After almost 5 and a half years, today I am leaving my post at Glasgow Caledonian University to start a new phase of both my professional and personal life. I have decided to rethink my work life balance. I want to have time for my more creative, artistic pursuits, so in order to do that I am going to now work as a freelance educational consultant.
I’m delighted that my first contract in this new phase of my career/life is with the University of Edinburgh, in their DLAS (distance learning at scale) project, where I’m working on staff development course for staff new to teaching online. I’ll still be continuing in my role as Chair of ALT, so I am not disappearing. I will of course, continue to post to this blog. #spoiler- there maybe a little change in the layout over the next week or so. And look out for another site with some of my artwork too.
Quick post around my first twitter conference – PressEdConf19. I’ve just done my 15 minute presentation slot. For someone who has quite a track record of tweeting (45.5k and counting) sending those 15 was surprisingly nerve wracking. It was a bit like tweeting into the void, no questions but lots of RTs which I am taking as “a good thing”.
So if you missed the session you can relive it all in the twitter moment below .
#OER 19 the conference that, according to the welcome message in the programme “goes beyond hero narratives”. I wasn’t exactly sure what that the conference co-chairs Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz actually meant by that phrase when I read it, but now a few days after the conference I think I do.
The stories I heard, the narratives were not of the great, I am, look and me and do what I do kind. They were diverse, challenging, not perfectly boxed solutions. They were the narratives of humanity, the narratives of the forgotten and the unrepresented, the narratives of critical hope.
We couldn’t have asked for a better opening keynote than the one given by Kate Bowles. Kate threw her questioning, porous, complex quilt of the current state of education over Galway and so the stage was set for two days of untangling and re-tangling of the threads that bind us together.
Su-Ming Khoo’s keynote recentred us through her stories of culturally repairing pedagogies from the Raven creation myth to post WW1 facial surgery, to our current state of colonial entanglement. We cannot mask the past to make it tolerable, we need to make our repairs visible, to heal in the open. To gain inspiration from the Japanese art of Kinstugi – the art of the ‘golden repair’.
Both Kate and Su highlighted that they didn’t consider themselves part of the open community. I hope they do now. Their open-ness and generosity of thought, care and criticality are at what lie at the heart of open education in my book. They may not be researching open in the way that the keynote panel of Taskeen Adams, Caroline Kuhn and Judith Pete are (I have to say that their panel was one of the most considered, diverse and yet cohesive I have ever seen), but they are definitely part of what I consider the open community to be.
The open community and open practice is a wide beach. One where I find my waves of open practice reaching at times fast and furious at others slow and shallow. I always know how to find that beach.
There was much talk about what exactly are the boundaries, the visible and invisible stitches that make up the quilt of openness. Trying to recenter myself after the conference I truly believe that is is us, the people, the community who are the open stitches. We share(d) our wounds, we healed, we laughed, we gave each other hope. As Kate Bowles reminded us of the words of Henry Giroux who said hope must be tempered by complex reality. I think that summed up my experience at the conference.
From finding some creative time with Amy Burvall and Bryan Mathers to make a “zine” which was full of hope;
to being in a room where it was standing room only to hear more about the emerging open space of the #femedtech community; to realising that at Una Daly and Jenni Hayman’s session around creating communities that I, and many others make and contribute to communities around, under, above, around about the formal structures of our institutions; to being transported to Big Learning in the Northern Territories by Johanna Funk; to the fabulous once-upon-an-open tale from Sarah Thomas, I found myself making visible and invisible stitches with everyone around me.
I was struck by the number of people I spoke to at the conference who said they didn’t really think they “did open” ( to paraphrase) but were finding themselves reflecting that many of the sessions they went to were resonating with their own practice. I remember at my #oer15 keynote, I encouraged delegates to be more open about calling themselves open practitioners. We still need that today. If we don’t talk more openly about open in our day to day practice then we really are hiding in plain sight.
Open education can help us to make those golden repairs visible in our ever increasingly complex educational environment, but only if we keep telling and sharing our stories, keep participating and challenging the complex spaces we all inhabit and in turn providing hope for a better future for everyone.
How do we mediate our place in the open community, aspects of which might conflict with our personal ethics?
This is one of the questions in the #openspaces session at #oer19 this week. I don’t know about you but my open practice is always a bit of a juggling act. Questions of how much can I share, where should I share it constantly running around my brain.
As you know, dear reader, I recently wrote a book (with Keith Smyth and Bill Johnston). Open education is a big part of the book, but the book itself isn’t available openly. I wish it was.
That was, and continues to be a struggle in terms of my own ethics and practice. However, we couldn’t afford to make it open access, we didn’t have research/institutional funding to do that. What we did have was interest from a reputable publisher and that academic pressure (probably self inflicted) to get a decent publication. We do highlight in the book the irony of writing about openness in a non open way, and we are also working on a couple of open access papers right now to make more of our thinking available. In fact, I have decided only to write any follow up articles for open access journals now.
Is that a cop out or just part and parcel of my continuing negotiation with openness? Hopefully something to pick up at the session later this week.
This post is cross posted from the Open Spaces site.
