Pathways & Connections - The Final Reimagining Open at the Crossroads Activity

[paulstacey]

Aerial view of the Brisbane River, Queensland, Australia by Greg O’Beirne CC BY-SA

Pathways and Connections is taking place both online here in the OEGlobal 2024 Interaction Zone and in person at the OEGlobal conference. The OEGlobal 2024 Connect online launch date is November 4, 2024. The in person version will take place at the OEGlobal 2024 conference in Brisbane, Australia on Wednesday, November 13th from 11:00am -12:00pm.

As with activities one, two, and three, activity four builds on the work of Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz and their five part action framework for moving forward from a crossroads. For background context I invite you to read their essay and the Reimagining Open at the Crossroads Introduction. You might also enjoy doing Reimagining Open at the Crossroads activity 1, 2, and 3.

This fourth Reimagining Open at the Crossroads Pathways and Connections activity invites you to reimagine open education and create a visual pathway for exploring it.

Plurality of paths are welcome. As articulated by Laura and Catherine, “Some individuals may opt to work for incremental practical change, some for policy change, some for legal change, some for setting research agendas, some in classrooms, some on committees. Some may abhor the alliances that others actively support. Some see their work as deeply personal while others do not. There are opportunities for working towards just, humane and globally sustainable open education globally, locally, and intergenerationally. All approaches are needed, and all are needed right now.”

In this activity creating a pathway involves drawing using rivers and tributaries as metaphors for reimagining open. A Pathways and Connections Google Sheet template has been created for your drawing with an accompanying set of instructions. Clicking on this template link prompts you to create a copy of the template which you can rename as your own. Your own copy of the template then serves as the basis for your drawing.

Upon completion you are invited to take a picture of your drawing or set permissions to allow viewing and share a link to your photo or Google Sheet drawing by Replying to this post. Add a description of your drawing to your post.

Making pathways visible makes it possible to connect with others who are following similar paths, both those in person attending the conference and those participating virtually. Connections can be made simply by replying to a shared pathway post, providing a link to your pathway post, and identifying areas of mutual interest. This final step intentionally aims to braid your work with others.

Vintage Silk Braid from Bombay by Shula CC BY-NC

Thanks for participating in these Reimagining Open At The Crossroads activities!

[paulstacey]

Here is Paul Stacey’s Reimagining Open Pathway.

I’ve named the main pathway Open Braid River to reflect the way the tributaries come together and combine forces with the main river.

I added two big tributaries which combine with the main river making it significantly wider.

The first tributary pertains to connecting the opens together. This part of my pathway focuses primarily on strategically connecting open science and open education. Other forms of open such as open access, open data, open innovation and open culture are also woven in but in a lesser way. This pathway interviews those already engaged in this practice, does a literature review on connecting opens, and builds a case for connecting opens.

The second tributary is about creating guidance on how to design and implement sustainable and mature open education programs. This pathway focuses on librarians and senior leaders. Guidance includes creation of a strategy decision making aid using a comprehensive suite of actual strategies others have used as a means of providing choices and options for custom designing your own strategy.

All rivers flow into a destination that combines opens together and provides a means of navigating the weaving of them into academic culture.

If anyone is doing similar work related to this reimagining of open I’m interested in connecting.

[RobertFarrow]

@paulstacey

In this activity creating a pathway involves drawing using rivers and tributaries as metaphors for reimagining open.

So, I went off script a little bit and tried to use GPT to create my river visualisation. The main tributaries I wanted were:

• Reimagining Open Educational Practices: Positioned as a primary tributary that feeds directly into the main river, highlighting different aspects of transforming traditional educational practices to open formats.
• Critical Pedagogies: This tributary emphasizes the shift in education from mere knowledge transmission to fostering critical thinking and engagement.
• Decoloniality: Another essential tributary, highlighting efforts to make open education more globally representative and just, foregrounding knowledge traditions from diverse cultures.
• Artificial Intelligence: A dynamic tributary featuring branches like “AI for Personalized Learning,” “Ethics of AI in Education,” and “AI-Enhanced OER.” This theme addresses both the opportunities and ethical considerations AI brings to open education, exploring potential transformations and risks.

In typical fashion, the output isn’t quite what I wanted but I could be a starting point! (Why does it struggle so much with labels?!)

[cogdog]

Thanks Paul for running a slideless conversational session. The river exercise works on many levels… well I may have not been very precise but enjoyed thinking on it and seeing other responses.

I do t have any fancy AI generated drawings

My map is messy, and as the saying goes, not the territory. No neat labels.

The river metaphor appeals to my university education in geology, especially geomorphology. The river on map suggests a fixed entity, but over geologic time, or less, they are quite dynamic. I thought of how stream capture in the headlands redirects flow, how river bends can be cut off leaving oxbow lakes,

So I saw a map where we have many parallel streams of openness, some perhaps in their own valley. My mind wandered to ways in which, unlike real rivers, they might become much more interconnected, creating cross flows.

But then this can be done by us, as individuals, maybe small groups, by hand, we can dig canals and trenches to make a deeply interfered system of flow towards a truly global open education community.

[paulstacey]

I’m back from Australia.
It’s always helpful to be together as a community in person. So special to be together exploring and thinking about open education in such a concentrated way.
And I like taking a bit of time to assimilate what took place.

In Brisbane I had the good fortune to lead a group of people in-person through the four Reimagining Open At The Crossroads activities. In the process I shared the contributions made online in advance of the conference from here, in this Interaction Zone, as well as engaging everyone in generating their own responses to the four activities.

The first activity, Reimagining Open Through Music, served as great context setting for the overall idea. I brought a bluetooth speaker with me and used it to play a subset of contributed songs live at the venue. Music is great for establishing rapport and connection. Participants were then invited to name songs that have personal open meaning to themselves. In addition to Rage Against the Machine which @RobertFarrow has already posted to this forum suggested songs included:

• Stand By Me
• Blackbird, and
• Rainbow Connection

For activity two participants were invited to work with others seated next to them to come up with What if’s? and … Then’s. Here is a sample of some of the What if’s? that emerged:

• What if open practices were woven throughout all our teachings from K to gray?
• What if sharing and open were tied to becoming a tenure professor?
• What if publishing something openly was actually respected as much as publishing traditionally?
• What if there was time for faculty to create locally relevant materials for students?
• What if higher education institutions actually knew about open education and actually tried to enable it to happen?
• What if there were Teachers Without Borders and participating academics received credit, recognition and reverence academically for participating in it?
• What if all OER could be available in any language?
• What if universities could be embedded in communities?
• What if it wasn’t profitable to be a commercial publisher?

In addition to What if’s? some exploration of the Then followed. For example one What if? imagined copyright never existed. Which led to “Then we wouldn’t have to teach our children that sharing is wrong.”

The hard part of imagining these What if’s? is the how part. How would we get rid of copyright? But this activity is freed from how. Sometimes just imagining What if’s is itself a really big step.

The majority of time was given to activity four involving the drawing of personal pathways identifying areas of open reimagined that participants want to explore and the connection of these to their main work as tributaries feeding into the Brisbane River. Here is a sample of the verbal sharing of pathways at the end of the session:

“Situating the river in a big cycle. Thinking about it as a water cycle and what makes it animate. Coming out into the ocean is the “commons”, the warmth of imagination and respect shines down on it, and it raises inspiration in the commons which gathers in clouds of gritty persistence and resilience, raining down. Springs of surprise feed the start of the river.”

“Seeing the main river as the open education policy river flowing into the bay of open practices and futures. The river flows through various locations much like towns and cities on a real river such as widening participation, digital accessibility, OER, student partnerships, EDI, universal and local learning design and co-design, open courses, micro-learning, communities of practice, collaborative pedagogic knowledge making. Other tributaries increase the flow making the river happen such as a support structures and infrastructure stream, reward and recognition river, capacity building creek, and research river.”

“Imagining a vibrant and connected ecosystem, and thinking about all the different organizations and people working in different places and how we come together and share, including teachers librarians, faculty, leaders and systems. How we are all connecting and learning together and moving forward in a coordinated way.”

And many more. Special thanks to @RobertFarrow and @cogdog for sharing their river pathways and connections here in this forum.

If you’d like to hear more an audio recording of the entire session can be found here.

I’d like to thank everyone for humouring me and participating in these activities. I’m really pleased with what emerged. Special thanks to @catherinecronin and @czernie for giving me the freedom to imagine their call to action in the form of these activities. I also express appreciation to OEGlobal, and @cogdog in particular for giving me a forum for these activities.

Open education has been around for a number of years now and for all those years it’s kind of been about the same things OER, open textbooks, and open practices, but at this juncture I think there is an opportunity for open to go beyond those things. Big thanks to all for the open minds and imaginative takes on what the future of open entails.