometimes or often. Then in the last column there about using public Wi-Fi to do homework because no internet connection. And then when it comes to COVID, we know the library shut down and all of those things they had access to were now null and void. I actually started to see teenagers spending in front of restaurants and people's homes during COVID trying to do homework during this pandemic. That's how bad it is and how many disparities there are. That's problematic. Well, open edge, great, brilliant ideal. Lots of people are invested, you've heard for the last three or four days, all of these great things that we're doing. So I won't talk about those things. Let's talk about the things we aren't doing, okay? Because that's fully important to have that conversation. I want to start with my own experiences because I am guilty as well. I have made some mistakes and might be it to do what is good and do what is right. I've made some mistakes and I've learned some things that I should do differently as well and things that I learned that we shouldn't be doing in the name of OERs. And I started my iTunes course in 2013 by the year after they started this. Great opportunity to do this iTunes course. And it was supposed to be fair for art, lots of excess across the country for those invested in learning of wanting to know more about human trafficking. Well, I learned very quickly there are some serious limitations when it comes to iTunes University. And I understand it's going to wait in 2021 end of the year. But first of all, it requires extensive training. Not all institutions can afford to really train their instructors to do this work on iTunes University. I personally know not to California for a week to Apple headquarters to learn from the best of the best. I was given a MacBook. I had top notch people around me training supervision and assistance. That's not affordable to many institutions around this country or even units in one within a same institution. The iTunes University courses are banked on. People have an Apple products to really get the full effect of the graphics and the programs. I afford it and part of it. That ended up being a limitation as well and not everything that I put on my course that I thought was going to be free end up being free to my constituents. So I quickly started to figure out some more various. I wasn't discouraged. I went on to Lucera and did a massive online course that very next year in 2014. I created this massive online course for four weeks on human trafficking. 30,000 people enrolled on my course. It was unheard of at that time. Over a four-week period had 30,000 people enrolled on my course of 187 countries. I was beyond enthused about the reach for open educational opportunities. Well, I quickly learned some things in those four weeks. Besides being sleep deprived for four weeks because all the time zones and things coming in, I learned quite a bit about access and equity. These things happen. Our prime minister in one of the countries banned the internet and I lost a whole sector of my group. Because there was no lower internet connection. Several other countries, there were blackouts because there's energy shortages. So there was blackouts throughout several countries around the world. I learned that multiple choice tests suck. They're Eurocentric, they're patriarchal, and they're exclusive. I get so much feedback. If you're going to do a course that involves other people from around the world, do not do what you do in the West. Think about other people, multiple choice tests out. And then paper. I've been out of the country between 2007 and 2018, 25 times. I've been in so many countries around the world. I've been out of the fit of Ohio to 37 other states. They're in the same time here, meeting all kinds of people and trying to figure this out. And one thing I've learned abroad is that the paper matters. And so if you're going to have someone engaged in your move course, your online education, and if there's a certificate involved at the very end, a diploma or piece of paper, a degree of sometimes, people want it. What I found whenever at the very end that there was a cost or a certificate, a two-tier level of cost. And what that ended up translating into was these certificates were worth some people for one month, two months, or three months of solomies. So they did all of this work because they wanted the certificate at the very end only to find they had no money to actually get the paper. And they needed that paper for the next job, for the next opportunity, the next program they were seeking to get into. So it became cost prohibitive. I was discouraged and disheartened, unfortunately. This is what I've learned about thinking about other ways to do this. Well, I didn't give up. I'm still working to make this right to be inclusive. Took the time. Me and a doc student wrote 13 chapter book. Wonderful experience. Learned a lot. Wanted it out there. It's on the internet. Post can get it. It's in my course. Wonderful opportunity. What I found is all textbooks are not equally created. And these are three of the ones that I absolutely love and I read myself. They are phenomenal, phenomenal textbooks. But there are some issues regarding open textbooks. They're all not created equally. Period. We're going to really keep that in mind when it comes to textbooks and having quality assurance. But in terms of equity, I found some more problems about faculty and instructors. This is a problem. Attainment for the work varies greatly. And if you want someone to put up quality work, this is for all the publics online right now, all the deans, all the presidents, folks who have to take grants and give money for this process, people need to be paid for their work. And I've paid it varies greatly. I hear some folks may have gotten a thousand dollars from what they've done. It's an institution. Some are getting 16,000. Some are getting course by else. Some folks are getting cash in your checks. Some are going to allow an option to come to fruition. There's a huge disparity about how the payments are going out. There's a huge disparity about respecting and valuing the work. Universities and colleges do not respect the work the same way that there was a printed book by a university press or some of these highly regarded publishers. It is not you the same. And in terms of livelihood, credit is not given where it is due when it comes to promotion and merit reviews. If universities want to create these OERs, they need to make sure it's baked into the system equity rights in terms of promotions as well as merit as well as raises and bonuses. That's a serious equity issue that needs to be addressed in institutions. So I'm not discouraged yet. I can feel so much good that comes out of this year. But now in my mind, I'm constantly thinking about equity and equality every time I think about OERs. So how to disrupt it? There are some things that we all can do. I want to start with institution. It's really important that we all collect data and see what we're doing right. Collect the right kind of data be very specific and then break the data down desegregate the data. Collect the right type of points of information so you can be proactive and doing something about this inequity and disparity. Audit yourself, how many racial minorities and authors have you had involved in your institution in doing this work? How many disciplines are overrepresented? We always talk about those who are underserved and marginalized. Let's talk about those who are over-served, those who are over-represented and overused and have access and opportunities. Let's think about that as well. Let's think of the diversity of the courses developing CUSERA and other online educational platforms. How diverse are they? Are they something that racial minorities will want to talk about and enroll in? Do they include issues and concerns of women? People with differing abilities from different countries. Let's do a series audit about what we're doing putting out there. And how diverse are the images? I know my previous experiences, that was one of my thorns in the side is finding images and look at the folks I was talking about doing something as basic as holding a cell phone, eating an apple. Images are hard to come by. I know there's creative comments out there at Pinterest but the richly diverse images are hard to come by. And what are you going to do to change that? Incentive for grants. We need some money. Show us the money to do this important work. I don't know how to say it. Show us the money. Still access to technology. One thing again about the COVID-19 is showing us there's a lot of disparity in terms of actual access to technology with our students as well as our staff at many of these universities. We're going to have to address that. Partners. This work should never be done in silos. We tend to do it in silos but we need to stop doing it in silos. When institutions do this for a living or I want us all to just stop. Have a moratorium. Stop for a moment. Assess where we are of what we're doing. Let's truly say how inclusive we are in this whole movement to have materials that are open to those out there. Look at our partners. Run your courses and your ideals by the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, African-American Studies, Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, Women, Genesexuale Studies, Indigenous Studies, Disability Studies groups run by people in these units at these departments. Let's say how inclusive the work really is. You may think you're doing a good job or let someone read it from a different unit, different perspective, different frame, different culture and they may tell you you're way off, way off. So keep that in mind. Think about partnership. They're strongly by causes and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, hyper-causing universities and just in general, other institutions less partner in a multi-directional way. Let's pause and think what are we doing right and who is missing, who is not part of the discussion and how can we get information to our partners and from our partners to do this the right way. This is truly the best way to make open educational resources educational, open, equitable and include diverse type of frameworks and approaches to getting this out there. It's really important to be holistic as possible. And then partners. I'm going to have to give my shout out to the libraries. I could not have done my work without the use and the assistance and the expertise of my librarians and my colleague Jesse Lawyer is coming on next to discuss this here. We need our librarians. They are essential to all that we do. Please stick them out every step of the way. They know what's available, what's missing. They understand OERs and in some campuses they're leading the way. They're leading the way in this movement and of course they understand licensing something that many of us don't understand but it's really important think about our campus librarians and then partners in terms of technology and access. We need to nurture all kinds of relationships different. Fielded tech or Apple, Dell, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, Spectrum, and so forth and so forth and so forth. We're going to have to always keep in mind all of our partners to help us advance our agendas and join us the right way. Okay. I'm almost done here. I want to allow again to just stop. Just please stop what we're doing right now. I'm going to have to say it. Just stop. Just stop what we're doing and take a moment to pause and reflect. I want us to create a reward system for doing this work and our OER space. I want us to unlearn exclusivity in the academy. We keep in mind most institutions outside of HPCUs and TCUs were really designed to teach white males. That was the platform in which all this is built on. We need to learn how to be unlearned. I should say how to be explosive and learn how to be inclusive. We need to value scholar activism. Many of us are scholar activists and value please value our work and our attentions. We move all the colonial debris that was wrapped in a whole academy. We move it all throughout. And we need to also consider disability and ability and the work that we do and how we present it especially OER. That's really important to keep that in mind. We need to become race conscious. It's okay to say race black, Latinx, indigenous, Asian, white. Let's just say it. It's okay to say it and focus on it and our work. And again, just plain stop. Let's just stop, pause, moratorium and get this right. The definition of open insanity is to continue to do the same thing and expect different results. Let's not be the insane academy. Let's do this differently as it enterprise. Simply said, let's decolonize the academy and OERs ASAP. So some quick thoughts from the educators. I'm almost done here. Let's be very inclusive of the images that we use and the topics that we discuss as educators in doing this work. Let's audit our students' access. We should always know what our students do have and don't have. And a quick example is this summer we went online. Many of us went online and we read this great summer program set up and ready to go for our young scholars grades 1912 who are going to be eventually a final state students. We quickly discovered that our young scholars who had home books thrown up school year had to turn them back in. So there we go. This great summer program and no Chromebooks, no laptops, no computers. Oh my goodness. We quickly call our partners around the university and out there we call Dell Computer. We call it Mac. We call Spectrum. We call everybody. So we need some donations. ASAP, would you please help us out? And we had some bags and bags and bags. We had no problems doing that. And we were able to get thousands and thousands of dollars to buy hundreds of computers. Actual laptops at the very last minute. And we were so glad that we figured it out before the program started. A summer program means nothing with no technologies actually offered to our constituents. Educators again, conduct your assessments. Demographic data is important. Racism, ethnicity, ability and disability, first gen ESL, do your homework please before you start your offering of material and understand commitment to updates. Once you know better, you have to do better. I too made lots of mistakes. I made lots of mistakes along the way. But I want to do this better down the road and I intend to do it better by being thoughtful and even having a way of looking at this that's very equity minded. So in terms of I'm ending here, reimagining, I want us all at the end of this conference to sit down and think at our homes, our offices. How can we do things differently moving forward? How can we reimagine open educational resources? Think about it in the context of don't think about financial limitations. Think about given what you have at your disposal, what can you do creatively to make this accessible to those around you? Look at your own work. Is it an anti-racist agenda or not? And if you know about the even kindies work, he says either you're a racist or an anti-racist. Either you're part of the problem, you're part of the solution. There's no ambivalence on where this should go in terms of OER. It'd be very awful to that. And in terms of accessibility, think about it domestically and globally. Think about it in the context of ESL in the second language, diverse cultures and differing abilities. All of these things in mind, we do our work in this particular dimension. Use racially and culturally diverse authors of all of the things that we're offering in our institutions and keep inclusion and equity at the forefront of all that we do, all of our discussions and initiatives must center diversity, equity and inclusion. And I know it costs, it's going to cost us a moment to pause to do this. And we're in a time of thinking we have a little moments here and there to just pause and rethink how we're conducting our affairs as higher educational institutions. I want to add this to your plate, this over this right we're going to have in November, December. How can you do your work differently? How can you update it? How can it be more inclusive? And where are the gas in terms of equity? Faculty, stats, deals, partner organization of an institution? Where are the gaping holes in your work? I'm going to challenge you to do something different when it comes differently when it comes to continuing this very important work that we're all engaged in. Thank you all. That was a lot. But I wanted to set the ground work for what I think is really important regarding being equity mindedness in how we do our work. Thank you all. All right. Thank you so much, Dr. Michelle Maia. We do have time for if you can answer just one question, then we'll move on to Jesse lawyer. So we have actually a lot of questions in the chat here. So let's see. Looking at one question is asking, what role do you think students undergrad and grad can play in this call to decolonize the academy and OER? I love that question. Thank you for doing it like it is, Dr. Michelle Maia, so refreshing. Thank you so much. And let me tell you about students. We need to start to get in the roles of students as teachers. We find ourselves stuck in this whole professorial role. But you know what? I've learned so much about teachings. Is the students who teach me the most? You need to really be consulting with our students before you do your next online educational patient next classroom next book, conduct a survey, conduct a focus group. Talk to our students first. This is what I did from my press book. And it made a difference because they tell me what was missing, what was needed, and what they wanted. And they held nothing back. And I loved it. But you know what? Well, students, they're going to tell you the truth. I love it. They're going to tell you the truth. So continue to rely on students. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. A little bit of that. I'm so sorry about that. So now we're going to go ahead and move on. I think we lost you, Jasmine. Well, Jesse, I turn it over to you. OK? And you're on mute, Jesse. All right. Here we go. Sorry to lose, Jasmine, but I think we are, we're going to head right in. So I'll just share my screen very quickly. And take us here. You got us going. So what I'm going to be talking about today is basically kind of honing in pretty narrowly. Dr. Michelle Maia has given us a beautiful landscape of what we see in front of us. But now I'm going to hone in on maybe one of the things that we can look at really specifically. So I'll start with saying that I believe really strongly in openness. But I enter this space from the perspective of being an Indigenous person. And for us, theft has marked most of our relationships with our own intellectual property. We can look at that as theft by outsiders, kind of historically, as theft by missionaries and anthropologists. But even modern times by tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, fashion designers, musicians. Now, for some positionality, I'm Cree Mati and I'm a member of Michelle First Nation. I grew up in Kalahoo here in my own traditional territory up in Treaty 6. So just outside of Edmonton, Alberta. This is what it looks like right now. It's pretty snowy and cold and we're entering winter, the time when we can tell stories again. Now I gave a talk last year for Open Access Week that thought about how open access and res dogs are kind of dealt with in the same way by outsiders. For both of these things, people look in and see an issue and want to fix it. And for res dogs, that means seeing a bunch of dogs running around and wanting to save them and re-home them, send them to nice new families. And for open access, sometimes that means that push to openness means that we miss some cultural context where something shouldn't be open. And so I saw them as kind of similar and related. But I also want to say that I don't think that openness is antithetical to Indigenous ideas about information. In the same way that we need solutions for dealing with res dogs and organizations like Save Res Dogs, which is Indigenous created, approaches it differently, seeing dogs as extended kin and thinking thoughtfully about how we re-home dogs like this. We also need Indigenous consultation when we're talking about open access. I'm just so grateful to go after Dr. Michelle Maya because I think the failures of open education in understanding justice and liberation really ground what I'm talking about here too. So I'm going to think a little bit about how can we consider open education as a tool to serve the needs of Indigenous sovereignty and more specifically the land-back movement. Now, let's talk a little bit about Indigenous sovereignty. So it's a complicated thing. In the context of a nation state we often think about positioning sovereignty in this way. And in Canada and the US we can see the different ways that this manifests. And one of the biggest problems about it is that first part of it, the Indigenous part of it. Because as a group of people, as a sovereign nation, as sovereign nations a lot of people in the mainstream are just unfamiliar with Indigenousity. And so I have two screenshots here. One of them is from an Angus Reed poll that was done in Canada that asked people if they had ever spent any time on a reserve and 38% so the majority had said no, they had never been to one. And most other people had maybe drove through or had spent a little bit of time but most people were just simply unfamiliar with Indigenous people. The other one is more recent. It's from the last US election where a polling showed Native Americans as something else which the internet took and ran with it. We now have beaded patches that say hello, I am something else. But it really just also speaks to the blind spots that most kind of Western nations have around there, the Indigenous people on whose lands they live. The other side of it is that when we consider sovereignty we often think about it in a Western jurisprudence kind of way. And so instead, I like to think about sovereignty in a much more expansive and relational way. And so I'm going to turn to Leanne Simpson's discussion of sovereignty and it's from her chapter called The Place Where We All Live and Work Together in the book Native Studies Keywords. And so what she did in this chapter is she asked an elder in Anishinaabemowin what the word for a nation, sovereignty, or self-determination might be. And he thought for a while and then he told her that he remembered old people saying genagicinishinabekomig which was understood to mean The Place Where We All Live and Work Together. And so that seems like a really simple answer, description of sovereignty and nationhood that is at its core about relationships with each other and with plants and animal nations, lands, waters, the spiritual world broadly. She also goes on to say in the chapter, this quote that's on the screen right now, for Indigenous people sovereignty is not something that takes place in an old stone building in a city full of old white straight able-bodied and minded rich men and that is guarded and vigorously defended by the military. Sovereignty is something that is embodied, visioned and lived both individually and collectively by our peoples from the smallest baby to the oldest grandparents. Our sovereignty does not come from a document. Our sovereignty comes from an abundance of healthy responsible, respectful relationships with all of our relations. And what's interesting about it is this conception of sovereignty is actually echoed by other Indigenous people around the world. It's not kind of a specifically anishinaba Mu'en perspective. And so Balagu writer, Ambulan Kwe Malina has a poem in the book living on stolen land that says Indigenous Sovereties are narrative Sovereties that begin and continue in story the tales of the ancestors that tell the story of a world that is alive. So this appeal to biodiversity of positioning people within a much broader sense of themselves rather than mastery of nature is something that I think grounds our discussion of sovereignty. So when we get overwhelmed with what do we mean by sovereignty, you know, how does a separate judicial system work and how does money work? Or even more practically, how do we get more Indigenous people in our disciplines? What if we turn then to a much simpler call to action? The call for land back. So land back has a simple tenant. Give us the land back. And so what it isn't is kicking everyone except for Indigenous people off the land. It's not anti-black. It's not anti-refugee. It understands the specific ways that people are brought to land is outside of their control. But what it does do is kind of position it in really specific ways kind of these complicated questions we've created for us at the core of it is land. Now the red paper from the Yellowhead Institute which is an Indigenous think tank based out of Bryerson University in Toronto looks at this concept of land back. And it starts with the reality that most grievances that Indigenous people have are overland. And so it's looking at it from kind of a policy perspective but thinking about things like how is consent for land theft negotiated ignored, coerced, kind of historically what does that look like. It also looks at the specific strategies that are deployed to dispossess Indigenous people of the land. So treaty making is one way that that has happened, script. There's lots of different ways that that happens. And then the limited ways that industry and the crown in Canada allow us to manage what little land we have jurisdiction over. So if people want to put a pipeline through a reserve, what are the limited strategies that we are able to enact in that space? They also highlight a couple of case studies of what land back can look like. And in these case studies, all of them are connected by having community based strategies of consent based jurisdiction. So why is this important? They kind of talk about it and say the matter of land back is not merely a matter of justice, rights or reconciliation. Like the United Nations, we believe that Indigenous jurisdiction can indeed help mitigate the loss of biodiversity and climate crisis. So we're thinking about it from a much bigger process. It's not simply about restitution, but it's much more kind of foundational than that. I'm also really interested in how other people are thinking about it even outside of policy. So Briar Patch Magazine recently ran an issue that they called the land back issue. It's well worth your time to have a look at it. But in the editor's note, the editors Nikita Longman, Emily Riddle, Alex Wilson and Saima Desai say, oh, I'll put it in front of us. Land back is the demand to rightfully return colonized land like that in so-called Canada to Indigenous peoples. But when we say land back, we aren't asking for just the ground or a piece of paper that allows us to tear up and pollute the earth. We want the system that is land to be alive so it can perpetuate itself and perpetuate us as an extension of itself. That's what we want back. Our place in keeping land alive is spiritually connected. Basically, land back says land is important. Land theft has happened. Things are bad with people and the environment. So what if we let Indigenous people decide what happens on their land? Gave them the jurisdiction back that was stolen. It strips back all the complicativeness that often characterizes reconciliation talks and asks that simple question. What if we let Indigenous people decide what happens on their land? And in this way, we can also ask what happens if we let Indigenous people decide what happens to their information? So there's a number of openness that we see in Indigenous projects. I'm going to just quickly go through a couple of them. One of them is thinking about who owns what in terms of archival collections, what's held in cultural memory institutions. Now, it's no accident that Indigenous materials are held in archives and other collections geographically distant from their originating communities and held in spaces that often require gatekeeping. And so much of our ideas around archival care center around preservation rather than access for many good reasons. But approaching our collections with a question as simple as do the originating communities know what we have changes how we relate to our collections, whether that is historical items, genealogy, or research data. That's something that we're generally generally been quite bad at doing in libraries and archives. We can also consider the way that MOOCs, as an element of open education, might change, sort of address some of the gaps that exist. The Indigenous Canada MOOC at the University of Alberta kind of has become sort of notorious recently as Dan Levy of Schitt's Creek fame is starting to take this class blogging about it and facilitating group discussions. And so it's an example of the ways that basic information that theoretically should have been taught in school can be remedied by open ed. So filling those gaps that exist. The Global Indigenous Data Alliance embraces open access for its publications, but it also holds a pretty nuanced version of openness when it comes to data. It's thinking about how cultural perspectives and controls are needed in order for Indigenous communities to retain control over their data. And so it looks at things like, how do we encourage Indigenous data sovereignty? How do we assert rights and self-interest in data? How do we think about the way that open data can help self-determined well-being of Indigenous peoples? And it also thinks about the way that a worldview might shape how we look at data. We also have things like an open journal, right? Decolonization from the start has been open. It uses a Creative Commons attribution license. And it's not as though the work that is published there is any less. That's the publisher of EFTech and Kay Wayne Yang's really kind of foundational article. Decolonization is not a metaphor which has been cited extensively. So we know that something that is built from the start to be open can actually create amazing work and can help us liberate that kind of extractive research that has often been so closely held by the ivory tower. Now in these examples, we just have to pause and ask are we asking the right questions in these projects? Are we asking is it easier for poor people to access this information? Who can access this? Easier for racialized people, for Indigenous people. For most Indigenous people, the oldest published materials about our knowledges are not held by us. They're rather enclosed stacks in museums, libraries, and archives. And this is a simplified truth, but it really highlights that idea that our histories, our published ones, are not held by us. Now openness is a good critique of industry in the ivory tower and kind of highlights the greed and miserliness of these industries. But and in the same way, Indigenous assertions of control of data are not antithetical to open access, but emerge from a similar impulse, the idea that something is being held from us. So where our ideas differ is that that theft that is a key feature of that history changes our relationship to it and also turns us to more control rather than kind of the broad open access with no cultural context. And too often, we tend to slide into what we can call tech solutionism. That's a picture of my dad learning VR for the first time. But too often, our tools fall into tech solutionism, which is the idea that there is a technological solution for all social problems. The thing is this approach too often mirrors neocolonialism. I'll fix it for you. I'll do it for you. Without ever thinking about how you think about the problem or how you perceive the solutions, or even if you think that this is a problem to be solved. Now, Mutale and Konde of AI for the People recently gave an amazing keynote at the algorithmic fairness and opacity working group at UC Berkeley's refusal conference. So easier to find if you just search for refusal conference. And in it, she says something really powerful and she says, refuse the techno solutionist frame. Reimagine technology as a tool of liberation. She goes on to say, because her work looks at automated anti-blackness, in this refusal of a world that does not serve everybody, we should not be looking at technology as the enemy, nor should we be looking at it as our trusted friend, but it's a tool. And she goes on to pose some really exciting questions what if we invested in community rather than police and that investment could be scalable in the way that AI is scalable? She also asks really interesting questions like what if facial recognition tech was used to recognize oceanic life to preserve it? What if we used these types of pattern recognition technologies to figure out what trees we have left as California burns? So recall how Leanne Simpson is talking about sovereignty as being connected to so much more than just the human world. She's thinking about that too. How can we use tools of liberation to liberate not only humans, but also all the other things that we are related to? So if we do this, if we turn our attention to justice and liberation, one of the things that we have to keep in mind that Eve Tuck and Kay Wanyang say in that article that I mentioned before is that the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful that it can feel like it is indeed making change. But until still in land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupt settler colonialism. So paraphrased, learning about the work isn't doing the work even though it feels great. So feeling good, even the work that we're doing this week at this conference can be so transformational, can feel really transformational, can feel emancipatory, but it's not the work itself, right? It's that first step. We still have to go on and actually do some stuff. We have to translate this into action. Now, this is a page from a book that I wrote when I was a very little girl. And so it's a picture of my brothers and I'm in space. And I use it to illustrate thinking about how Indigenous Futurisms might help us take that next step. Now, this helps us kind of frame where we want that next step to be, how we can use openness to really think about liberation. Now, Indigenous Futurisms draws from Afrofuturisms, which is a rejection of the white utopias that we are often served. It was coined by Mark Derry and it embraces themes of reclamation and black liberation. So think Wakanda or Alicia B. Wormsley's artwork, which is on billboards that read simply, there are black people in the future. That's Afrofuturism. Now, the language of Indigenous Futurisms, which was coined by Grace Dillon as an homage to Afrofuturism, thinks about how Indigenous people, after surviving genocides and continued never-ending trauma, already live in the dystopian now. The term NDN has seen a resurgence in the last few years, popping up in places like Billy Ray Bellcourt's book, Indian Coping Mechanisms, and it's both a throwback to chatroom shorthand and a desire to see Indigenous people in the future too. We are Indians, not dead natives. So things like Sanyasu's paintings, which add West Coast formline aliens over colonial landscapes of Hidah villages, that's Indigenous Futurisms. A tribe called Red, Indigenous Futurisms. And what's interesting about thinking about this next step of action as emerging from Indigenous Futurisms is that it positions technology as coming from our worldviews rather than existing outside of them. So open access when utilized for liberation and justice can be powerful. We have really good examples of that. This whole week we have great examples of students who can now pay their rent and feed themselves rather than pay for textbooks. I mean, half of the sessions here are literally dreaming these new worlds of possibility. But it's so common for us to be drawn into the false promise of technological solutionism. We can fix the world instead of imagining a world emerging from Indigenous possibilities. And that's a world in which sometimes we just have to step back and say, yes, land back. So I'll end my time with telling you a quick land back story that I think really kind of highlights how this can work together. Métis in Space is a podcast for two Métis women shown here, Molly Swayne and Chelsea Bell, along with Chelsea's cute baby. They watch sci-fi and then they talk about it. And so they talk about often how Indigenous people show up in sci-fi. Now, they launched a land back project titled Back to the Land to Land to Furious that would allow them to purchase land in their ancestral homeland to be held as a land trust. And the way they did it was they asked settlers to contribute financially to this project as a direct means of supporting land back. Their GoFundMe is still live as they do need to continue to have fundraising. But they were able to purchase 160 acres of land in Laxinan County, which is right outside of Edmonton. Now, what's exciting about this is that this kind of biodiversity that they now have access to kind of enables them to do so many exciting things. Prairie biome rewilding, water revitalization research, traditional food systems work, ceremony language camps, and they're outlining other possibilities in their article Back to the Land to Land to Furious, which is also part of Briar Patch's special land back issue. Now, one of the things that they've said about this project is that we recognize that access to land free from the state and settler monitoring and constraints is a huge barrier to cultural engagement and knowledge generation for many low income urban folks. And so that brings for me to mind the idea that the barriers of education are so similar to the barriers of land for Indigenous folks. And reframing it through Indigenous Futurisms helps us see how this could be different. Let's dream of a world in which we use Indigenous Futurisms and where those tools of open education emerging from an Indigenous worldview can be used for liberation and justice and they can contribute to those kinds of things like Indigenous sovereignty and land back. I think that both of these approaches, both open education and land back, are kind of our means for moving forward to breaking down the systems that have held us back in so many different ways. So this is really an invitation for us to do this work together and to dream the ways that open education might contribute to Indigenous sovereignty and land back. Thank you everyone. That was amazing. Just absolutely amazing. Love it, love it. All right, so we do have time for one more question. Let's see, or one question in the Q&A. So this question is from Betsy, Jesse. She said, I love your presentation, Jesse. And thank you for mentioning decolonization is not a metaphor. I find that in many OER spaces, the term decolonization is thrown around very liberally and almost always metaphorically. Can you speak to the assumption that academia can be decolonized without decolonizing the wider society in which we live? Is it possible to decolonize academia in the context of ongoing settler colonialism and racial? That's a beautifully complex and interesting question. And I know I don't have a ton of time because I think we're going to speak together at the end of this. But I think that one of the things that this article does so well is it disrupts our need to include decolonization as a way that we're doing this work. I think one of the first sentences in that article is it is not a way of making our schools better. And it really grounds it in this idea that land back is what decolonization asks of us. I think it helps us reposition it as well. The idea that learning about it is not necessarily doing the work. So I see open education is really helping us do that first bit where we have to learn. We have to position ourselves. We have to figure out what we don't know. And open education helps us fill those gaps. It helps reach people that aren't able to access education in the kind of really strict traditional ways that it has been. And then we have to think, all right, what are we doing going on beyond that? What are we going to do? And so that's that second step of action that I think is the actual decolonialism rather than sort of the prep work that we all have to do. That often, and they talk about this in this article, that often feels so good, right? We can pat ourselves on the back because we say, yes, we're doing this work. We're being a man's pathway. We're enacting liberation. But when our relatives are still being thrown into jail or being taken off the land, today is the day that there was a protest camp in Edmonton, Baker Waywin. And today is the day that police went in and broke up the camp. And so we can think about, okay, what are we doing in the institutions that we work in that actually enables and takes care of the most vulnerable people that were part of our world and our relatives? So it's a complicated question. I think with a complicated answer too. But thank you. Absolutely. Thank you. And so sorry that for whatever reason, my technology doesn't want to cooperate. All right. Now I would like to open it up for a Q&A discussion for both speakers. For any questions that you have for either speaker, this has just been just an enjoyable plenary. I love, you know, the focuses have been, or folk I have been very different, yet very similar in what you both have discussed. Seeing, going here to the Q&A. So I believe this is for Dr. Meshlamaya. So this person wrote in the corporations that you had asked us to partner with are not particularly interested in changing the economy or in openness in general. How can they actually help? What happens when the corporations are bought or sold? Isn't that a sustainability issue? That's a really good question. I think that's an excellent question. And like we have the responsibility to get educated and to be equity minded and to do this the right way, that responsibility needs to be shared by funders. And just because they're giving us money doesn't mean they have to not play by the rules of doing this the right way as well. So part of our responsibility is going to be to have to educate them as well. And if funders are not willing to be educated and do things differently, sometimes you have to sever ties with organizations because you don't want to be involved with the unit. It's going to continue to perpetuate inequities. And sometimes orcs are the perpetrators. And the ones that I listed there are ones in particular that my university contacted when we needed some help with our students. And in our case, those units came through, those works came through for us in various ways. But at the same time, I do realize many of these works that I listed have been in the game, had skin in the game for some time and hasn't really changed a lot themselves. So part of our job is to educate them as well. And your point is well taken. They need to be educated too. Thank you. Thank you. And Jesse, I just wanted to point it out in the chat, Ursula Pike, I believe their last name said, as a native woman in OER, I have never felt more seen. I just think that's beautiful. Shout out to you. I know that you're doing great work. I mean, it's hard. It's hard work for sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. We do have one more question. I believe it is for Dr. Michelle Maia. Can you explain more why multiple choice is problematic? I don't have any formal education or pedagogical training. I'm a librarian, so I don't fully understand. Multiple choice tests really are for the professors. It works for us. They're easy ways to measure students' competencies. It's a very quick way to get the grading in. It's a one-shot deal in getting our work done, in my mind, on a day-to-day basis. And as a college professor for 25 years, I am guilty as all out, adorned out of convenience. But what I've learned over the years, and that's why I started to shift high, did things, was that I started to get more international students. And I started to be told by international students from Asia and Africa in particular, we don't test this way. We don't learn this way. And this is not working for us. And I've had some really, really bright students who struggle in my class because of the way I was testing their competency. And I learned the same thing in my human trafficking course. And when I look at the results, the research regarding this year, it really does show that race and minoritized individuals, in general, and wealth internationally, don't fare as well or the same, what at the same rate or pace as their white counterparts when it comes to standardized tests. They simply are not equitable in how they're composed and even our intentionality behind them. We need to really think of other ways or a variety of ways to really measure student success. Absolutely. And I also have been guilty of kind of defaulting to the multiple choice and have since really tried to work around that. There's another question here. This person wrote, thank you both for extraordinary messages and your work at large. Question about metadata. Colonial appropriation and erasure gets reproduced and circulated and inherited metadata and taxonomy and digital cultural objects and material. There are TK labels, and they give some context there, and the Global Indigenous Data Alliance. What are other ways to engage and contribute to initiatives by African diaspora, for example, and indigenous communities to reclaim and rewrite metadata? Thank you all so much. So if either one of you know if either one can speak to that issue. I'm happy to start us off and then pass it on. TK labels, so traditional knowledge labels were developed to do exactly that work, to say openness to everyone doesn't make sense here. And so some of the labels that they can affix to individual items are things like this can only be opened seasonally. So for us, for Cree people, as I was saying at the beginning, it's now winter, it's now a time for stories. There are certain stories that we don't tell it any other time unless there's snow on the ground. And so if we just throw that into kind of a regular database, that's not going to give us the flexibility nor the cultural context that it needs. Not to say that we don't want people to know these stories, but that there's a particular time where this makes the most sense. And so things like that are really exciting. Yes, thank you for the link to TK labels, because I think that that link actually explains it really well. Largely though, I think it has come down to listening and I think that even calls for lend back are really tied to that. We can look back in time and see what are people asking for. It's often quite simple, but we have complicated it. And so even in kind of really early writings in Indigenous studies, before it was even kind of its own academic discipline, we see calls for land back. And we see this also in many complex ways in an other Indigenous context. So I mean, Africa is an Indigenous context. It's one that we often don't think of in that way. We tend to think of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US, maybe like Norway for Sami people. But we rarely think about South America and we rarely think about Africa as also sites of indigeneity. And so, so often I think one of the hardest things to do and the most simple thing to do is to listen to what people are actually asking for. I think I can probably pass it on to Dr. Michelle Amaya to see her take on it as well. Well, you pretty much, you to me, you answered the question very well, I see. I would add differently or additionally to it will be that I think that we live in a universe where we are obsessed with telling people's stories for them. It is that simple. And if we were to let go some of that control and that power and need to tell other people's stories, I think in general that educational enterprise will be in a better place, period. Something that's simple is that give people their platforms to tell their own stories. Yeah. I love how you said that. That was amazing. Yes, absolutely. We have one more question. This person wrote, I'm a non-black settler inside the academy and I do not want to contribute to the exclusionary practices that reinforce capitalist colonial projects. Jesse, could you talk more about how I might be an ally or perhaps an accomplice without co-opting or crowding out space for Indigenous folks? Another brilliant question. Right. This is an interesting question that I think a lot of Indigenous people get no matter what they're talking about, right? If people want to know, well, what can I do? I like what you're saying, but I want to know what to do. And I think maybe I have a hard answer to that in saying I can't tell you what to do. I'm not going to speak for all Indigenous people and say here's what you need, but here's what we need from you. But I do think that some of the things that you can be doing is really looking at some of the structures that you're involved in. It can be something as simple as tenure and promotion that was talked about in the presentation just before mine. Thinking about the ways that tenure and promotion reward research very differently. And Indigenous research, research that is community-based, that is actually doing work of listening often takes much longer and it doesn't have the same products at the end of it. And so you're in a position of really thinking about the structures that you're involved in and people will listen to you in a way that they will not listen to either of us. And so I think that using that to really query the structures that kind of make up our life and our work is something that could be really powerful and really helpful. Absolutely. Absolutely. Jess, go ahead, go ahead. Say to that person as well, I just like the fact the I statements and the language the person used in posing the question. That's a huge first step in trying to do this the right way. I just want to acknowledge that. Yes, yes, centering on what that individual can do. And also, I just want to go back to what Dr. Michelle Maia had said about these institutions historically were created not for Indigenous people, not for people of African diaspora. They were created for white middle class men. And so when we think about these traditions and policies and procedures, that was the audience. And still, to very much a certain degree, is the audience. And it's not considering other ways of producing, creating knowledge, whether that's more of a co-creation process, a communal process that is very much prized and valued in, for example, Indigenous communities and other communities that unfortunately are not centered in academic spaces. And then we have just one more question here also for Jesse. And Jesse, forgive me because I am my mispronounced this. So are METIs recognized as Indigenous along with First Nations or, and then I'm just going to spell it out because I don't want to butcher it, I-N-U-I-T. Right. Inuit. Yeah. So sure, this is a question probably about Canadian context. So in Canada, there are three groups of what the federal government calls Aboriginal people, First Nations, which are status and non-status Indians, which we are still using that term legally. Like I have a card that says Certificate of Indian Status in my wallet. So that is one category of Aboriginal people that's recognized in Canada. Another is Inuit. So people of the North, oftentimes, they're connected to a land claim area. And then Métis people, which are the third group of people. And oftentimes, that is flattened to be like people of the fur trade, people with, you know, a white dad and a native mom, but that's not the case. They're considered a a post-contact Indigenous group. And so there are other examples of post-contact Indigenous people like OG Cree people. And the reason that they're recognized in Canada as a separate Aboriginal group is because there's a unique culture, a unique language is that developed as part of this culture. And so, yes, they are recognized, but the the way that sort of race is managed in Canada is messy. Right. So I have a, my mom is a status Indian Cheese Cree and my dad is Métis. And so they have different access to different kinds of services and rights in Canada. So both Aboriginal people, both Indigenous people, but just managed in different colonial ways by the government. So complicated answer to a complicated question. Yeah, it's a complicated community, you know, situation. I will note, though, that Métis people are not recognized south of the medicine line, south of the border. So in the U.S., Métis people have a much different relationship than in Canada. I see, I see. Thank you. And I actually have more of a broad question for the both of you, just final remarks from your, both of your brilliant presentations that you want to leave with the audience. Any final remarks? Sure. I'll just add, you know, I really love for us to just, when I say just stop, to really stop because as I said to you all, as I defined insanity, to continue to do the same thing and expect different, and expect different results. It's just insane to keep doing that. And I think we have a more responsibility at this point to just do the right thing in the higher education enterprise. And this whole open educational resource, resources, this whole phenomenon, open ed, really is full of potential. It's been full of potential since 1987 with the STEM 2000 project on to UNESCO in 2002, but it's taken too long to have real progress in so many different areas in this country, in this world. And it's simply time to stop saying we're going to get to it. It doesn't take this long to do the right thing. I just want to urge all of us in any capacities and roles that we're playing in higher education that we become that factor, that age, and that change that needs to take place right now to make this right. Yeah, I can only agree. I think maybe one thing that I'll leave us with is that all of the things that sort of started off this discussion today are all things that do connect. And so even though I'm kind of using a really narrow focus to talk about land back as a way that we can shake up the actual work that we might be wanting to do, it's all connected, right? And so we can't look at anti-indigeneity as separate from anti-blackness, as separate from sort of these structures, these carceral structures that we're a part of. And so it's all connected. And I think that whether we're looking at kind of a really broad zoomed out or really narrowly focused area, we need to sort of see the structures that exist. And I think that open education can help us, if utilized in the right way, can help us identify those structures and then also think beyond them, dream beyond them into a new possibility. So. Absolutely. And the comment made earlier from Dr. Meshlamai reminding me of, you know, the Black Lives Matter activist D. Ray McKenson, and he talks about how, you know, if we look at slavery and the, you know, the situation with slavery, how things like that, conditions like that, people were all of a sudden imaginative when we were talking about oppression, right? We have these very elaborative, you know, imaginations when it comes to oppressive, oppression. And yet when it comes to a solution, right? All of a sudden, our imagination is stunted for whatever reason. There is is not as imaginative. And so I really like that point addressed earlier. Well, there are no further questions in the Q&A tab. I just want to thank both Dr. Meshlamai and Jesse for just two incredible talks on social justice, social justice, the application of such in open education. But we will be around and shortly for some tea time to just chat more about this topic. Thank you all for attending this session. Thank you all. Thank you, everyone.