BCcampus Festival of Learning 2018

Every couple of years, BCcampus organizes a Festival of Learning, a large gathering of people who come together for sessions on educational technology, open education, scholarly approaches to teaching and learning, and more.  There was an open education ethics session held at the 2018 Festival of Learning, May 28-30, 2018, in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Title: How to ruin an open education initiative at your institution

Abstract:

What does it take to ruin an open education initiative at your institution? How can you ensure that everything you have worked hard for fails and you end up supporting a closed system?

In this session, participants will actively engage in dissecting what it would take to ruin an open education movement at an institution. Facilitators will host an unconventional, interactive format that will have participants talking, brainstorming, and supporting each other as they discussion the challenges of open education at an institutional level.

Participants will have the opportunity to take these lessons learned from outlining how to ruin an open education initiative and then work in groups to flip the conversation to creating processes to work towards a successful open education initiative. This session is an opportunity for participants to critically reflect on the open education movement across BC and in particular at an institutional level.

Facilitators: Amanda Coolidge, Rajiv Jhangiani, Rosario Passos.
The session used the TRIZ format, as many other sessions in this series have done. This means that the discussion was guided by a series of questions that invited participants to think about a worst case scenario, what they might be doing that resembles that, and then how to stop doing those things. Participants broke into small groups to discuss each of the questions.
This session was somewhat different than the others in this series in that the focus was not on the open education movement generally, but rather on open education initiatives at particular institutions, and how they might go well or badly. This session also did not have virtual participants, as some of the other sessions have.
Questions asked:
  1. How can you ensure that you destroy the open education initiative at your institution?
  2. What things is your institution doing that resemble, in any way, the list we just created?
  3. How are you going to stop doing these things? What are the first steps?

Please see the session notes on a google doc for how the small groups answered these questions during the session.


Suggested citation for this post (APA style):

Hendricks, C. (2018, August 6). Festival of Learning: How to ruin an open education initiative at your institution. Open Education Ethics. Retrieved from https://blogs.ubc.ca/openeducationethics/2018/08/06/bccampus-festival-of-learning/

 

CC Global Summit 2018

An open education ethics workshop was held at the Creative Commons Global Summit, April 13-15, 2018 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Title: How might we destroy the open education movement? An interactive discussion about ethics, inclusion, and equity.

Abstract:

Openness is a process that requires and benefits from critical reflection. In this interactive session, participants will unearth and critically explore places of discord and incongruence between the practices of the OEM [open education movement] and CC community and their values/philosophy/ethos, including those of diversity, inclusivity, and equity. The session format supports both in-person and virtual (online) attendees. The artifacts produced during the session will be shared afterwards so that others may use them to reflect and contribute to an ongoing conversation about the CC community, inclusivity, and ethics.

Facilitators: Claire Coulter, Helen DeWaard, Terry Greene, Jenni Hayman, and Rajiv Jhangiani.

The format was similar to the Open Education 2017 conference session, but without there being virtual participants–the participants were only those who were onsite in the room. Using the TRIZ format, the facilitators engaged participants in discussing three questions, designed to elicit worst case scenarios, what is happening that somewhat resembles that/could lead to that, and then what can be done to stop moving towards that unwanted end.

Questions asked:

  1. If we were invested in ensuring Open Education is not open, what actions would we take?
  2. What things are we doing that resembles, in any way, the list we just created? Be unforgiving!
  3. How are we going to stop doing these things? What are the first steps? Be as concrete as you can!

Please see the notes from the session, providing participants’ answers to these questions.


Suggested citation for this post (APA style):

Hendricks, C. (2018, August 6). CC Global Summit 2018: How might we destroy the open education movement? Open Education Ethics. Retrieved from https://blogs.ubc.ca/openeducationethics/2018/08/06/cc-global-summit-2018/

OER18 and OEglobal 2018

A group of people (see list below) facilitated conversations around “Breaking Open” at the OER18 conference and again at the OE Global 2018 conference. Most information about these sessions can be found on a post on the Towards-Openness site; here is a brief overview.

These sessions focused on issues around equity and inclusion, specifically trying to include voices from the Global South. The blog post some of the facilitators wrote for the OER18 conference provides some background on the kinds of questions we were raising, as well as one overall, provocative question:

How do we use openness to exclude, overpower and/or oppress marginalized individuals, communities, knowledge systems?
Continue reading “OER18 and OEglobal 2018”

Open Education 2017: How can we destroy the open education movement?

How can we destroy the open education movement? Conversations about ethics

OpenEd17: The 14th Annual Open Education Conference, October 11 – 13, 2017, Anaheim, CA

Abstract

Openness is a process that requires and benefits from critical reflection. We believe that facilitating and stimulating critical discussion/debate about the contours and direction of the open education movement (OEM) is essential to its flourishing. In this spirit, the proposed session is intended as a space for participants to unearth and critically explore timely, perhaps uncomfortable questions that may not be at the surface of what we are doing as individuals or as collaborators within the OEM. The facilitators in this session do not have answers. Rather, we host an unconventional, interactive format designed to expose difficult topics and support innovative interventions. The session format supports both in-person and remote (online) attendees working together on outlining and discussing pressing ethical questions in the OEM. This session allows participants to engage in a critical conversation that is liberating, paradigm challenging, constructive, and inspiring.

Continue reading “Open Education 2017: How can we destroy the open education movement?”

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