 And I want to deeply thank you all. It's been a real honor to be here. This is my first OER conference and I've been absolutely blown away by the incredibly powerful women that have populated the keynotes, colleagues of mine, but also people that are new to me. This has been, I think, very much a conference that lived up to its promises and stuck to its themes. And thankfully, the work that I have to present for you today is really a description of someone else's framework and theory, but ways that I'm exploring its application for open education. Hopefully it's something that we might all be able to find that useful in our work. I also want to thank all the support that I have back home at the College of William and Mary. Also my really supportive colleagues at Lumen Learning that although I've been working there for a year and a half and it's been an intense distraction from my dissertation, they are actually making space for me to finish my work. And then, of course, the GoGN graduate network, which I'm sure I'm tired almost of hearing, but the work that's going on amongst that group, the support that it's provided has been irreplaceable. And of course, thanks to Hewlett for backing up that work at GoGN. I want to start at the end. This is one of those sentences from a lot of writing that I've done a lot of tinkering with and I'm really, really happy with. I've recently tweeted this. Again, you might have seen this in other presentations I've done because it's consistent through a lot of my doctoral work. But this is something that I'm drawing from the theoretical framework that I'm going to show you today. But this is where I think distills down to what we're trying to accomplish. I think it's something that will resonate with just about anyone who's engaged in open education, but it really clarifies the direction to go. Where I started with this work was finding and looking across the readings that open education, as we all know, is something that's really come about from practice. It's one of these movements that's really originated in what was possible and what could be done. And then now after, and it's time that it has matured, now we're starting to see some people start to bring in theory to try and understand what the hell we have been doing and whether or not that's been effective in getting us where we want to go, which is what I want to contribute to today. So why? Why do we need to bring in theory? Now, for those of you who are active researchers, those of us that are active academics, we know that the idea here is that theory is supposed to provide a lens by which we can examine empirical data, empirical phenomena. But it can also help be a guidepost for us. I think it can actually shape and guide the progress of the movement. So it's something that can protect open education from the delusion and co-optation. Things that earlier today, and Nicole Allen was highlighting for us in her great presentation, how the movement is quite vulnerable without a theoretical framework to this delusion and co-optation. But also use the metaphor of a keel. Anyone that has any experience with sailing, you know that a keel is that bit that sticks out the bottom of the boat, and not only does it help keep balance on that boat, but it's actually primary function is to keep the boat from skiffing along the surface of the water pushed around by the winds. I like this metaphor where, with a strong theoretical framework, social justice not too distant from a lot of the topics that have come up here today, we can really guide this work and propel it forward. The real utopias, it's a very clever, simple phrase. It's not mine. It is from sociologist Eric Ulinwright. I also wanna deeply credit him and his influence on my work. Sadly, Eric died just earlier this year after a brutal battle with leukemia, but he's left us with a very, very in-depth, robust, clear, concise framework that we can use in context, all across reshaping of institutions. The text is actually copyrighted, but he's made it publicly available on his personal website, so if you do a web search, you can easily find access to all of his materials. He's actually a pretty good writer, and the framework came from over 20 years of tinkering on his part and actual residences at various colleges and universities across the globe. He wanted to get feedback from the Global South. He wanted feedback from minority-serving institutions, and he got it, and it really shaped his work. So the idea here is that Eric is framing for us something that it's important to dream. It's important to have fantastical notions of what we're trying to go towards and what we're trying to achieve, because without that kind of ideas that might be, some people might find frivolous or a waste of time. They actually can help shape and guide what is possible in the present, because if we don't have those kinds of aims, we'll never get there. But he also wants to not get stuck in that utopian thinking because that can be unachievable. It can be incredibly frustrating not to get there, but use that as a guidepost to inform our practices that can hopefully start to work us there, work within the real, work within our actual context, things that we can actually do, something that I think would resonate with anyone that's doing the work that you all are doing. So I think that we have the will already. That's why we're here. That's why this conference, are we global, open ed? This movement is moving. We have evidence. We know we have doers in this space, right? There is a will, all right? And I think what we need to do is keep an eye on why we're doing this work. We have a notion of what that is, but let's get explicit about it. Because if we're just doing without any guidance, we could end up in a bad place. We can make a mess as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So let's get a little bit of guidance here to aim towards this. What we want are plausible visions, which is a lot of what we're already doing here, but we want them to start to work us towards these radical alternatives. What we heard from our keynotes all along our journey here in these last two days has been really thinking about radical alternatives to our existing institutional forms, and we're thinking about how we can redo education. And the idea is to go towards an emancipatory social change. And thankfully, Eric is very explicit about how he defines these kinds of topics. We're not, and how we can think about emancipation. This is how Eric defines emancipation. It's very simple, but it's actually very, very important, right? That what we're trying to do, what we're seeing, rather, what we can observe in the world is that many forms of human suffering, as well as deficits or barriers to human flourishing, are the result of existing social structures around us. And when we're talking about the casualization of labor in the university, we can see how that is directly impacting human suffering and limiting human flourishing. So, if we can transform these institutional and social structures to enable either human flourishing or diminishing human suffering, that means we're on the right track. Simple, right? Less suffering, more flourishing. Let's go for that. And then you can do it in four easy steps. Simply identifying the moral principles that are in GuideThings, and we'll touch on what each of those are for Eric. And then conducting a pretty thorough diagnosis and critique of the existing social structures. Thankfully, we have a lot to work from on that front, which I'll briefly touch on. And then we need to develop an account of a viable alternative to those. And what I wanna do in the paper, and what I do is bring out short cases of open educational practices, resources, assets along those lines that are proving to be viable alternatives, and then trying to envision what a theory of transformation to really transform our institutions to get us there. One, two, three, four. Let's bang through them. So the moral principles that can guide our work, that definitely resonate with the work that's going on in social justice application here in the open education space, are these dimensions of equality, democracy, sustainability. For one, equality. In a socially just society, all people would have broadly equal access to social and material conditions necessary for living a flourishing life. That's what equality looks like for Olin Wright. Democracy means participating in a meaningful way in the rules that govern our lives. And I know that we can start to envision ways that open education can impact democracy, right? We know that it's about amplifying voices, diversifying perspectives, and bringing those into the space. And then finally, sustainability, which of course has become an increasingly strong buzzword in open education. People are understanding this as a crisis and that it's imperative that we think about sustainability, but we don't see many definitions, clear tactile definitions of sustainability yet. And here is one that of course, there's a bit more to it, but essentially it's that what's going on now? Hopefully in the next generation, we keep that there or make it a little bit better. So this also kind of takes in some ways what might be the daunting pressure of transformation or sustainability and looking at it in a little bit longer view, which I think makes it a bit more plausible. But those are the moral principles. And then when it comes to the diagnosis and critique, I'm going to look to existing literature, excellent work that's already been actually referenced many, many times during my time here. But certainly these critiques of higher education and its institutional form come from Giro, Slaughter and Rhodes and academic capitalism. Christopher Neufeld has done a great look at the neoliberalization of the university in the United States. And again, what I'm going to be focusing on in this paper is the American context, but hopefully it'll demonstrate the model that can be applied for you for outside of that. I'm going to definitely pull into critical pedagogy because certainly those are the principles of quality and democracy that come into our teaching and learning. And I want to definitely talk about the possibilities that are enabled by the information age and theories around the network society from these guys here and then critiques of higher ed and the empirics of it as a student experience. And pulling on Audrey Waters, Tracey McMillan-Cottom and Sarah Goldrich-Rob who have all looked at how the institutional form in the United States has been systematically kind of a poor experience for like a bit of words for students. Then moving into three where we start to look at some of what open education has to offer as an alternative to that diagnosis and critique. So what we want to move into is looking at dimensions of desirability. We want to make sure that we're moving towards something that's a little bit more ideal. It's getting us along those moral principles early on. It's got to be something we can do. It's got to be a viable alternative. Again, all the work that you're already doing has shown that this is quite viable, all the work and all the examples that we have. And then not only does it need to be that but it also needs to be achievable and we need to be framing how we transform those practices, those explicit practices. When I'm gonna be detailing is I wanted to distinguish the difference between open things like OER and data and how that's shared, all these assets but especially on practices and going beyond just pedagogy, teaching and learning. I want to make sure that we're talking about open research and how that can equalize things for us as well as how we can start to bring open principles into the organization and governance of our institutions. We're talking about radical change. It's gonna need to include all those dimensions. Ultimately what we're trying to do when we're framing open education as an alternative is to move what is predominantly the case right now where the vast majority of power affecting educational institutions really is the economic power. And they're a capitalist system. This is the bottom line. This is what's influencing most things. But with open education, the idea is to move the power over to the people and the participants in the institutions and away from the economic power. We'll always have economic power under capitalism and I'm not proposing that we're gonna be able to move society to a socialist one. Although all my Marxist professors have promised me the revolution is coming. I haven't seen it yet and I think, and I think Eric takes a very pragmatic view towards that which I find actually really exhilarating. And to get us there, he actually frames transformation in three ways. So there is that revolutionary ruptural change that many people call for. But I'm wary of, and I think Eric Owen Wright is also wary of because it's often violent and it can be harmful and painful process. And it's one that, if it happens, it happens. But it certainly has a lot of unintended consequences. Rather than that, think about the ways that you have already been practicing and those really line up, I think, with the interstitial transformation where you can make changes in your existing institutions in the margins, right? We've seen some write-ups on this. We already know that this is what's happening. But also symbiotic, right? When we've seen all the policy analysis brought forth here, we know that some of what's going on in open education rarely resonates with academic leadership, with policy makers at the state level. They like the cost savings. So we can leverage that alignment with these broader goals to move in these practices that will ultimately get us towards a more socially-powered educational institution. So through those four steps is where we should be able to arrive, you know, finally back here at this summation where open education does have the potential, I think, to sustainably transform our educational institutions in these ways. I look forward to getting this out and published so you can start to apply it in your own contexts. Now turn over to questions. I have tweeted out the slide deck, which includes the actual references as well, so you're welcome to dig through those. Well done, Jemison. That's a part of the conference. Questions at the input to Jemison? Questions? I've had the opportunity of listening to this a couple of times and really thinking it through. So what I was thinking about is that although I think the institutional niches and crevices dimension for change is so critical and I think so achievable for many people, I actually am beginning to think that some component of revolution may not be, in fact, in today's world. This sort of digital mass change.org stuff that then develops major kinds of, you know, school students leaving their school and marching and actually doing active democracy. To me, that's kind of the edge of the revolution and I think it's valuable and I think it's timely and I'm anticipating we will see more of that because things in wealth and income inequality have become so horrible. It's become untenable for many. So when I see young people taking to the streets in that revolutionary fashion and no one wants to bash each other over the head but it has that edge, I would like to propose that there's, in times of desperate measures, I'm encouraged by that, particularly from young people and I think that we could be a little more provocative and suggest that, hell, do more. And if that's the edge of revolution, I think there's some power and timeliness in it too. Do you think that it's always dangerous to kind of go there? That's what I wanted to know. Is there a place? No, I think, yeah, you make a really great point, worth exploring because when people do talk about social change, they also do mention how imperative it is to have boots on the ground and people in the streets as well as policy, you need to have lawyers that can do that part. We need to have policy makers that can do that part. We need boots on the ground as well. So maybe there's a synthesis of all of them. Thanks, James, and Bill Johnson from Scotland. That's a very stimulating talk you're giving us right at the end of the day, so thank you for that. One thing that struck me that would be interesting to hear a wee bit more about, perhaps if you can, would be time. But I think the situation we're in just now of the neoliberalization of higher education, healthcare and many other things, didn't all happen overnight and it didn't take centuries either, it steadily worked up through the 20th century. Do we have to wait for the same length of time to achieve the real utopia, do you think, as the real utopia of the neoliberals is where we are just now? So it's impossible to tell exactly how long the actual implementation of this kind of change will take, but the point to Eric's framework is that we really do want to inform practices that we can do today in very short order, things that can be implemented now that start to move us towards that utopian framework or that utopian vision. So if we can start to look towards that as our guiding light, there's things that we are already doing, things that have been done that I think are actually moving us away from that, actually working us to borrow Suming's words that we're repairing, right? We're repairing what is evidently a very broken system. It's underway, so that's a hopeful thing, I think. Last one. Well done, you made it. Well done, you made it, thank you very much. Thank you so much. Woo! That was powerful, and I want to applause to yourself as well for having stayed up to the last minute. Have a great day yourself. Thank you.