Hello folks. Welcome to an Ethos of Open Meets the Climate Emergency.

It's important part of doing this work is to just

pause a little bit on how it is that we can do the work

and just kind of slow down for a second.

I'm going to have myself right here.

I'm just going to get in the room and just be here and be able to step back a little bit

and bear witness to what's actually going on in the world.

It's not easy to pay attention to.

I'd like to know who I'm sharing this space with.

How many of you have felt like you've witnessed something related to the changing climate in the past year?

How many of you think about some aspect of this and what's going on, I don't know, daily?

You don't have to. It's not easy to do.

How many of you in your work might be doing something that's a little bit related to how we're taking a response to climate?

I think you guys are. It's more than I would have wanted to.

Well, a little bit about me.

In addition to being Director of MIT, of course we are, where we publish materials including things about climate change.

This is kind of the world that I live in when I'm both at work and not at work.

And I'm refusing at this point to compartmentalize around this issue.

I'm a trained volunteer facilitator with the En-Roads Climate Simulator Project, which I did a session about it a little last year.

I lead a reflective practice at MIT called the Council on the Uncertain Human Future, where we use a talking certain methodology.

Volunteer later in the Boston Green New Deal Coalition, leveled in a net zero.

Thank you so much.

Converted 100 year old structure, it's a net zero.

And sometimes it works fail me, and so I'm a drummer, and I just need to hit the thing.

This is a performance inspired by Gretta Kimberg's "How Dare You" speech to the United Nations, original jazz performance.

So, we talked about what we were witnessing.

It's kind of a big deal.

So why open plus climate?

What's open got to do with this one?

I'm going to channel our friend, Katie Green, from his keynote that we will last year at Edmonton.

If we're going to solve the world's biggest problems, the knowledge and culture about them must be open.

And I think we can agree that what's going on in the climate is one of those big problems.

And the longer we have waited to take this on, the more difficult it gets.

This is a graph of the emissions pathway curve that we need to be on in order to get the Paris Agreement from 1.5 degrees centigrade rise of the industrial levels in time, if you will.

And if we had gotten on this 20 years ago, we had a lot of work to do, but we could felt more reasonable.

It's a really steep curve right now.

And so we've got to bring everything we can to build this response.

Gold low emissions are continuing to rise.

Even this past year, they have risen.

And these impacts, which we have heard from our scientists, we've heard traditions, is turning out to be sooner, stronger, and more widespread than we would have hoped.

This graphic here, the carbon tunnel vision, I think is really important to keep in mind as well.

While we are focusing on, for instance, how we deal with carbon emissions, there's a bunch of these other intersecting issues that are coming up.

And so we can't just have tunnel vision about climate solutions as in we've got to reduce our carbon emissions.

These impacts are kicking off all kinds of other first or second or third or impacts, having grappled as well.

And there's a lot of learning around everything around that circle that needs to happen.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, one of them, number 13, is about climate action.

But you can make a very good case of climate action, truly intersects with every single other one of these sustainable development goals.

So when we think about the benefits of climate action, it's really furthering everything around this square or circle from the UNSBG.

Specifically, why open in this work?

Hopefully, we're familiar with the 5Rs, the licensing and the practices enabled to retain, to redistribute, to reuse, to revise, and to remix these open learning, open education materials for all kinds of other uses.

I think of a nutshell, access for all, building equity and inclusion so that the learning is relevant to people no matter what their context.

And to do this with great speed and at great scale, all sorts of scales.

These are the kinds of things that open enables that are just essential for doing this rapid response to climate.

And I want to make the call that what we need for open practices is to build a to gray that's kindergarten to elders, climate literacy.

You know, you've got to reach all these ages now. Many of us are involved, for instance, in higher educational institutions.

We've got a particular focus on our students and with good reason.

But many of us also have these other positions in our communities.

Our schools are doing continuing education for adults. We've got programs reaching to younger learners.

We've got to reach not just the students that we have right now, but their parents.

Workers will all strice up through the professional level.

And frankly, citizens and the civic leaders need to be reached with this material as well too.

Nobody, well, not very few people study this when they're in school.

We've got to reach older people as well as the younger folks.

And to reach them not only with the facts, but also the framings and the mindsets that are attached to these things are just as important as the facts.

Because those cover the facts and how the facts play out.

And these open practices are also, I think, going to be really important for everyone, everyone across all of these ages,

to keep pace with the rapidly emerging knowledge that will be coming up in this unprecedented crisis.

So I want to reflect on specifically around open education, the three dimensions that I think are particularly perfect.

Content, communities, and way to find them.

I'll start with content. And I'll speak from that place that I know best.

Open learning at MIT and MIT Open.

These are materials that we've got from MIT OpenCourseWare, for instance.

These are materials that kind of come from an academic context from the MIT classroom.

And we've got about 200 courses spanning all disciplines, I think you can say, are about climate change.

They're available on the MIT OpenCourseWare website.

The video's out on our YouTube channel and so forth.

So hopefully among that half a billion people that we've reached at this point in our two decades of operation,

a lot of them are not only learning how to write programming in Python, for most part, to their course,

but are also starting to pick up on some of this stuff.

Ripley, how beyond what we do at OpenCourseWare, we're truly part of a broader community at MIT,

which is taking this seriously, helping it off the ground about 10 years ago, kind of a more general audience,

but also openly licensed set of materials for people who aren't looking for the rigorous academic take on things,

but give me something I can read in a minute to learn about scope-three emissions.

Who knows about scope-three emissions?

It's pretty wonky. It's really, really important.

There's a one-page explainer about scope-three emissions on the MIT Climate Portal.

There's a wonderful interactive climate primer written by World's foremost authorities on hurricanes,

but also just a really sharp thinker about climate change.

A podcast, you know, distilling some of these topics into like 10 to 15-minute bites,

with an accompanying educator guide to bring these podcasts and make them relevant to your classrooms.

And one of my favorite functions on this portal, ask MIT climate.

Submit your question, and we'll hook up somebody who's kind of a trusted expert in this thing to provide that answer.

And through, especially through asking MIT climate, we're discovering how important it is to kind of meet people

at the point where they're curious, where their questions are.

You know, these are very powerful gateways into hopefully what becomes a more rigorous, more extensive, you know,

ongoing learning point that these general audience points were seeing really, really valuable

and complementary to the sort of classic OER framework.

And that's not all. We're continuing to, at MIT, produce other sorts of curricular materials for other audiences.

Younger folks, there was a day of AI program that did professional development

and kind of concise module of things around artificial intelligence a couple of years ago.

They are now pivoting to focus increasingly on climate change.

We've got a new high school curriculum where MIT basically just held the space for some high school educators

from around Massachusetts who are really committed to this and worked with them, recommended some resources,

ways they might think about it, but really just held the space for them to create this curriculum,

called CATE, Climate Action Through Education, it's available for free and it's created commons licensed.

And last but not least, this Climate Justice Instructional Toolkit.

Purpose-built modules to bring into an infuser curriculum across a wide range of disciplines,

some slides, some teacher guides, some student resources as well.

We want everybody to be making use of these open education materials in whatever forms you're working.

So that's a lot that we've got going on at MIT and with all the humility, we can come close to cover all the needs that are out there.

For instance, I was thrilled to learn recently in coming to this conference that there is a new open textbook

focused on climate change for lawyers and what the legal profession needs to be.

This one specifically focused on the Australian context.

I just learned outside that there's another one.

Sweden, yeah.

So these things are continually proliferating, how great that is.

Topical deep dives. Stanford University a number of years ago produced this open access free online resource called

Understanding Energy Energy. I think because of the power of open education practices and licensing,

at the end of August, they put a Creative Commons license on this thing.

It's now in the OER Commons.

A wonderful resource.

Case study libraries from the University of Michigan program that they're holding,

they're inviting other people in and how powerful case studies are as a learning mode.

And other forms of producing modular curriculum.

In the spirit of that like MIT-K curriculum, but the wonderful K-12 focused subject climate project

is producing these lesson plans specifically on particular topics to be flown into a particular class.

Again, this is pretty K-12 focused, but the landscape of content produced through OER lenses is expanding dramatically.

And that is so, so great to see. This is what we need.

Also growing are more interactive forms of resources.

I want to encourage us to think as expansively as possible about what OER is here.

I've got two programs that are doing things that are very interactive based on simulations and models.

On the left, climate interactive, it's En-Rowde's model, which is very focused on understanding solutions.

Got 18 policy levers you can play with and see what its impacts are.

And a great global facilitation network help bring these things into whatever context you're working in.

Probable futures are a little more focused on the impacts, really rich, and you can zoom way in and see the specific place where you live

and who you care about and on different climate change pathways and what it's going to look like.

It was just announced this morning, hit my inbox.

There's a collaboration between probable futures and climate interactive. What a surprise.

So the probable futures impact helps you now being integrated into the climate interactive tool.

So collaborations based on these resources are the kind of thing we need to see.

So a lot is happening with content.

But it's also, we've learned very clearly that you can't just build it and hope people will come.

The way the communities are building up around content is really, really important as well.

I want to shout out the OEG Global Award winner from I think it was 2020, the UN SDG Open Pedagogy Fellowship.

I know those of you who might be newer to the open ed space, please check this out.

What they've done, bringing together instructors from across disciplines and across institutions to work together.

And this is all done through open pedagogy framing.

So the students are under teaching guidance, creating these wonderful resources and there's now a repository of non-disposable assignments.

In other words, the work that the students have done has been shared back into the content as a ripple of the community that was built up through this wonderful program.

Another community-oriented program that's, yes, there's some OER involved, but also the community is what's really making it click.

The Office of Climate Education, which is a UNESCO affiliated program, as a program that's been thus far focused in Central and South America called ALEC.

They pulled together over a thousand educators to work with the sort of like core materials that they produced as OER.

You know, they sort of open textbooks and videos, but localized them into specific communities and concepts.

And they're just finishing up their initial pilot phase and great report about how the community is putting the OER, the content, into practice and situating it in these local contexts.

Really like hopeful for the path that this shows forward, what could be possible when you not only invest in the content, but the community as well.

I'll ask just a little bit more.

I'm kind of a fan of this project, second time I'll mention, subject to climate.

Not only are they producing content, but they've assembled this community of educators who are reviewing and vetting the contributions that go into the repository.

They're supporting teachers to build content, to kind of fill in gaps in going into the United States, state by state, building support to infuse climate into these --

into the state curricular.

So not suddenly for just, hey, here's some OER, have fun with it, but putting it into practice, we're just learning again and again how much can get done through this.

Last, but not least in the content front, I think this is the last front, the work that Wikimedia is doing more broadly in putting content in the places where people are.

I'm going to Google search.

This is where I'm going to find the material, right?

And the way that the community around Wikimedia makes this happen, it keeps it up to date, is just so important and so vibrant.

I love this end of year report that they posted.

It just goes on and on and on with the wonderful projects that are happening in different spaces, all made possible by the community that's been built up here.

So then on to Wayfinding, having built all this stuff and having communities who know what's happening, putting it into place.

What about those of us who are just trying to get our bearings and figure out a path?

A lot of work, I think, needs to be done here.

We're starting to see it take shape, but I think this is in particular part of the next way.

A great appreciation for what OER Commons has been trying to get off the ground. A couple years ago, they created a climate education hub and started assembling things through the library and minded folks on their team and inviting a curation group into the process as well.

Pulling things from OER Commons, if they think are relevant, and segmenting it by different topics and different academic levels, is a great place to start.

If you're interested in contributing to this work, join in.

The climate curation working group is an open thing. It's pretty small right now, but we're standing here for some more energy.

I want to note the emergence of several of these. They're not quite OER yet, but if you set aside whether the license thing is there, try to move in this direction as well.

Kind of syllabus for posatory-ish things around public health, around social sciences, around business.

Three programs have decided to hear that Johns Hopkins, Brown University, and Columbia University of the United States are holding, they're all moving in really interesting, colorful directions.

I want to drill in on what the business community at Columbia is doing, because it's got an AI ankle on it.

I want to touch on AI as a way of finding. Can't not mention this. AI, in many important ways, is going to become the intermediary for how people take in new knowledge over the next few years.

How do we make this more trusted and functional for climate? I think there's an important role for what we are pulling together as climate OER to be put to good use.

I don't think we quite know what that is, but we've got people who are working hard on it.

Appreciation for what Creative Commons is doing around things like this preference signaling framework.

If you care about this, you can learn more about Creative Commons preference signaling work.

They're doing some blog posts and one of the workshops. I think that's going to set a very important frame for how trusted climate information gets pulled into these AI tools and is traceable back to it.

I want to note quickly a couple of examples. This is the Columbia University Business School.

It's a world-of-the-climate curriculum. They've got a new climate TA, which you can do three things with it.

You can ask it to create a syllabus around a set of topics. You can ask it to update the syllabus that I've got right now.

I want to tweak it in one way. You've got the advice for me and help me find materials in this combination of chat, GPT, and a kind of a tuned search engine that they've built into it.

Super early stage, but they're very open to hearing feedback. In two weeks, I've got a call for them because there's no terms of use yet on this side.

I want to talk to them about how I was going to create a currency.

Another model that's kind of more general-purpose, chat GPT-like, but this is built on a open source under the hood called climate GPT.

It's an interesting thing where it does perspective taking. Here's my general answer to the question you asked me.

Help me drill down from an economic or a science perspective. The tool is making really interesting progress here. This team is doing a lot of work getting this tool visible to global leaders.

Their lead person has been to Davos. I've come from here. I've got to hang out in those circles. We've got to reach.

Again, K to grade includes the people who go to Davos.

I want to close with a brief reflection on, we're focused on open education here, just how important some of these adjacencies are with other things in the broader open context.

The open climate campaign is a really important example here of applying pressure, support for all those who are trying to drive the research agenda to get this stuff opened in a more open form.

We heard Edmonton is around the launch of this campaign, but less than half of the research around climate change is openly licensed. That's got to change.

There's a curriculum, Creative Commons is kicked off on open climate data, specifically best data practices.

That feels really important. So much of the education work we do is drawing from what's coming out from research, except that that research is openly available and will help us all the way along.

I also want to acknowledge the really important breathing between Western knowledge practices, research and data, and indigenous knowledge practices and data.

I'm housed last year, last October at the Center for Braiding Indigenous Sciences and Sciences, and climate change is one of its pillars.

This is a big project with more than 30 different institutions, mostly around North America, but not entirely. Mostly people who are indigenous themselves, but also people who are working in this space.

Over the next couple of years, we'll be seeing a lot more of this project and thinking about how to grade the knowledge practices between Western open ed perspectives and indigenous practices, and especially how that's going to play in climate and food security.

Stay tuned. I bet we're going to be talking about this in 2026 and came to terms.

With regards to open publishing, there are folks who are working on different publishing models that are more directly open.

Shout out to my colleagues at MIT Press for the books that they're publishing under an open license.

There's a long list of climate books that are open, you know, open licensed. You can download, use for free journals that are open access as well that they train and publish.

And new publishing models that will help, kind of in the spirit of the open preprint stuff that grew up around COVID, to help things like the climate researchers do a more effective job.

I look forward to that continued development.

And the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations, five meetings happen right now, and there are open people who are there under the guise of an open-goes cop trying to make the case that open practices need to be broken through

all of the work that's going on around the global response to climate, drawing from the data that's being drawn upon, the research that's being published.

So I'm thrilled to know that this is happening again. It's not Davos Quaint, but it's Davos Light. I must finish.

I wanted to close, you know, with a story about what open can do. A number of years ago I got involved with this nonprofit in Massachusetts called HEAT, H-E-E-T.

They got really concerned about the E-T fossil gas infrastructure. They publicly accessible map, gave their way to the world for all the gas leaks that have been around for years that people aren't fixing.

One thing led to another, and they said, you know, that's really important thing to fix, but there's a much bigger thing we could be doing about, it's been billions of dollars for the year, fixing the leaky gas infrastructure and perpetuating it.

So there's a technology, so it's that technology, they're known as sort of shallow geothermal or network geothermal, browser, seed pumps. It's never really been brought to bear here. It's kind of underappreciated.

So they kicked off a process as we had open course where we were working with them on hand, sharing a hackathon about the gas leaks thing, about pushing in this direction.

And they pulled together an amazing community that's having these ripples that are coming from the open practice.

So these co-creation design surets that pull together researchers, the public utilities, the policy makers, the labor unions and so forth to come together and solve for this together.

Sharing an opening on, for instance, open education resource, also an open resource library.

And he was really clear from the beginning, I got to help them take the license for this library, that they wanted this stuff to not only be open access, but to be released with a license because they wanted it to have that kind of five-hours impact.

So lo and behold, as they were going through initial pilot tests in Framingham, Massachusetts, and Boston, this network geothermal first in the country utility run pilot program, the World Bank was thinking about, as the country of Ukraine emerges from the destruction they're going through, they're going to have to rebuild their infrastructure.

They learned about this open resource library that he did put up. And because it was open license, they set their team on a track like, "What's the point of everything we can about this?"

And they're now working on a program to put that way to Ukraine, well, a whole bunch of other countries that are trying to do some elite fraud, renewable energy deployments around the world.

And a delegation from Ukraine visited the pilot site in Framingham last month to learn about how this works.

This was all kicked off because of the open practices and the open licensing that EAT were able to work with them on to put out.

And then this is going to continue to go.

So, we're going to close with two calls to action.

One of my favorite charts, visuals around this work.

This is a climate-themed diagram from Elizabeth Iana Johnson. She's a climate scientist, read by Lois Bountrain.

And think about the intersection of what are you good at, what work means doing, and what brings you joy.

And then we can all find at least one, maybe a long list of things that are in that intersection.

So, check this out and think about this. Bring this into your community and see what it might come up to.

I bet in this community, among the things that what are we good at, what work means doing, what brings us joy.

There's things around open content, open communities, open wayfinding, and we can all get up to together.

And to get up to together, I'd like to invite you to express your interest and help me follow up with you

and help us follow up with each other together.

I'll have an express your interest on this quick little Google form, you know, name, email, and a couple of quick questions just to understand what you're looking for.

And I look forward to getting this off the ground. We have a lot of important work to do and I can't wait to do it with you.

Thank you.

[Applause]

Alright.

Twenty-eight minutes.

[Laughter]

Any questions? Catch me there.

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