MI OER Keynote Text: The Art of Open Resources, Pedagogy, and Practice: a balancing act in three parts
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I was asked to deliver the keynote address for the MI OER conference on Sept. 20th, 2024. This post is adapted from my notes after the talk. Some parts have been omitted or changed due to the format change. The references have been embedded as hypertext throughout the text and the longer reference list is a representation of the sources used in the text but also other resources consulted in the preparation of the talk.
Opening Remarks
So, I have promised you a balancing act. One of the attempts at balance that I will make is to be able to speak to those who are new to the open education movement; as well as to those who are more experienced.
We will go back to some basic definitions and revisit some histories.
And while I will be sharing histories that those of you with more experience may be familiar with, I will try at the very least, to make it entertaining for you by bringing in some contemporary challenges and using some metaphors to connect art and some artist profiles to ideas in open education.
Connection to Conference Theme
When I heard the theme of this year’s MI OER Conference—Framing Open: The ART of Open Education—it immediately resonated with me. Being invited to keynote this event, held during Grand Rapids ArtPrize, inspired me to explore the intersections between open education and art.
I’ve never been to ArtPrize before but exploring it I was impressed with how the event embraced broad genres of art and invited the public to take on the role of jury for awarding the prizes. I think with its open, participatory nature it is going to be a great environment for the conference.
In crafting this talk, I wondered what might happen if I allowed myself to explore intersections between open education.
Years ago I wrote a blog post doing something similar and it might be fun to revisit and expand that.
I decided to give it a go, and so throughout the talk I will make little diversions to explore connections to art and artists and try to weave it all back together.
The intersections I’ve come up with are by no means perfect and none of them are exact. Metaphors can be powerful tools and can often be misconstrued and misunderstood. I hope the ones I’ve come up with hold value to spark connections in your brain and set a tone for the conference.
GenAI Disclosure and Acknowledgement
I want to disclose that several forms of artificial intelligence were partially used, in the creation of this talk; specifically for brainstorming the structure, creating first-draft text, looking for connections and creating some images. A lot of the material generated was not used.
I find myself exploring these tools frequently because of the line of work that I’m in and I do find some practical applications for them but I am conflicted by their use.
I want to acknowledge that most GenAI tools do not respect the individual rights of authors and artists and that by not including any form of consistently factual citation they ignore concerns over copyright and intellectual property. Additionally, I want to acknowledge that some of the systems are trained through the exploitation of precarious workers in the global south and that their environmental impacts are atrocious.
Acknowledgement of Human Help
And, if I’m going to acknowledge the bots it only seemed right to acknowledge the humans. I also want this to be a reminder that the idea of a single author or a single speaker is always a myth. Every writer/speaker is influenced by many and our ways of acknowledging this influence is limited.
Katie Blocksidge – Key contributor who helped me stay on track with regular meetings, read drafts, provided feedback, and sat through practice sessions with me.
Early brainstorming with Raya Samet from University of Michigan – Dearborn. Bsky interactions: Chuck Pearson, Eamon Costello, Samantha Ahern. Interaction in blog comments: Martin Weller. Email exchanges Stephanie Davis and Jenny Shanker from the Michigan Community College Association (MCCA). Practice runs with my grade school friend Jennifer Clemente and Grace Helms Kotre a friend and colleague from University of Michigan.
Encouragers and advisors who give me moral support, advice on public speaking, well-wishes and more: My family–my dad, brother, sister-in-law, and niece; my colleagues at University of Michigan–Dearborn, College Unbound, and MCCA.
Acknowledgement of My Own Limitations
[This was originally part of my Bio and had connections to the Land/Labor Acknowledgement which I cut due to the format change – I just felt those things worked better in person.]
My entry into this work came from a technical perspective; my first real job in higher ed was in the IT Department. I’ve broadened since then to work in faculty development and instructional design. I have pursued a more critical lens in my own development pursuits but that technical lens does still shape the way I see things.
I often present myself as a “liminal space” and position that as a positive thing. Raya did a great job of leaning into this when introducing me today. But all that in-betweenness also means that there are gaps in my perspective. I don’t know much about K-12 education for instance, and thanks to the Michigan Community College Association (MCCA) I do work in open education part-time but I’m not as involved in it as I once was.
Finally, I’ll say my work in open education is motivated by interests in affordability and technology but more importantly in the transformative possibilities of education especially for those to whom it is often not an option or those who just want to do it in a way that is outside of the norm.
Part One: Tensions around OER
In this talk I’ll explore Open Educational Resources or OER, Open Pedagogy or OP, and Open Educational Practices or OEP.
We are starting with OER. So what are they?
The term Open Educational Resources came out of UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on Open Courseware in Higher Education for Developing Countries which was held in Paris with support by the Hewlett Foundation and WCET.
The final report on the Forum is kind of fascinating. If you’ve never taken a look at it directly I recommend it. It ends with a declaration which states:
“The participants express their satisfaction and their wish to develop together a universal educational resource available for the whole of humanity, to be referred to henceforth as Open Educational Resources.”
A tall order; but that sounds amazing.
They have a definition for OER in this 2002 report which is the first definition of OER, I guess. We are going to look at how this definition changes a few different times over the years.
This original recommended definition reads:
“The open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes”
This will be the only time I will bring it up but I think it is worth a mention that the “Non-commercial” sentiment goes away.
Fluidité
Here I do want to insert a little disclaimer.
I want to be clear that I am not throwing any shade over definitions changing. I’m a big believer that words and their definitions are fluid. That humans make meaning out of terms and phrases and that those meanings naturally shift over time as environments and people change.
But I also think that revisiting old definitions and looking at how they change can give us insights around the work we are doing.
I should say that I’ve not done a full etymology on the term OER but rather I looked at some of the early UNESCO documents and found some things interesting that I’m sharing with you.
Definitions Continued
Today, the UNESCO definition that I see quoted most frequently on websites, libguides, and wikis is the one they have on their website is from their 2019 Recommendation on OER:
“Teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions”.
This is not the only definition out there – there is one from the Hewlett Foundation that gets a lot of attention. There are longer declarations and guidelines too; the Cape Town Declaration is particularly important, at almost a 1000 words it gets to a lot more nuance around the values behind OER. They all have similarities. But like I said UNESCO was the first to define the term so that I why I’m focusing on theirs.
I think this is a good definition.
There is some jargon in there like “open license” and some legal concepts like “public domain” but the definition is mostly clear. And there is something comforting about that.
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I’ll suggest that even though this definition seems clear and that the different definitions are similar, that things are not as simple they may seem. That there are complexities that need to be balanced.
But before I go there, in the spirit of the theme of the conference I’d like to make small digression to look at an artist who exemplifies balance – Philippe Petit.
I realize this might come as a hard turn but I’m just going to ask you to stick with me – I promise we are coming back to this.
Introduction to Philippe Petit: The Art of Balance
When I decided to embrace this idea of the balancing act as a metaphor, Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974 came to mind. I was familiar with Petit’s work from the Robert Zemeckis film The Walk and I decided to watch the documentary about him called Man on Wire as part of the prep for this talk.
This daring feat was not just an act of physical balance but also an act of rebellion.
This was not a sanctioned event. No permission or approval was granted.
For six years he planned this “artistic crime” (as he calls it), studying the construction of the twin towers after seeing an announcement about their ground breaking in a magazine while he was waiting in his dentist’s office.
Prior to the walk he would travel to New York several times to visit the towers and study them. He would perform similar events around the world prior to taking on the towers, famously over Notre Dame Cathedral and the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
He was not alone, he had a community, a group of colleagues helping. And when the time came they broke into the towers and hung the wire in secret in the night. In the morning the people of New York were treated to a high wire performance like they had never seen before.
The police were notified and Petit was taken in; but not before he taunted and played with them a bit. For 45 minutes he crossed the wire eight times just out of their reach; performing tricks like laying down and dancing on the wire.
The Balancing Act in OER
Where Petit’s tightrope walk was an audacious challenge to gravity and authority, OER is a rebellious act against conventional ideas of publishing. And like Petit’s walk, it is also a high stakes balancing act.
Just as Petit had to maintain balance on a wire over 1,300 feet in the air to avoid a catastrophic fall, those of us involved in open educational resources must carefully balance the ideals of openness with the realities of inequities, institutional economic pressures, and technological exploitation.
This balancing act in OER is not something new. I didn’t come up with it. I often see it in talks and in the literature. Maybe not as a balancing act precisely but well…
In preparation for this talk I read a lot of articles and went back and watched recent keynotes in Open Education. The OER Conference put on by the Association for Learning Technologies or ALT just happened back in March and the keynote by Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz I think touches on this balance. The name of it —“The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be: Open Education at a Crossroads” where they laid out numerous challenges facing open education right now.
Rajiv Jhangiani’s keynote at that same conference was entitled “Betwixt Fairy Tales and Dystopian Futures,” where he told the story we have all heard about the faculty member who is changed by a perspective around open education to champion student success through affordability and student agency. Just to then retell and annotate that story with the harsh realities many of us face.
The titles of these talks alone speak to the kind of balance I’m trying to get at and I see this balance being called for in so many other articles and talks about OER.
I’m not going to attempt to cover every tension but to highlight a few that stand out to me as particularly important.
Open vs Ownership
Maybe the most foundational tension around OER is that of openness vs ownership.
Critical to the OER movement has been the Creative Commons licenses. Remember that for resources to be considered OER, by definition, they need to be licensed in such a way that “permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions”.
Creative Commons has six licenses that authors can choose from to provide levels of nuance around how they want their work to be shared.
Now, Creative Commons is just one of the open licensing structures out there and there is no requirement that it is Creative Commons that has to be used in OER but I don’t think anyone could contest that it is widely used in the OER movement.
It is important to note that not all of the Creative Commons licenses are OER compatible. Of the six licenses, only four can be applied to a work that would be considered OER. Namely, any license that has a “non-derivative” or “ND” qualifier cannot be called OER because all OER, by definition, has to permit adaptation.
One thing that all six have in common is a BY qualifier or CC-BY, requiring attribution.
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Let’s go back to that definition from UNESCO. The last definition I gave you earlier is the one from the 2019 Recommendations but I found something very similar in the 2012 OER Declaration. But there is a piece at the end that is no longer included:
“Teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. (but then continues) Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work”
Again, definitions change all the time and that is normal.
It looks like what happened here is that in the 2019 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER) they combined definition with scope resulting in a longer statement. This sentiment about respect for authorship from the 2012 Declaration got moved to #2 in a list of four statements.
I’ll admit that I find the longer definition a bit clunky. And I think it makes sense to split it where they did. But I also wonder if this might tell us something about where the focus and majority of the energy around OER has been more broadly that it was moved to #2.
It might not be surprising to suggest that the OER world has been more focused on sharing and often encouragement of sharing with the least restrictions possible. Maybe this is not news.
But I don’t think it should be news that respect for authorship has always been at the heart of the OER movement. But for some reason it feels like I’m being reminded of this.
And I get the feeling that it could be more important than ever.
Open vs. AI
This question is particularly interesting as there are new tensions emerging around respect for authorship and generative AI technology.
The large language models require text as training data and the really big ones like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and the like are trained on huge swaths of text.
While there are lawsuits pending from multiple artists, news outlets, and production companies, the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) here in the U.S. has issued principles and are sharing them with policy makers.
The principles state that the training of Large Language Models (LLMs) on copyrighted text is fine – in fact that it is already established fair use.
In July of 2023 Katherine Klosek wrote in a post on the ARL blog that this is the same as it was in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust and then in Authors Guild v. Google which both established that scanning of books for data mining and other kinds of “non-expressive use” was indeed fair use.
I would imagine this is the same reason why plagiarism checkers can legally have a database of copyrighted works to check against to find exact matches and not have to have a license for each copyrighted piece in the database.
But it is important to point out that the LCA does not make or enforce law – this is their reading of the law – we are still waiting for the courts to rule in these cases.
And all of that has to do with LLM inputs.
Outputs are a different matter.
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The LCA also states that if those who hold copyright were to see their work come from a LLM verbatim, or even as substantially similar output, that they could sue not just the AI provider but also the user who prompted the model.
Early after the release of ChatGPT when we were all trying to understand this tech we were told that verbatim outputs were not possible – this was just not how the technology worked. It was “generative”; the whole point was that it was creating something new. But it turns out that is not exactly true.
A phenomenon called memorization does happen and AI companies are at a loss about what to do about it. Alex Reisner reports in the Atlantic about researchers finding outputs that contained 100’s and even 1000’s of words of copied text with models recreating news articles and song lyrics. AI companies say this is a bug and that they are trying to fix it.
What does this mean for OER?
What about the BY in CC-BY?
Will those who have published with an open license just be more amenable to their work being used by AI?
Commercial academic publishers Taylor and Francis as well as Wiley recently announced partnerships with AI companies and we saw outrage from many academic researchers. Rice University just announced that they have partnered with Google to bring the entire OpenStax catalog into the Gemini model and it does not seem like we are getting the same response.
But not all open educators and researchers seem to be on board.
Anna Mills, open textbook author and critical AI literacy advocate writing with Maha Bali a well known figure in open education who I believe keynoted this conference a few years ago, have pointed out how if you ask ChatGPT about a concept it will often tell you about that concept (with varying accuracy) without mention of the people who are known to work on that concept.
They give “non–violent resistance” as an example, pointing to the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Yet when they ChatGPT about non–violent resistance no mention of these two is given.
Incidentally, I repeated this experiment before the talk and indeed ChatGPT did mention both Gandhi and King. So I do think the AI companies are playing catch up with this kind of thing. I do think that LLM attribution is possible. But I’m not sure that lesser known authors will see their work get mentioned and I’m worried about what the process of breaking through to the LLM will be like.
Heather Ross an educational developer at the University of Saskatchewan who leads the OER/Open Pedagogy initiative there blogged some concerns last month in a post entitled “The Soul of Open is in Danger”. She mentions many elements between open and GenAI that are at odds with one another but on the topic of copyright she says:
“Taking what isn’t yours to create something new without giving credit, having permission, or considering the impact on others isn’t innovation or acting in the spirit of open. At the least it’s theft, at the worst, It’s colonization.”
A few weeks ago Martin Weller, professor of educational technology at the Open University and well known blogger, wrote about the recent ruling against the Internet Archive which resulted in online access to over 500,000 books being removed. He compared this to the partnerships between AI companies and the commercial academic publishers and says “We are entering a strange world where we, as, you know, actual human beings, cannot access knowledge freely, but AI can.”
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So, what might the path forward be?
Creative Commons is holding open conversations inquiring about new ways of indicating authorship preferences around how work might be used in training artificial intelligence that go beyond a binary use/don’t use my work to train AI and provide nuance about when and how work can be used — this seems right up their alley. Though it is important to note that these “preference signals” are not meant to be legally enforceable. (Tumadóttir, 2024)
Just this month David Wiley started publishing blog posts and just yesterday gave a talk about his new vision. His vision of OER going through a transformation and changing into something he is calling “Generative OER”. He sees a world where AI is used to develop first drafts and speed up the creation of OER. That a greater focus will be put on remixing and that open licenses will be put on prompts. That AI model weighting would be open and that we might run smaller models on local devices.
But I can’t stop thinking about this icky feeling that GenAI creates for so many. It is important that OER creators feel valued and that they see their work as affecting something larger than themselves.
Because while OER is “free” in terms of there not being a charge for the resources itself; it is not free to create or maintain. And that will take us to our next tension.
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Free vs. Funding
There are common metaphors across the open ecosystem to convey what we mean by “free”
One of the core juxtapositions is that of gratis the “no-cost” aspect of “free”– and libre, the “no or limited restrictions” aspect of “free”.
The metaphors often used are those of “free as in beer”-or gratis and “free as in freedom”-libre.
But there is another “free” that is sometimes discussed. I first heard it working in the IT department around open source software but it also applies to OER — it is the “free as in a puppy” metaphor.
Because a free puppy is not really free. It requires care and there are costs to that care in terms of money and time.
Looking to adopt OER? It takes time to evaluate the different resources and think about how you are going to integrate it into your class.
It is true that you are free to remix OER if it does not meet your needs exactly but again that takes time and effort – not to mention technical skill.
Creating OER, of course, is going to take time and energy. And once it is created what about updating and growing the resource?
Then there is fact that OER are often focused on introductory classes and in many institutions those classes are taught by adjunct faculty whose compensation is already precarious to begin with.
Many institutions and foundations provide grants for working with OER to account for this and this is a great way to bolster OER. I, myself, have been involved in developing an OER grants program at my institution with Raya who introduced me. But grant funding is temporary and keeping resources up to date is often an ongoing process.
I think it is important to remember that attribution is a kind of compensation too.
Conclusion of Part 1: Navigating the High Wire
The people who I know that have licensed their work openly do so, yes, because of a sense that they are doing something bigger than themselves. That they are enriching a commons that will benefit a greater good.
But I also think many of them just like to have their stuff read or watched — and hiding it behind paywalls defeats that purpose.
Open licensing was a response to the desire of creators who wanted to break free of full copyright so that they could have more agency in sharing their work more broadly. If that agency is now usurped and authorship is obscured by technology I think we need to have a different conversation.
Wiley thinks that in the future philanthropic funding will require AI first drafts and he would know better than me. I have 0 experience working at that level. But I’m not sure readers are going to accept remixing AI first drafts as true authorship or that those who enjoy authoring texts will either.
I do think that there is potential for people to feel that AI is part of that greater good. But for that to happen people will need to see themselves and their values represented in models more often. I like the idea of smaller models running locally on your computer for privacy reasons but I’d also like to see them built on training data that is documented with more nuance. I’d like to see models that credit people appropriately but again then I would worry about lesser known authors and whose voices actually get heard.
I want to see us lean into the tension of these issues and use them to our advantage the way Petit used the tension of the wire to support his creative spirit.
But we are coming up to the end and we have not even gotten into Open Pedagogy or Open Educational Practices yet.
Part Two: Tensions Over Definitions
Focusing on a definition for Open Pedagogy (OP) would be more difficult than that of OER because the term is not exactly settled—though I think it might be better than it was a few years ago.
OP relates to something more experiential — and theories around creating experiences— and that is just harder to define.
Open Pedagogy also has a focus on values often connected to Open Education broadly. Student agency is a big one, others are experiential learning, public sharing, social justice, education as a human right, etc.
It was not that long ago that I witnessed the definition of Open Pedagogy being formed – or at least part of it.
The first time I heard Open Pedagogy discussed at length was during an online video call organized by Maha Bali.
This was during the 2017 “Year of Open” and you can go watch the video, it is still on Maha’s YouTube. In the video many well-known scholars and practitioners in the Open Education movement, riff on their definitions of Open Pedagogy, many of whom were also actively blogging and communicating on social media about the topic.
The tension between resources and experiences becomes evident in the conversation – and the nuances start to come out. Those with the more experiential view include Robin DeRosa, another MI OER Conference keynote alum, who talks about using the term Open Pedagogy specifically as a way to get away from the focus on resources, cost, and licensing. At one point Maha says that the key part of Open Pedagogy for her is relationships and conversations – which can’t be licensed. There are many others as well but I can’t name them all.
But then there are those who are very focused on resources. They see any teaching and learning experiences of note as only holding value precisely because of the resources, the ability to access them, and the ability to remix them — of course, due to the licensing. They are left wondering how any conversation about Open Pedagogy could not always include OER.
Later I would learn that this conversation actually started in and would continue in the literature for years to come. Those focused on Open Pedagogy as an experience point out that the concept has a history that goes back to the early open education movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, is often tied to experiences that are student-led or inviting students to have more power over the structure, design, or delivery of the course.(Cronin & MacLaren, 2018), (Short et al., 2024)
These tensions through blogging, social media conversations, and the video call would lead to David Wiley and others who desired a definition that focused on how open resources impact teaching, to start using the term “OER-Enabled Pedagogy” to describe what they were talking about.
Open Pedagogy Through the Art Lens
Thinking about Open Pedagogy through the art lens made me realize I have chosen to focus on two performance artists for the profiles that I’m highlighting in this talk – In a moment I am going to highlight the work of Marina Abramovic.
I think this is likely because I am drawn to the idea of experiences. I like resources but I like people more and people have experiences. This is likely assisted by the fact that I’m not that bothered by the lack of a clear definition. Not everything needs to be strictly defined – I might make the case that strict definitions are just an illusion – we’ve already talked about how definitions naturally change anyway.
All of this made me think about how performance art differs from objects of art like paintings and sculpture which is where I’ll go for this next art diversion.
Performance Art and Performing Arts
But before I even take on comparing performance art and objects of art; there is an important distinction between “performance art” and “performing arts” that should be made.
Performing arts including theater, dance, music and the like are highly skilled technical arts that are generally practiced and rehearsed where consistency is often valued.
In earlier drafts of this talk I only nodded at this as a way to differentiate performing arts from performance art and then quickly moved on.
I was worried about suggesting that Open Pedagogy was performative.
But on revisions I think I’m just going to own this. I do think that there are big parts of OP that can be performative. But some of the best teachers that I’ve met have backgrounds in the performing arts.
Still, this is not the connection that I want to focus on. I think this might be because, save a few exceptions, performing arts are largely meant as a to be observed. There is a nice thick 4th wall between the players and the audience and while it can be broken it is not the norm.
Performance Art and Open Pedagogy
CC-BY Andrew Russeth Wikimedia Commons
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But performance art is something different. Like Open Pedagogy it is hard to define.
Above is a photo of Marina Abramovic’s performance art piece “The Artist is Present” which took place in New York at MoMA in 2009. She sat in the museum’s atrium and people were in invited to simply sit across from her and stare into her eyes. They could sit as long as they wanted but were instructed to not speak to her and not to touch her but just to stare. Many people broke into tears or laughter during the experience. We will see Abramovic again shortly but in a more intense example of performance art.
Years of planning can go into preparing for a piece of performance art and it can at times have scripted elements but it encourages spontaneity and is deeply rooted in the context of the moment; it thrives on unpredictability, often inviting the audience to become participants in the creation of the work.
Similarly, Open Pedagogy might forgo or diminish traditional learning outcomes and invite the students to co-create the learning outcomes at the start of the course. Or perhaps rather than using an LMS students are given their own web space, taught about open licenses, create content based on research they are doing. And yes Open Pedagogy can also be writing the textbook with your students rather than assigning a commercial text—this is just not the only example of Open Pedagogy.
Objects of Art and OER Enabled Pedagogy
In contrast, traditional art objects like paintings, sculptures, and even digital art like graphics and photos represent something more enduring and tangible. Something much easier to define.
Engaging with this kind of art is perhaps akin to OER-enabled pedagogy.
These objects of art are more material and while the experience of creating or studying them can not be discounted, those experiences can’t really exist without the objects themselves.
Part Three: The Many Umbrellas of Open Educational Practices
Moving into part three quickly here – Open Pedagogy and Open Educational Practices (OEP) are sometimes used interchangeably.
But in the literature OEP is often thought of as an umbrella term that encompasses a bunch of others – Open Pedagogy just being one.
Because of this, I think OEP broadens what might be considered in the realm of Open Education.
In their 2018 review of OEP literature Cronin and MacLaren placed a number of constructs under the heading “OEP–Related Concepts” including: networked learning, connected learning, open scholarship, open networked participatory scholarship, open pedagogy, open teaching, and critical digital pedagogy.
They stated that “All describe emergent scholarly practices that espouse OER use/production, open learning and teaching, collaboration (in the form of networked participation) and empowering learners to co-create knowledge.”
Where I’m going next is to dive into an area of my own entry into open education which I think falls across several of these “OEP–Related Concepts”
I don’t want to disparage the researchers who study these constructs as separate phenomena by collapsing their work into something less nuanced. But I don’t think I have one term that describes my experience.
The open practice I’m referring to has to do with people who want to use the public internet to teach, learn, and research together. It often involves work on the public web like websites, social media, blogs, and open access forums. Though of course much of the work happens in private/semi–private spaces, or “the back-channel”, such as direct messages and email.
The experiences I’m talking about are sometimes at odds with open education, in that they make room for public interactions that often take place on commercial platforms. Platforms that meet the no-cost part of “open” but have little to do with reuse or remixing. Nor do they have a required connection to open pedagogy principles like student agency – though the people using them in this way can and do bring these elements in.
Somewhere between 2014 and 2017 I had become interested in actively pursuing an educational community on the open web through social media, personal blogging, real-time document editing, and video calls. It started by participating in online events sometimes called MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses (I would say cMOOCs but that is a different rabbit hole and a different talk), specifically Dave Cormier’s Rhizo15 had a big effect on me but by the time 2017 rolled around I’d started organizing and promoting some of my own events.
Now, I would not have called the events I was trying to organize MOOCs—none of them were massive and I didn’t want them to be. I also wasn’t trying to position myself as a teacher so much as trying to cultivate conversation and learning around topics I was interested in—though admittedly one could argue that might be teacher behavior. And I was using a lot of the skills I learned participating in MOOCs.
A topic that I put a lot of focus on was digital citizenship, or at least that was the name I used, and I had started using the hashtag #DigCiz to rally the topic on Twitter. I even started recruiting well known people in these online spaces to host different weeks, write blog posts, run twitter chats, and the like.
This was an exciting time for me and I was learning a lot. Some of what I thought I knew was challenged and I had to readjust my thinking—the term Digital Citizenship being a big one. I was also gaining a lot of technical and online social skills through this process. I made a ton of connections, getting involved in others’ projects that they were working on and some of them helping me with mine. But….
The Vulnerability of OEP
I also saw some real ugliness between people that was hard for me to figure out how to deal with. I mean it is the internet after all. From scholars like sava saheli singh, Bonnie Stewart, and Chris Gillard I started to develop some critical literacies of my own around interpersonal dynamics on these platforms but also predatory behaviour of the platforms themselves like surveillance, data collection, and algorithmic targeting. I even had a run in with the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
It was during one of these events that I published a short reflection as part of a larger blog post connecting Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 performance art piece with this practice. I’m paraphrasing some of it here; in this piece Abramovic’s public is a kind of metaphor for me for both predatory platforms and toxic social media actors.
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In 1974 performance artist Marina Abramovic produced and performed Rhythm 0 in a studio in Naples, Italy.
In Rhythm 0, Abramovic wanted to experiment with giving the public full access to engage with her however they saw fit.
She stood for six hours in a room with a table upon which were all manner of objects for pleasure and pain. There was a statement that told the public that she was an object and that they could do whatever they wanted to with her. That she took full responsibility for whatever happened.
It starts innocent enough but as you might imagine that it quickly turns ugly. When Abramovic’s life was threatened the audience fought with one another. I’m not sure I can say she was unharmed but she made it through the piece.
In the blog post I asked, why. Why when given the chance to engage with her would people choose to harm her? I questioned the ability for any public to choose between tools of violence and tools of peace. I challenged the ability of any public to be able to interact with one another as more than objects. Finally, I declared I was not Marina Abramovic and that #DigCiz was not Rhythm 0.
Same as it ever was
I don’t bring up the intersection of this kind of OEP just to tell you a personal story. I think it is still highly relevant today. Though the players and platforms may have changed.
If you spend any time on TikTok you’ll see many of the creators there engaging in a practice of open teaching and learning concerning subjects both frivolous and serious. Many grappling with interpersonal dynamics between one another and issues of platform control like “shadow banning”. Often our students come to us with this frame.
The recent exodus of many academics from Twitter, after its purchase by Elon Musk and changes that he made to the platform, has had a huge impact to many of the communities that I’m referencing. This speaks to the vulnerability we take on when we practice openness for education publicly on commercial platforms that can easily be sold and change in drastic ways.
The question I asked about why the public would choose tools of harm when invited to interact with Abramovic is one that educators who choose to have their students work in these spaces still need to grapple with.
If you want to have your students work on public websites, post publicly to social media where they will be exposed to the public, or if you ask them to use ChatGPT or other platforms that collect their data, you need to first inform them about social tensions and data privacy in these spaces. If you are not aware of these issues you need to educate yourself about them. Many are proponents of student consent forms as a way to assure for an ethical approach to this and I love consent forms but it means little if it is not informed consent.
Calling for Community
We are almost finished, my conclusion is the next section and spoiler alert I’m going to do a call for community.
But before I do that I do think there is another lesson from Rhythm 0 that speaks to how careful our balance must be in this area. Building community might be one of the more difficult tricks on the high wire.
Abramovic said that after the six hours were up and she became herself again… when she started moving and speaking again… that the public could not bear to look at her. They all ran away.
If we want to create a community, we have to have to create an environment of trust: in ourselves, and in each other. We do that through openness, yes, but also through setting healthy boundaries. The big difference between Rhythm 0 and The Artist is Present comes down the instructions that the public was given.
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I’ve explored changing and messy definitions throughout this talk and the elephant in the room is that how we define “open” itself is anything but clear.
In 2014, Audrey Watters pointed this out while making a case for a reassertion of the political nature of openness. She says:
“If we believe in equality, if we believe in participatory democracy and participatory culture, if we believe in people and progressive social change, if we believe in sustainability in all its environmental and economic and psychological manifestations, then we need to do better than slap that adjective “open” onto our projects and act as though that’s sufficient or — and this is hard, I know — even sound.”
I laid out a few challenges for you today and it is by no means a comprehensive review. We must acknowledge that the path forward is not clear. The balancing act that I’ve described throughout this talk is more relevant than ever and I have some bad news — You can’t learn how to walk a high wire from listening to a keynote address.
Instead, I invite you to see this as a collective undertaking. The strength of the open education movement in Michigan lies in its community. Our educators, librarians, learners, designers, technologists, and advocates coming together to explore what it means to be “open”, what it means for us to grapple with new tensions over authorship, what it means to be a healthy and respectful community.
This conference is a great start as well as all of the amazing work that the MI OER Network does throughout the year. And I wanted to highlight some some others.
I know for librarians that the Michigan Academic Library Association has an OER Interest Group.
The Midwestern Higher Education Compact is providing supports for the whole midwest region which you can find out about on their website.
We are also doing some things over at the MI Community College Association, where I work part-time, to try to make connections. Along with my colleague Stephanie Davis we are holding quarterly virtual coffee hours and sending out a regular newsletter “the Open Mitten”. You can find out more on our website at MCCA.org/oer
But these are just the things that I’m aware of and as I’ve mentioned my context has its limitations. OER is not my full time focus and I don’t have a lot of experience in K-12 for instance. So, as you fill your day at this great event I’m going to ask you to think about how you can make those connections and build community in your contexts.
Thank you!!
References and Inspirations
Not everything listed here appears in the hypertext above and not every link above is referenced here.
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Featured Image: AI Generated by DALL-E3 via ChatGPT through several rounds of wholistic and isolated prompting. Description: AI generated image that looks like an illustration of a surreal landscape of colorful lines, shapes, and swirls. A wire walker walks through the middle of the frame with a sunset in the distance.