Reimagining Open at the Crossroads Through Music

[paulstacey]

Paul Stacey and his ukulele CC BY-SA

Hi I’m @paulstacey inviting you to Reimagine Open at the Crossroads through music.

For background context please read the Reimagining Open at the Crossroads Introduction. This activity builds on the work of Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz whose essay “The Future isn’t what it used to be: Open Education at a Crossroads” has a five part action framework for moving forward from the crossroads.

For this activity I invite you to submit one to three songs that have personal open education meaning to you and respond to Catherine and Laura’s five part framework in some way.

In submitting your songs please provide:

• the name of the song
• the name of the artist or band who play the song
• a link to the song online (As a suggestion @cogdog identified a really nifty web service called On Demand Smart Links where you can search for a song and it provides all the places it is available. It also gives you one song link that you could use.
• a link to lyrics online (another @cogdog suggestion)
• your remarks on which of the five calls to action the song responds to and why the song has personal open education meaning for you

Original songs and songs that are openly licensed are especially welcome. However, any song can be submitted - from any country, in any language including songs not openly licensed. The aim here is to share the many ways songs connect in personally meaningful ways with open education. Everyone is welcome to submit songs whether you are attending the OEGlobal 2024 conference or not. A playlist of all the songs submitted will be created for the OEGlobal 2024 conference.

As an example, and to get things underway, I submit two songs:

Paul’s First Song
Name of Song: Open The Door (To Your Heart)
Artist: Van Morrison
Links: Music / Lyrics

Remarks: There is a verse in this song that for me conveys both open protest and celebration responding to Catherine and Laura’s challenging and resisting call to action. It goes:

“Money doesn’t make you fulfilled
Money’s just to pay the bills
It’s need not greed
Open the door to your heart”

Paul’s Second Song
Name of Song: The Sharing Song
Artist: Raffi
Links: Music / Lyrics

Remarks: Raffi is a Canadian children’s song troubadour. His songs were loved by my kids when they were growing up. In my view the core verse of The Sharing Song conveys the essence of open and in doing so makes a claim about what a just, humane & globally sustainable open education effort entails. It goes:

“It’s mine but you can have some
With you I’d like to share it
'Cause if I share it with you
You’ll have some too”

What songs invoke protest, joy, inspiration, or the essence of open for you? Simply Reply to this post to submit your song(s).

[vidminas]

Hi Paul! Thanks for sharing this creative activity
The song that comes to my mind is “I know things now” from the musical “Into the Woods”.

The film performance is nice: Into the Woods | I Know Things Now (1080p) (youtube.com) (although there’s many other good ones too).

It’s about learning from experience. Openness comes up as being open (‘receptive’) to new things:

And he showed me things
Many beautiful things
That I hadn’t thought to explore
They were off my path
So I never had dared
I had been so careful
I never had cared
And he made me feel excited
Well, excited and scared

And there’s an element of sharing openly (perhaps ‘honestly’ or ‘vulnerably’) about lessons learned:

Now I know: Don’t be scared
Granny is right, Just be prepared
Isn’t it nice to know a lot!
And a little bit not

[paulstacey]

Thanks @vidminas . I like how this song acknowledges exploring things off the path is both exciting and scary and how being prepared mitigates scariness.

I was struck by “Nice is different than good” line. I dug around a bit to explore this difference.

It seems that good is who you are in your core. Being good entails having your values clearly defined, and aligning your actions with them. Good has authenticity, integrity, and a true to self nature. Being good feels good. Sounds like the practice of open education.

Nice often entails a bending over backwards, a compromising of your values in order to be liked or approved of. Being nice can mean not being true to yourself. Nice is something polite but inconsistent with your core. Being nice doesn’t always make you feel good.

I found this quote interesting “Nice people are like artificial sweetener. It’s sweet, but it has a weird aftertaste and we will always prefer the real thing.”

Given our Zoom conversation yesterday I wondered if Artificial Intelligence is like artificial sweetener?

[cogdog]

Such a great open activity, Paul, and we hope this starts a great series of responses for your workshop. I’m giving it a twirl, admittedly with music from a few eras back.

As a suggestion for song references, there is a really nifty web service called On Demand Smart Links where you can search for a song and it provides all the places it is available-- see for example the smart link for Open the Door (To Your Heart) – it works for podcasts too, I have a customized one for OEG Voices.

Alan’s First Song

Name: Maggie’s Farm
Artist: Bob Dylan
Links: Music / Lyrics
Remarks: As a protest song speaking against exploitation I file this under “1. Name & Analyse” and also “2. Challenge & Resist” The last verse definitely about resisting, but all of them are stating being under the control of an entity. I read somewhere that Dylan recorded it in one take.

I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more
No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more
Well, I wake in the morning
Fold my hands and pray for rain
I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin’ me insane
It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more

I was turned on to the song a while back by a Hybrid Pedagogy piece by Audrey Watters where she wrote about as Maggie’s Digital Content Farm. I was inspired to learn the song, and did my own edtech cover version - it’s just fun to play.

Alan’s Second Song

Name: Into the Great Wide Open
Artist: Tom Petty
Links: Music / Lyrics
Remarks: An easy choice for the title, but I always liked its spirit of potential, opportunity, the stepping out into something new, so maybe I can put it under “4. Courageously Imagine” or just a sense of hope, optimism that was the frame of the HE4Good. The verses about the characters are not what I am drawn to, just the chords, and the ringing chords played under it. Where else would we want to be?

Into the great wide open
Under them skies of blue
Out in the great wide open
A rebel without a clue

Again if taken literally, being a “rebel without a clue” sounds negative, but I take it as being someone who is not following the clues of the system or the norm, like operating on a different moral or ethical plan. It’s not being clueless, its being a rebel not tied to the clues of the status quo.

Alan’s Third Song

More into the 1960s stuff!

Name: Woodstock
Artist: Joni Mitchell
Links: Music / Lyrics
Remarks: Okay its definitely full of the 1960s hippie vibe, but also for at least the spirit and conviction of “5- Make Positive Changes” ?? Like the verse about wanting to be a cog in somthing bigger, like joining together, and also the reference to “life is for learning”?

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it’s the time of man
I don’t know who I am
But you know life is for learning

I was also very close to listing Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi as the sort of paving over of open ed by corporate interests.

Bonus Tracks

Okay I have gone on a bit long, but wanted to add in this playlist from the Free Music Archive of all tracks we have used as music for the different episodes for the OEGlobal Voices podcast. Most are instrumental but have great titles that tie into openness.

[paulstacey]

@cogdog A bit of protest, spirit of courageously imagining potential, life is for learning, and a bonus Free Music Archive collection - awesome choices all. Thanks so much!

And thanks for sharing On Demand Smart Links. I wasn’t aware of it. Really like the way the link it provides gives a wide range of listening options. Super helpful. I’ve added it to the instructions for this activity and used it to redo the links to the songs I submitted. Also added link to lyrics as you did with your post.

[Paola]

Paola’s first song
Nameof the song: Via del Campo
Name of the artist: Fabrizio De André
Link: https://open.spotify.com/intl-it/track/2PMIlbBzMstucsr3h0iGF5?si=44094c321b2140a3
Remarks: I feel the connection between this song and “1. Name & Analyse”. The author describes a narrow street in the middle of Genova, where the most marginalised people live, and he describes them with grace, and humanity. They are all important in their own way. The song ends with this sentence, which is my motivation to choose it in this context:

Dai diamanti non nasce niente/ dal letame nascono i fior.

In English, it sounds something like

from diamonds nothing is born/ from manure flowers are born.

It’s a very powerful reminder for me about where to look, what to focus on, what to do next.

Here a complete official translation in English, curated by Mark Worden.The author wrote this text together with another great Italian songwriter, Enzo Iannacci: http://www.fabriziodeandre.it/faber/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Via_del_Campo_english_version.pdf

[paulstacey]

@Paola That’s a beautiful song.
A lilting swaying dance with waves of wistful uplifting flow.
Great voice and lyrics.
Thanks for the poetry about where to look, what to focus on, what to do next.

These submitted songs are quickly becoming my daily listening pleasure.
A soundtrack for reimagining open at the crossroads.

[rjhangiani]

Thank you for inviting participation in this wonderfully creative exercise, Paul!

The song that immediately came to mind for me is one of my all-time favourites, and one for which I was privileged to embody through choreography in my former career in a professional dance company.

Song: Justice’s Groove
Artist: The incomparable Stanley Clarke

It is a stunning, moving, and inspirational instrumental piece that communicates so emotion without a single lyric. I sometimes turn to it as a source of strength, including when resisting hegemonies, when making claims for just, humane, and globally sustainable open education, and certainly also when imagining and sharing fresh possibilities for open education.

Enjoy!

[paulstacey]

@rjhangiani Love the driving groove of this song.
Energizing.
Thanks for sharing.

[catherinecronin]

Paul, thank you for inviting such creative engagement with these questions! As I mentioned in our email communication, Laura and I cited Angela Davis et al (2022) in our chapter in HE4Good about the role of artists in “seeding resistance and providing the tools for us to imagine otherwise”. In this creative wildcard session you are doing just that Here’s my first song:

Song: Nina Cried Power
Artists: Hozier & Mavis Staples
Link: Smart Links (thanks Alan!)
Remarks: This glorious anthem salutes artists & activists who have fought for human and civil rights. For me, the song highlights a legacy we can draw from in fighting injustice today. In our 5 calls to action for ‘Open Education for better futures’, we note that each action requires courage – e.g. to challenge & resist hegemonies, to make claims to better futures, to imagine fresh possibilities. If we look beyond the bounds of OE and HE, there are so many examples of those who have done just this, in social movements across time and place. Apart from this being a brilliant song, it never fails to remind me of the possible.

“…It’s not the song, it is the singin’
It’s the heaven of the human spirit ringin’…

…Power has been cried by those stronger than me"

[catherinecronin]

great choice of songs, Alan! and thanks for sharing On Demand Smart Links – so glad to know of this (and I used it in my response )

[cogdog]

Wow, “brilliant” might be an understatement for the power of the song, calling from the soul stirring voice of Mavis Staples to the now. Worth reading the YouTube caption for the statements and credits, a tip of the justice hat to a song for a “new Ireland”.

[paulstacey]

@catherinecronin Thanks for reminding us of the possible with this powerful song.

…It’s not the wakin’, it’s the risin’"

[Downes]

I just have one song, it’s my go-to when I’m talking and thinking about issues like this, but it has three verses, so I’ll make it count as three.

It is, of course, Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World

Here are the three verses:

There’s colors on the street
Red, white and blue
People shufflin’ their feet
People sleepin’ in their shoes
But there’s a warning sign on the road ahead
There’s lot of people sayin’ we’d better off dead
Don’t feel like Satan, but I am to them
So I try to forget it, any way I can.

I see a woman in the night
With a baby in her hand
Under an old street light
Near a garbage can
Now she puts the kid away, and she’s gone to get a hit
she hates her life and what she’s done to it
There’s one more kid that will never go to school
Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool

We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
We got department stores and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people, says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive

War. Poverty. Environment. These are to me the three major educational issues of our time.

Let me tell you a story about braiding.

When I was in the latter years of my PhD (which of course I never completed) following what I thought was the logical progression of connectionism and associationism, etc., I embarked on what turned out to be a two-year project of mapping every philosopher’s influence on everyone else - I worked my way though various history texts, the Bible, the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and many more works, and created a great giant graph that covered entire walls (no longer extant; I left it behind when I moved from Eaglesham to become a distance education specialist).

What I discovered was a 3000-year old dance between empiricism and rationalism (to greatly over simplify it). The two poles in opposition: they would revolve around each other, then split as each influenced the other; you’d get empiricism, empiricism-r, rationalism-e, rationalism, then these would reform, and on they’d go, twisting around each other, some weaker versions trailing off, the stronger versions remaining, two main threads, that persist to this day, with myriad sub-threads and sub-themes weaving throughout.

These threads repeated and re-repeated through the great issues of the day - physis (atomism vs holism), substance (essence vs accident), knowledge (experience vs reason), inference (freedom vs authority), meaning - over the 3000 years (we are still preoccupied with meaning and all its sub-entities: identity, value, worth, etc).

What’s different today is that the major traditions are beginning to weave together. Right now, we perceive the strands as distinct and essential - ‘western’ knowledge vs ‘indigenous’ knowledge - but that’s just the first go-round.

None of the individual strands matters (though without them there would be no culture). How they intertwine, and what results, is of paramount importance.

The best music, to me, captures this - captures the two ideas in opposition, captures the revolution of each around the other, captures the resolution (though often - as with Neil Young’s song) that resolution is left in the mind of the listener.

It doesn’t matter to me whether we’re doing Taoism, Hofstadter, Indigenous knowledge, Hegelianism, whatever. I won’t say it’s all the same - because it’s not, each time we go through again, it changes.

[paulstacey]

@Downes Stephen, thanks for encouraging us to “keep on rockin’ in the free world” while working on the major educational issues of our time.

For those who want to listen to this song, here is the link via On Demand Smart Links https://song.link/i/135132686.

Mapping every philosopher’s influence on everyone else into one giant graph is quite the braiding exercise. Your observation that “None of the individual strands matters (though without them there would be no culture).” and “How they intertwine, and what results, is of paramount importance.” are interesting takeaways.

On a smaller scale I wonder how we might intertwine and braid the different forms of open together (open education, open science, open access, open source, open data, …). And what might result?

[paulstacey]

My Open Education Global friend and colleague Jan Gondol sent me his song via email and has kindly agreed to me posting it here.

Jan says:

"OK, this may be a weird song, but my first association was this: Weekend fun: AI-generated song about the MIT license – First, the text of the song is the MIT license (how cool is that)? Also, even “amateurs” can make stuff like this with AI. And finally, it makes me think about the nature of openness and the future of education (are we all going to have a very personal tutor who can teach us pretty much anything? what is the role of human educators? will we transition to project-based learning and educate ourselves through creation of digital artifacts with the assistance of AI?)

Anyway. That’s my song… ;-)"

Thanks a lot Jan for this song. An AI-generated song where the lyrics are the text of the MIT open source software license, performed by a melancholic pianist is definitely a weird song. I really appreciate your thoughts and questions on what this means and what its impact will be on the nature of openness and the future of education. I too wonder how AI will impact music and education.

[Downes]

It’s interesting that you seek to ‘braid the different forms of open together’.

My interpretation of ‘braiding’ was based on the idea of braiding different perspectives or points of view together. This seems quite different from braiding different topics together. Eg. ‘open’ as ‘free’ vs ‘open’ as ‘no pre-requisites’ vs ‘open’ as ‘accessible’, etc.

In any case, we discussed this idea when we were creating our first MOOCs - we were deliberately merging open content with open design with open assessment, etc. We sought deliberately to blend different strands of discussion (hence, we had a guest participant for each week of the course, rather than a lecture on some particular topic) and to connect people with each other (hence, our use of ‘oer’ wasn’t to create stuff but to find stuff and link it together, and to have participants respond to that, and link that together.

I don’t feel the contempory discussion of ‘open’ - braided or not - has moved much beyond the idea of a course as a presentation to students by a professor.