I’m absolutely delighted to be invited to present one of the keynotes at this year’s CELT Symposium at NUI Galway. I’ve never been to this event before but I always follow it online as it often has excellent keynotes and a really lively social media presence. I’ve also never been to Galway before and to say I’m excited to visit would be a bit of an understatement!
The theme of this year’s symposium is Design for Learning: Teaching and Learning Spaces in Higher Education. I’ll be developing some of the themes I touched on in my OER18 and FLOSS UK keynotes to look at what we mean when we talk about openness in relation to digital teaching and learning spaces, resources, communities and practices. Focusing on open education, OER, open practice, MOOCs, and Wikimedia, I’ll be exploring different and sometimes contradictory definitions and understandings of openness in these contexts. I’ll also touch on the structural inequalities that prevent some groups and individuals from participating in open education and asking how open and equitable our open education spaces really are and who are they open to? Using innovative examples from the University of Edinburgh, I’ll look at how we can engage with students to co-create more equitable, inclusive and participatory open education spaces, communities and resources.
The title of my talk, The Soul of Liberty – Openness, equality and co-creation, is paraphrased from a quote by Frances Wright, the Scottish feminist and social reformer, who was born in Dundee in 1795, but who rose to prominence in the United States as an abolitionist, a free thinker, and an advocate of women’s equality in education.
Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it.
I think the same could also be said of openness; equality is the soul of openness. If our open education spaces and communities are not open to all equally, then really we have to question whether they are open at all.
Fanny Wright, public domain image, Wikimedia Commons.
(I think Fanny would definitely identify with that other free thinker, Ms Janelle Monáe, who I mentioned in my previous blog post – A free thought from a free thinker)
