Staying open: sustaining critical open educational practice in a time of walls and borders [1531] Members : #OER17

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Wed, Apr 5 2017, 1:30pm – 2:50pm

Authors: Sheila MacNeill, Frances Bell, Vivien Rolfe, Josie Fraser, and Kate Bowles

Room: Seminar 2

Theme: Participation & Social Equality

Type: Panel

Description

What are the prospects for sustaining a generous and critical practice of open educational practice and open research in these times, one that can address the pressing challenges of the emerging political formations that govern higher education? By staying open, can we find effective means to challenge the new politics of normalisation? What are the challenges and privileges of open practice under austerity and precarity? What kind of refusal does open practice now represent? And what tactics work at the local level, in institutions whose strategy for open is driven by the promise of reputational gain?

Across US, Britain and Australia we have seen a rapid electoral shift away from the ideals of transnational cooperation, and the widespread manipulation of anxiety in relation to unregulated human migration.

Meanwhile our public higher education institutions have tightened their focus on market development, brand management and competitive success in global rankings achieved primarily through closed journal publication. The well-developed professionalisation of institutional strategic planning is underpinned by the pragmatics of austerity budgeting, and the expanding precarity of labour. In these conditions the valuable weak ties of open networked collaboration that have sustained educational innovation have come under pressure: time spent in the open is reframed as institutional risk or individual time-wasting, except where institutional brand benefit can be simultaneously achieved.

Our panel, hashtag #critoep, is designed to stimulate interaction. We offer brief provocative prompts for audience participation that build on our own experiences; and we will bring in ideas from the rest of the conference. We invite participants to join us in imagining the tactics that will sustain ethical open practice in a time of building walls and closing borders. We will capture the session via notes and picturing, feeding into a summary at the end, all subsequently shared.

Prompts:

How can open pedagogy thrive when institutional and government strategies favour the financialisation of higher education, and object to outspokenness?

How sustainable are unsupported initiatives, and what collaborations will best support transborder open pedagogy at a tactical level if these conditions are actually getting worse?

How open are our research and education practices? In research, citations provide links to sources that may be behind a paywall. Open access journals, blogs and web pages may enable these links and open sources but does this dissolve power relations

How resident is our open educational practice in our institutional and personal digital spaces?

How open are we? Within our community many voices are still unheard – students, those from different cultural and geographical backgrounds. Are we being critical in our actions and practices or hypocritical?

What social and political conversations have come up at this conference (#OER17)? How can we translate discussions in to effective action?

Conversation and connections are critical to online communities and engagement in open practice and activities. What can we learn from present-day political attacks online, and new forms of censorship? What is acceptable and non-acceptable, and how might this translate to an effective way forward for the open movement?

References
Hall, R., 2015. For a political economy of massive open online courses. Learning, Media and Technology, (March), pp.1–22. Available at: https://www.dora.dmu.ac.uk/handle/2086/10847?show=full
Oliver, M., 2015. From openness to permeability: reframing open education in terms of positive liberty in the enactment of academic practices. Learning, Media and Technology, 40(3), pp.365–384. Available at:http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1475491/3/Oliver_1475491_Permeability%20paper%20v3.pdf

White, D.S. and Le Cornu, A., 2011. Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).

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