start recording the session. Okay. Thank you. So hi everyone. So I'm really, really totally delighted to welcome you to this amazing four person keynote. My name is Suman Koo and I'm going to pass straight ahead to the keynote speakers in the order of Maron, Francis, Amri and then Tannis to introduce themselves. Not that they really need any introduction because they are extremely famous as it is. Thank you very much and hello everybody. It's great to be here at O Global today and I'm waving to you from Akkadiff in Wales in the UK. My name is Maron Deepwell and I'm the Chief Executive of the Association for Learning Technology and we also organised the OER conference and I've seen many familiar faces here so thrilled to be here. Hi. My name's Francis Bell. I'm actually sitting in our summer house which was renamed as Femed Tech Quilt HQ over the summer so it's quite nice to know I've got the quilt not too far away from me. I retired as an Information Systems Teacher, Researcher and Postgraduate Programme Leader in 2013 which seems a long time ago and since then I've been a co-founder of Femed Tech and I've done some research and scholarship in informal open education and the role of platforms and I'm going to post a document link in the chat where you can pick up some links that we've gathered for this session today. Okay. Okay. Hello everybody. I'm Ann Marie Scott. I am the Deputy Provost at Athabasca University in Canada and for those of you who haven't heard of Athabasca though I suspect some in OER Global will have, we're Canada's largest open university. I think we would describe ourselves as Canada's open university. For those who aren't that familiar, roughly analogous to the open university of the UK though obviously working in quite a different context and I am personally based in British Columbia on unceded First Nations lands. My institution is based in, in, notionally in Athabasca but in several locations in Alberta which is one province over from here. We are a remote and distributed open organization and many of you will recognise I'm not a native Canadian prior to joining Athabasca which I did in January of this year so I've had quite the interesting induction to my new institution. I was at the University of Edinburgh for many years where I suspect the number of you might I'll pass with it to Tannis. Good morning everybody or good afternoon or good evening. My name is Tannis Morgan and I'm located in Vancouver Canada on the unceded territories of the Squamish, the Slewa Tooth and the Musqueam First Nations where I am an uninvited settler. I'm an advisor and open education researcher at BC campus which works with 25 post-secondary institutions in British Columbia Canada and I've been involved in open education since about 2002 but I do work very much at the intersection of distance education, educational technology and open education as well so thank you. So that's a really great opening for I think a really collaborative conversational kind of keynote, very special. So maybe I see that Maha has posted whether we can share this on Twitter and besides the document link that Francis has shared perhaps we could also have the hashtag which is open ed ethical futures I think. Is it futures or future in? I'll check. Yeah yeah okay Francis if you can just pop that in the chat as well then people can follow on Twitter. So maybe just too well Francis doing that we'll just come back to Marin then and just to sort of open the context for us a bit by reflecting a bit on how this very unusual year has shaped the thinking behind this four-person keynote. Well hey lots have changed in this past year and you know I'm very mindful that while we're all coming together here it's not as planned and none of the things that we've been really undertaking this year has been as planned and now I represent a community in the UK of a couple of thousands of professionals who work in education and learning technology and all of them have been in emergency response situations since March trying very hard to do whatever they can to continue our work and do support students parents fellow academics and institutions. So I think up to this year I never quite knew what a learning technology emergency would be like and I used to joke that there's no need to put my phone number on the website because no one ever needed to get hold of me this urgently and this year I really found out what an emergency crisis for our profession really looked like and it's been it's been really humbling to see the response and one of the things that I wanted to contribute today was to highlight the work of some of the community that I represent around an open pledge for education in the times of COVID and this isn't my piece of work this is done largely by other people and I'm going to put a link to it in the chat message as well. The group of people who've been working on this have been led by Helen Beatham who's been doing astounding work reaching out to policymakers, institutions and individuals to support this pledge and some of the real key points is really to think about what research data and practice we could make openly available in order to enable other institutions to cope in the current crisis but also so that we can get a better picture of how the crisis is impacting on different groups of people different communities and that is where the data sharing point really came in. So my organization the Association for Learning Technology supported the launch of this pledge and thus far I think it has gained well over 200 signatories and from very global set of education and open education institutions and I'd really like to invite you if you haven't come across it to have a look at it to see if this could be useful in your context. I appreciate it might not be a perfect response for everyone in every context as this has been such a challenging and in different ways challenging time for everyone but I feel it's made a really big step in the right direction here in the UK highlighting to our policymakers and our institutions that's really open approaches that will help us through these times and help us find a response. So I think we're going to leave it there and yeah that's what I wanted to highlight for my first contribution. Yeah I might just invite any responses from Francis or Tannis or Anne-Marie if you'd like to respond to what Marin's just said. Yes it could I do that. Go for it Francis you first. Okay well I sort of could imagine some of the things that Marin was going to say and it's fantastic to celebrate the brilliant work done by learning technologists and particularly by all since with the COVID pledge which is a great piece of work so I tried to think of some things that might be complementary to that. So two things that have really struck me about and I was thinking about COVID-19 is something that is beginning to make its way into the media now and that's the tendency for existing structural inequalities such as race, class and gender. It's becoming pretty clear that they're reinforced in the health and economic effects of the pandemic and I'm going to talk about Bray Dottie later on but as she said that the reliance for the technology that's contributed to the current situation in some ways to be positioned as an unproblematic solution. I'm not saying that learning technologists are doing that but some other people in education are doing it and I think that applies to track and trace, to vaccines and to education particularly higher education that you know it's almost like the technology has seen like a knight on a white charger coming to save us and I personally don't think that's a particularly helpful approach. Well we'll come back here to Francis in a minute but yeah Anne-Marie please. Yeah no no I think I was going to say something very similar to Francis around you know if this year has done nothing for me it's reinforced all the ways in which technology is not the answer and I am a learning technologist in a senior position in a fully online digital university so I'm maybe not the person who would think so you will say technology is not the answer but we are you know 11 months into this now or 11 months into this year maybe nine months into the most extreme end of this pandemic and the kickback I think we're seeing now against particularly Zoom particularly remote proctoring and you know Zoom being shorthand for many online conferencing systems this large-scale instrumentalist rollout of technology that we did with a kind of knee jerk reaction in many cases we've really built a large-scale experiment that reinforces everything we know to be true about learning technology which is we haven't started with people their material circumstances their skills their literacies and then built our technology choices out from there and I think in doing that we haven't really thought about the kind of education system we want to see we've tried to build in many cases a quick digital effect similarly of a campus-based education and those of us who work in online distance open know all the reasons why that's a bad idea and so as Francis has said all of the issues around equity inclusion and care have just been written large and and it's a lot of it is now starting to get quite difficult and some of it quite nasty and we may touch on some of that in a little while but I think we've forgotten the effect that campuses have this sort of levelling effect and and now we're having to deal with the real material circumstances of a lot of our students and a lot of our staff and we've been able to be a little blind to that and I think it's really um it's really highlighted that for us this year so and as somebody who's had to do all of this at a completely new institution I think I would also say kindness and grace have been my my fallbacks this year nothing we can do is good enough we are going to fail so you know rather than technology as the as the silver bullets I think kindness and grace are our silver bullets this year forgiveness okay yeah I know we're we're eating to the next section but Tannis you've been nodding your head and I really want to give you the opportunity to I'm just showing I'm still awake okay no no I don't have much too much to add other than I I think for for me this year it was really I was reminded a lot about old school distance education and partly because I think of many of things that it's already been said but I think here in British Columbia the crisis really exposed a level of reliance on public wi-fi and it exposed in Canada we have a urban versus I guess remote or rural kind of divide and we've known this for a long time but I think we maybe had some blinders on in terms of what access really is like for people in rural and remote communities in Canada and I think that this really exposed just how even in urban areas access has become I guess a little more fragile than what we were designing around and so on more than one occasion I have wondered whether mailing out packages in some respects is actually not only a nice alternative to zoom but you know why did we completely get rid of that I think I've been asking that question a lot when clearly we still have some you know significant access issues okay just to circle back then to Francis maybe and to revisit the theme of this particular keynote session which is on you know open ed and and ethical futures because you're reflecting a bit on maybe traditions and you know constant concerns so maybe just to think a little bit about that whole topic Francis and this theme of ethical futures and how you might like to make some remarks about that yes yes I would I'm not coming up with any answers I'm afraid but I've done a lot of thinking about it over the last few weeks and I think it's an excellent topic for us to be looking at so as I said before and I've included the reference to the book in the in the document link document of links that we've got is I've been reading very slowly I have to say Rosie Bray Dottie's book on post-human knowledge and I found it really useful if quite a challenge at times and so I was thinking about one of the hopes that I have for the future at Femme Edsett and elsewhere of exploring alternative ethical approaches so not coming up with a right answer and ways of looking at problems so in the in this book that I've been reading by Rosie Bray Dottie the book post-human knowledge she's saying that the human has become de-centred and that non-life what she calls Zoe is now the driving concept and I always found I was quite resistant to that but over the last couple of years I can see more of things that I can see happening that we really do need to look at the post-human and the non-human aspects of this and I have got a paper that was published by Bray Dottie at the end of August this year where she applies her ideas from the book to COVID-19 and it's called the papers called we are in this together but we are not one and the same and I think that's just really does fit in with what we've been talking about over the last few minutes and how are we not the same is something to look at so but also she sensibly points out that now may not be the time for theorizing about this because we're in the middle of it all and it's very painful what she recommends is collective mourning effective resistance and regeneration so that sounds like to me like a better thing than perhaps talking a lot about theories even if meanwhile we're trying to read about them but you know aren't necessarily ready to prescribe any theories so she exhausts us to develop ways of caring and she calls this a more transversal relational ethics and I know that Anne-Marie talked about that in a webinar that she had last week or the week before and we've already looked at the ethics of care in Femme EdTech but I do think that we can also look at Bray Dottie's work so and I just wondered if anybody else had anything to say on that I've got stuff to say about the quilt if you haven't got anything to say about that I think I would just jump in Francis and say that the point about theorizing is super interesting there's practical responses required right now rather than native ways of doing but for somebody who's made a jump to a completely different context I can't I also can't carry on blindly and just do what I would have done with my gut instinct because a lot is new to me so there's that kind of tension in there as well and your point about care being careful is important as well it's a real interesting line to walk yeah well I say something about the quilt yeah so yeah I just thought I'd share some thoughts about the the quilt and I think most of you many of you will probably know about it was a wonderful global project that collided with COVID-19 so it wasn't a COVID-19 quilt of which there are some but it was being completed as COVID-19 came to us and I think many people took comfort in their experiences makers or viewers of the material quilt and it has an online presence thanks to Anne-Marie at quilt.femmedtech.net slash quilt and I'll post that link as well but some of the themes that Bray Dottie explores are present in the quilt so the experience and knowing of Indigenous peoples the open movement in Africa but was struck by something that Ruth D'Souza said in a webinar related to a COVID-19 quilt in Australia and whilst she was celebrating the opportunities offered by craftivism she also questioned the nature of participation participation in art activism quilts like the current quilts and the AIDS quilts where the representation of victims doesn't actually match the demographic outcomes and also she questioned whose artwork is visible and valued and I'll share you a link to to her part of that webinar. Thanks very much I think it's really the amazing project and it's super inspiring but just to maybe come back to the theme more generally and how we've been relating to it maybe in person and things that Marin said you know how do we make the connection between these values in general and ethical questions that we are coming up for us and you know commitments which are maybe to those values in a more systemic way and yeah so maybe I might invite Tannis to speak a little bit about systemic commitments and and her thoughts and then maybe Anne-Marie might like also to answer. Wow well I mean I should mention that we did have some discussion about the word ethics as it is as well and and just how relational and subjective it actually is so I'll just maybe somebody else can pick up that thread but in terms of I guess ethical futures which is the theme of this session I really would like to replace that with alternate futures and and for me that's really come from the situation the context where I am in Canada and British Columbia where we are in a truth and reconciliation process addressing you know colonial harms and thinking and reflecting as we should be about how that fits into our work in higher education institutions and so I think that's it's been a really you know there's a lot to unpack there but I think one of the things that I've found really helpful is of course you know the social justice work that's been done around reframing open education from a social justice lens the work Cheryl Hodgkinson and Henry Trotter and Sarah Lambert and others as well and and also in the context of Canada taking that a little bit further perhaps into you know what decoloniality looks like and so for myself I find myself really looking towards examples of that what is what is transformative or radical reform look like what are the examples in open education where we actually see that and maybe I'll just stop there but that's what the alternative futures I think the alternate futures are really coming I think from observing these radical reform or transformative type efforts that maybe come from outside of our own sphere because of course sometimes we have to look much further beyond that does maybe Anne-Marie would you like to comment some on that as well coming from the Canadian yeah now I think for me I see a danger point I mean I think it's been there for quite a long time anyway but it's going to it's going to bite a little harder and you know we're in a recession and it's going to a global recession and it's going to take quite a while to dig our way back out of it and certainly in western western plus Australia anglophone countries perhaps you know with this this marketization of education and competition between universities is going to manifest itself I mean it has been already manifesting itself in terms of wanting a share of the indigenous education market whatever that means more indigenous students participating in education but I think I think austerity and recession are going to drive that more and again where we're perhaps seeing less movement of students internationally it's going to be a perhaps seen as a way of you know maintaining numbers and we know that that's deeply problematic already and so I have some of the same concerns as as Tannis does about the extent to which we are um truly looking outside of the academy and are willing to change the academy in order to accommodate different types of learners and coming from an open university you know we have a very diverse I'm going to say non-traditional set of learners already and and I you know are we in a good position to do that you know it's work that every institution is is doing at the moment so I think there's there's there's a danger point coming and we need to be thinking about how to make systemic changes in our institution to make sure that we don't do harm in this next period and that are what drives us is right some of the other things and this is work I've been doing for a few years and there was an excellent article on inside higher education last week by Bonnie Stewart which is calling for a ramping up of this kind of work is is looking at what we need to do where our gaps in policy are particularly around use of data and she she flagged up the need for better institutional policies to to manage the governance of ed tech and the data that is often used by third parties and that's policy work I've done in a couple of institutions now Edinburgh and and now at Athabasca but I've done sector scans as part of this work and and there is very still very little out there in this space so one of the things I need to do is write up what we did at Athabasca and share that out because part of the problem I think is how do you do it how do you get started it's it's an almost overwhelming task sometimes um so I think there are there are structural pieces we need to put into our institutions that give us the frameworks to resist as well and these are I've talked about ethics gaps in the operations of institutions and I think the the last eight months or so have really shown us those gaps so what I see from your discussion and and you know what you're offering into the space is very much you know the the big questions that have always been there in a way and um your sense of you know kind of astonishment that the that that they're really despite doing consistently policy scans and looking at the horizon um still there seems to be very little out there and you know that's really addressing these deep structural concerns so yeah I suppose I'd like to spend I know I should invite more people in but I would like to spend a few more minutes maybe just going back to this um question of you know how do we look back on on where we've come from and what are the questions that we might still have and um yeah um I was kind of yeah going to invite both Tannis first and then you to maybe have a little bit more and then maybe Francis and Marin to add some if that would make sense yeah could you reflect a little bit on on that you know looking back I mean I I love to look back and and for me COVID has been really it's landed us back in 1999 2000 I think if we're thinking if we're talking about um you know how how to continue with our COVID pivots but um I think there's oh now I lost my train of thought it really is early I'm sorry looking back yes looking back um I'm completely I completely forgot maybe somebody else can go and I'll remember yeah no amary amary amary well I'm following along in some of the chat um and there's a there's a tweet thread from Ben Williamson one of my lovely colleagues from Edinburgh um and I think um I mean we can look back to the history of of open um and thinking about widening access and and widening access to education we've been doing this for a very very long time and we can talk about the history of open education but let's talk about education more generally and this positioning of this modern positioning of education has broken because I think one thing we're maybe not talking about enough with COVID is the extent to which um we have done this for ourselves yes some of us have bought some technologies but by and large we have shifted our institutions ourselves with our own hard work with our own knowledge we are adaptable we are able to change we are able to change rapidly painful not pretending it's not but there's a reason that universities are hundreds of years old in many cases now my institution is not very old it's 50 years old in in university years it's a baby in ed tech years it's ancient so I I would really like to kind of reflect on if we're just going to reflect on the past let's reflect on the fact that universities have existed for a very very long time and there are reasons for that and one of the reasons for that is they do adapt and they do change so I I would really like to push back on this you know we're all broken and we need some technology narrative because I think COVID has shown us that we don't um that we can do for ourselves now tannis has remembered what she wanted to say yeah I knew it would come back um I think I was I was going to say something about um I mean for me I come from a distance education background where really what drove my desire to work in that field those really questions around access um but I think one thing to sort of take away from so much of this is that it really is so much more than just access right I mean we can see you know what Francis was saying at the at the top here about just all the inequities that have emerged and have always been there but really just surfaced um so I'm wondering you know I wonder more about what the project of um moving forward really really is if we accept the fact that it is so much more about access and again I come back to you know examples of of activities that are um happening as these radical reform types of things that that look very different but then are also just sources of inspiration for how we might move forward I I think a lot about um I use this example a lot the example of Raven Space Publishing which is um Indigenous created platform for essentially open textbook or open book publishing um through University of British Columbia I think about traditional knowledge licenses as an alternative to Creative Commons licenses um and just what you know what that what that brings to our own conversations when we see these kinds of alternatives to you know things that we celebrate quite a bit which are Creative Commons licenses um and more recently I came across um Wampum Codes which I think was a Mozilla project but really taking this idea of open source and and within reframing it from an Indigenous perspective by Indigenous people and adding this notion of you know you can reuse but you have to you can't reuse if you're not going to follow the values and the intention of what was created and for me that's been a really missing piece in Creative Commons licenses where you know we're told that CCBY is the holy grail and you know it's okay if anybody takes our stuff and does whatever with it and it's really missed that value's piece but that's what you know turning to those examples can do for us and help us in advancing our own conversations yeah well what I find so interesting what you're saying is this kind of tension between what um Anne-Marie you know notes as being a kind of a danger point and you know the opportunity to think about the value the value proposition as it were what the value of of the thing you know that we are doing you know and and how these relate to past but they also relate to possible futures and alternatives as you say tennis so I just wonder if either Marin or Francis would like to chip in some Francis is it okay if I go great um well I think for me that this is very resonant because the organisation that you know I work for and I represent we we define learning technology without the word digital it's not it's not defined by being online or by being digital and you know includes books and chalk and blackboards and paper and pens and all the other ways you know sand drawing with your hand um paintings um I don't really think that that's ever been my definition and I think as a you know as a professional body we've been working to take some concrete actions to try and redress this sort of narrative that's emerging um at least here in the UK and particularly in the media around the sort of concept of you know zoom being synonymous with online learning as a shorthand for this kind of simplification um and so one of the developments that's UK based but that I wanted to highlight is that our members are working on you know establishing an ethical a practical approach to ethical use of learning technology within their institutions and kind of by reaching beyond one's own institution and maybe working in collaboration with others you know we hope to identify more of the blind spots that we've already started to refer to and I think Anne-Marie's documenting her work on policy and within different institutions is a real guide here but there's other um other approaches we're drawing on as well and so I think this is an interesting time because there is appetite and there is a driver now to really more critically look at that um but I also wanted to highlight one other piece before I hand over to Francis which is around um in in the UK I think we use the term digital poverty frequently when we discuss lack of access or infrastructure or hardware um and might include even digital literacy or lack thereof um and we um or least government policy and consultations here often refer to that in relation to students alone and I think it's really important to reflect that it applies to you know staff and institutions just the same and I often find that there's real stigma around admitting that maybe as an academic or as a researcher you know we don't have access to space connectivity or infrastructure either um and and that's the same I think um instead of our context then then it is for students and for staff so it's it's quite a big gap for everyone together and maybe we can reflect on that as well as students access to education um yeah Francis do you want to add to that I see you've shared the link again yeah just in case people it's too far back for people yeah there is just one thing that I would like to add and and it's really um sparked by some of the conversation we've just been having I I thought about um how my experience you know with campus-based teaching and comparing it with the current situation and I think one of the big challenges is um how to avoid surveilling students while they communicate with each other or with us and that surveillance could be uh from on the part of the institutional platform or it could be on the part of um social media platforms because both of those can do surveillance and so I just think it would be nice to think about some imaginative ways in which we can support students um engaging off the radar and away from the gaze and I wondered if anyone else had anything to say about that. Ann Marie has something to say I see her hand is up well I I'm just I'm reflecting on these issues of surveillance and um and this danger point that I talked about and there's there's something I read last week there was a Washington Post article on I want to say Thursday last week maybe um that was really about the pushback on remote proctoring tools and there was one little phrase in it which I I just saw read when I read I mean I just exploded um but it's been it's been bugging me since and there's something about it I find deeply deeply traveling and it was a comment from um one of the CEO of one of the proctoring companies he'll be known to a few of us on on this keynote here um but he talked about this notion of COVID diplomas and without the use of his technology um educational credentials would be worthless um and I I've been thinking about that for a few days now I've really really had a strong reaction to it and I think what I found deeply troubling is that it's um these technologies companies are reaching into um into the academy in a way that's inappropriate and essentially what that position says is that these technologies are could become part of the credential itself that the the technology and the surveillance is some kind of certification of authenticity not the institution not our judgment as academics not our judgment as educators not our judgment as as a degree awarding institutions many of whom have been doing it for hundreds of years and I I think that's a really pernicious and deeply troubling kind of statement so the the surveillance that Francis has talked about it's it's amping that up and saying that it's it it's making it structural and it's devaluing it's aiming to devalue something about the institution um and I I found that comment massively troubling so if we're thinking about our ethical futures I think we really need to be looking at the not just the effect of these technologies but the statements and the the positioning of these technology companies what are they trying to do but what is this um yeah I just think it's a really important like part of the conversation which comes back to what Morrin said about alt and what alt is about and it's not about the digital but it's about alternatives it's about delivery of education it's about meeting needs and getting to people where they are and um this kind of strange thing that seems to be happening with commercialization of education which I think you know a lot of people in South Africa have been working on this unbundled project as well and the unbundling has led to the kind of like a fragmentation but also a commodification of the higher education processes but in in somewhere in that the question of values and what becomes devalued and you know becoming worthless or worthless and and you know where we think how we think about values in in the ethical futures I think it's part of this tanness's view on also on you know alternative futures um but you know anyway um I don't want to waffle on because I'm supposed to be cheering you not talking um but uh yeah maybe we might just um turn to some of the questions because as Francis has shared there's this open document that you know uh we're all very keen to continue working on and this is just like a taster or a invitation I suppose to edit and join in this document uh and also the hashtag open ethical futures um so yeah maybe Paul actually has um quite kindly said that he would uh uh monitor the chat because so much chat has gone and and curate some of the questions so is it okay with everybody if maybe we all turn to Paul now to curate some of the chat and present some of the questions Paul are you okay with that I'm gonna mute myself okay well there's a lot of questions and a lot of comments that are really exploring this whole topic of the relationship of especially edtech I guess to the the ethical parts of education and perhaps I get a sense that this is a little bit of a hot topic so why don't we ask a few more of the panelists to reflect on um some of the the issues around edtech that have particularly emerged during the covid times and if we choose not to go in those directions what's the alternative so let's go in order okay well I'll jump I've always got something to say I'll jump in again I think I think there was a there was a comment in the chat about um you know like definitions of technologies and Tanish wrote a really excellent post at the the kind of start of covid um reminding us that you know we don't necessarily need new technologies we can use technologies we've already got we can use them in different ways or we can go back to using them in ways that we used to and Tanish I think your email post your post was about using email as a as a you know how could you teach a whole class on email if you had to flip um and in my own institution you know we we have had to use proctoring softwares not every student can not every student has got connectivity um but we've been doing distance education for 50 years and the model we started with was a telephone based tutorial model we used to do exams on the telephone so guess what we've been doing we've been doing exams on the telephone it's something we know how to do so um I think I think in the in the pushing back and rejecting some of these new technologies we can just do things we've done before and that we know work um and that we know scale um yes we let go of them um for for good reasons at that point in time but that doesn't mean that their time can't come again I mean how many of us have have come back to an idea that was you know it seems like a good idea five years ago didn't work we put it on the shelf and five years later it's time came um so I I think if as we push back um we don't have to be left with nothing we have plenty in our toolbox already we just have to remember how to be imaginative and creative and I think it comes back to what some of what I was saying earlier if we think about the kind of education system we want we think about the values of that and then we build the technology out from there it's actually a lot simpler than perhaps we've been sold it to be it can be very simple it's about creativity and constraint often yeah I I mean the the thing the thing that we have to remember too is or maybe just turn our lens a little bit outside of higher education is that email courses via mailing lists or actually a thing they've come back in style so I mean there's this tendency I think for higher education to be so much engaged in the game of catch up that you forget that actually there there's new twists on old things everywhere but I guess what I want to say in response to Paul's question is that I think in not looking for these alternate futures we you know and we know this we recreate them and I've recently become involved in microcredentialing discussions and in the excitement of this it feels very much like the MOOC excitement of you know 2012 immediately out the gate we're forgetting just how how to design the importance of designing for equity or for social justice or for actually really being critical about whether the claims that we're making about microcredentials in terms of a response to something are actually you know going to benefit the people that it claims to benefit so I think I'm reminded by that and so I think that's why these discussions are so important because you know right now we're talking about surveillance software and proctoring software but there's there's other things on our desk as well and I think these threads have to find their way into all of those conversations. Anyone else want to comment on that or shall I bring forward another question okay another question so there's a number of comments in the chat there's been a threat of them actually related to the licenses that have been so integral to open education at least up to this point and a lot of people kind of recognizing and questioning what those licenses entail especially in terms of the political and moral aspects of them and and tennis earlier talked about indigenous alternatives I wonder what you all think about licenses as part of the ethical future of this education world. That's an open question to any of you. Maybe I'll just jump in first. So ever since March some of our members have been running a weekly webinar series on licensing and it's been the most popular topic in my community with over a hundred people attending weekly webinars around the different implications of licensing licensing for different types of sources including for example film or art. We've been looking at specific implications of it during the pandemic particularly without access to you know necessarily material artifacts and yeah it's actually in fact such a big issue that we're setting up a special interest group just to address this particular area of work and I think in our community we haven't really explored for example some of the issues that Tannis and Amarie have spoken about in a Canadian context that you know I'm now adding to our reading list in our area so I think it's such a big issue but an intensely practical one as well so I feel I've been not surprised but maybe this was not necessarily the one number one topic that I would have chosen as being kind of you know a hundred plus people discussing every week so I'll send a link to the resources in case anybody wants to follow up that. Anyone else want to talk about them? How to go beyond licenses that's what I'm interested in. I'll jump in on that one. Do we need to go beyond licenses? Can we not go back to what was before licenses and I think I hinted at this a little bit. A lot of the the writing about open education in the 60s and the 70s was very much focused on this widening access and moving barriers to participation and the OER movement grew out of that as one facet of that but my own experience is that it has grown to kind of to some extent obscure some of that history and I certainly think we need to go beyond the five hours idea of what open education and open licensing is and so I would argue this is going to sound tortured but you know to go beyond it we actually have to go backwards in time and go back to some of that early work then there's a really great really great paper that Martin Weller Katie Jordan Irwin who's on this call and Viv Rolf did doing a citation analysis a social network analysis of citations around open education which really excavates some of this earlier history that I think you know if you came into the field as there was a rush of money into who we are particularly probably hasn't been obvious to you or you maybe haven't excavated that history so going beyond licenses for me I think is a bit going back to some of that work and then again if we think about what do we want to do in terms of access reducing barriers it's that centering on the human again which which Francis touched on again as touched on as well and then how do we build out technologies in in services than the vision we have thank you it's another whole thread about I'll say micro credentials recognizing experience and informal learning and I wonder whether and how you see those kinds of things as part of the future for open education Paul was this a question from the chat yes okay I feel I mean I'm looking at Deborah Arnold's face here on the screen and I know she's going to be doing a session on open recognition as part of this conference hi Deborah I certainly I would much rather point to people like that who sure are super knowledgeable about that question come along yeah I don't know what time it's going to be for you for me it's going to be 20 past 10 tonight for me so it's a long day spanning all these time zones but yeah more than happy do you want to say a few words about it tell us a little bit give us a teaser as a teaser looking at micro credentials not from the technical point of view but from how they can be useful and I think this is resonating with conversations that Thomas and I've already had in different contexts looking at what's happening in Europe what's happening beyond so a bit from North America and also focusing zooming in on what's going on in New Zealand and addressing some of the criticisms that have been raised because I think they keep us on track and yeah get us beyond the technicalities into thinking about well who are they for and what could we do to make them as useful and as relevant as possible there we go pitch excellent very good could I just contribute a couple of sentences from some informal education that I would normally be involved in but um but because of COVID and not I'm a weekly volunteer at my local library and most of the clients that I get there are older people and it's just been so poignant for me that at the time that they most needed to get support in accessing the internet is the time when they can't come to the library and get that support and they're not in a position to get all of that support online and so I'd just like to put in a plea for the the older generation who didn't have to use the internet as part of their work in their workplace and who have been treated very badly over the last few years and I don't suppose it's got any better during COVID so that's my little rant there thank you I just want to also perhaps bring forward Irwin's comment about openness as a worldview and this kind of suggests that it's quite a lot more than just simply a set of licenses or a set of five-hour permissions and I wonder if you see there's been some some reflection on the history in a sense of how openness has been part of our work for a long time and I guess I wonder to what extent do you see openness as being part of our work moving forward will it continue to play the role that it's historically played will it change and shift in some ways and and perhaps you could speak about the future part of this any of you I'm gonna jump in and I'm sure everybody else will too I think this is a real opportunity at least in the community that I work with you know people are open to thinking about open in different ways now because I think there's a different set of priorities currently that maybe haven't been at the forefront of people's minds quite in the same way and I'd like to echo what Anne-Marie said in her first contribution about grace and kindness and care because I feel that you know for the first time in many years actually things like you know open access to repositories is a priority for for people again and it might not be you know necessarily everybody's worldview but it's certainly become a lot more widespread and practical in the community that I work in so I hope we will use it to tackle some of the big challenges that we've highlighted today and now I don't want to trivialize any of them they are big issues that I also don't have any confidences to but I do think we have a lot of tools to tackle them. Thank you Marilyn we just have one minute left so why don't we just get a few more remarks on this and then we'll wrap up this session which has been so fascinating thank you all anyone else want to comment on the future of open moving forward? I'd like to ask Suming if she'd like to contribute she has been a fantastic moderator for us but I know that you have many interesting thoughts also. Well I just want to go back to the line in the chat really that we were talking about open you know open futures the futures of open also reflecting you know the histories and the different stories of open and I saw a lovely comment there from Kathy S. Miller on educators sharing a meal and discussing practices and really that this was about convening a family of people who had a certain set of ideas about what what open was about at all and that opening is a kind of a continuous process that is never finished but it's really about you know this some sort of commitment that people have to removing barriers and widening access and participation and like in my view I mean I always think from a human rights perspective which is which links it to science for democracy and the relationship between open knowledge and open science and open education and our rights as human beings to participate in the human family and to enjoy the benefits of being members of this family and so for me I suppose that's what I think that process is about is never finished but it's about becoming human and and being part of that human family and that's why I gravitate to this which is not a native land for me the open community you know I wasn't born into this community at all but I really gravitate towards it because I think that there is something there in this very strong commitment to removing barriers which I think is the most important value. Thank you so much Sumi that's really great I really appreciate the kind of ending on notes related to human rights very good I want to thank you all for doing this panel with us very important and kind of profound topic for us to all examine at this time of the pandemic when there's been so much introspection. I want to encourage you all to continue the discussion over in OEG Connect there's a little area for this session where comments and resources can be shared and and with that perhaps all of you can join me in thanking the keynote speakers today and we'll end the recording here and get ready for moving forward. Thank you all so much. Thank you Paul, thank you Sue and thank you.