Recently I contributed to a conversation around radical openness as part of the OLC’s Ideate online events, together with Robin DeRosa, Gerry Hanley, Leigh Graves Wolf and Rajiv Jhangiani. I was very glad to be invited and really enjoyed taking part.
The session, described as a ‘community salon’ was described in the programme as an “opportunity for a group of thought leaders to engage participants in rich discussions around a broad topic intersecting with their scholarship and outreach. This salon brings together champions of open education and pedagogy sharing perspectives and guiding activities around the topic of radical openness, with a special focus on the ways that we can open doors for learners that are often hidden or closed to their success. Come with your ideas, challenges, and questions on the topic of openness, and take part in building new knowledge around open practices that will sustain us through and past these challenging times.”
Leigh Graves Wolf set out a really helpful structure for the session, guiding us through a series of prompts and questions, including:
“in what ways are you open/radically open?”
“What are some Open Educational Practice behaviors that you promote/enact/admire?”
“What are some Open Educational practices that you promote/enact/admire?”
And it resulted in a rich discussion and engagement, collated into shared documents (I encourage you to visit the OLC website to explore more).
Eventually the conversation turned to current events, to how everyone is coping (or not) with the challenges of the pandemic, working from home, childcare, supporting students, teaching, Zoom… and so on. These topics, which have become so familiar to all in a short space of time.
The more casual part of the conversation brought to light a different side of openness, which makes us all more vulnerable than sharing a teaching resource or a textbook. But it also made me think of ways in which, over time, our ideas of what might be radical openness may change. Here are some of my reflections:
Radical… power structures
At this stage of the great pirouette online, much of what is being done is still determined by power structures within institutions and communities or even countries, that rely on the decision making power of face to face institutions and processes, such as university governing bodies, finance committees, audits, quality reviews and so forth. Most of what is happening is not what was planned, but it is too new still for a lot of annual processes or less regular process to have happened yet and many of those processes are not open in either behaviour or practice. It’ll be interesting to see if we can challenge the openness of such structures more radically or whether the opposite will be true.
Radical… change and culture
In the first year of moving everything and everyone online we can draw on what we built up in person. There is a certain amount of common experience, of organisational culture, of shared memories, that act a bit like glue when it comes to getting through a crisis. But over time, as new people join the venture who don’t have that shared background, you open your behaviours and practice up to more radical change and transformation and that can be hard for everyone involved. Hard for those who are joining and hard for those who are already there. It’s difficult to build a shared sense of identity, aims or values without in person interaction at any level. One’s instinct is to close down options to change, to potentially loose what is being held on.
Radical… uncertainty
In the absence of much that we can rely on, it is difficult to imagine beyond the radical uncertainty we face. What do you do, whom do you ask, what is your plan when no one knows what, when or how things will change.
Open behaviours and practice are hard to embrace when you are facing that kind of perspective. In that sense, any amount of openness we can put into practice is radical.
One of the things we discussed in the session was how to support learners, and we were mostly focusing on traditional learners in a higher ed context here. But it was clear from the conversation and the comments from the audience, that we were all feeling more like learners again in a sense, just without the study guide to refer to.
It’s International Women’s Day #IWD2020 and this year I am writing this post about washing.
What is this about? Women’s labour? Household chores? Automation of domestic labour? No. What I am thinking about is the concept of ‘openwashing’ and similar kinds of ‘washing’ and how to avoid drowning in that kind of dirty laundry.
I came across this first at the OER15 conference in Cardiff in a memorable keynote by Cable Green:
As an aside, OER15 was a vintage keynote year for the OER Conference in my view, featuring Josie Fraser, Martin Weller and Sheila MacNeill and the whole playlist is definitely worth another look. That said, I think you could safely say EVERY year of the OER Conference is a vintage keynote year (but you might expect me to say that as part of the organising team) and this year’s event, OER20, is promising to be a vintage programme year once again.
Back in 2015 meanwhile, Lorna Campbell wrote an often quoted blog post in which she wrote:
Cable also touched briefly on open washing, which Audrey Watters has defined as “having the appearance of open source and open licensing for marketing purposes while continuing proprietary practices.” And he called Udacity out for openwashing with their Open Education Alliance, which despite the name, does not appear to be open in any sense of the word.
From: OER15 – Better late than never!, Open World, by Lorna Campbell
Since OER15 then I find it useful to use this concept of openwashing in other contexts as well, for example I come across of communitywashing and equalitywashing… and so forth.
I am in a position of privilege in many ways, in that I am a white European woman in a leadership position, I am well educated and I have the knowledge, skills and connections to navigate life to name some examples. Some of this privilege I was born into, some is due to luck and some I have worked hard to achieve. I also experience a lot of prejudice and discrimination and inequality as a woman working in a tech related field and in a myriad of other ways. Both have helped motivate me to actively try to see more of how others experience the world, and to do what is in my power to make a positive difference. Promoting gender equality is something I am passionate about, which is why I am an activist in networks that help this cause, such as the FemEdTech network.
Example of the work I do from 2019 (you can find the whole talk here)
This and other professional activities have attracted the attention of people who are keen to be perceived to care about things like openness, community and equality. People who organise events, publish content and generally broadcast messages that contain all the rights words and yet have no meaning because when we read them we know it’s nothing but washing. It’s reputation management at toxic levels. And so at this time of year, particularly around International Women’s Day, the invitations to contribute, to speak, to be interviewed and to participate increase in volume just as the desire to seem to be doing the ‘right’ thing becomes a more valuable commodity.
Every time I read yet another media release that starts with ‘by the community, for the community’ but which is actually written by the marketing or research department of a multi million pound business it makes me question what meaning community has in this context: do they actually mean customers, consumers, users, target audiences? It matters. It matters because of the intention behind the exercise differs and the outcome does as well. Like with openwashing proprietary practices usually continue to underlie all these ‘community activities’, they are just washed in words that imply engagement and shared ownership. Yet when the commercial interest or policy angle shifts, then those projects or networks are often shut down or dissolved into ‘self sustaining’ models that quickly end in the graveyard of moribund communities of practice which is full of ghosts of communities past.
Besides the obvious, this type of ‘washing’ has serious downsides in the long term: from the outside, to policy makers for example, sectors in which ‘community washing’ is prevalent appear to be functioning well, hence not in need of investment or intervention. Snap shots show only activity levels not their unsustainable and patchy nature. From the inside, particularly for newcomers, this kind of washing can be hard to detect and the alternatives harder to find. Again and again I come across new hubs or networks that duplicate what existing communities already do – but marketing ‘we are supporting something that is already there’ with its own identity and power, is far less effective at ‘washing’ those impact reports and social media channels, it can’t bathe them in a light of seemingly authentic engagement. Thus, I feel, much resources get wasted, wheels invented many times over in the name of communitywashing. It doesn’t help empower actual communities or build capacity or develop skills in ways that are sustainable and fit for purpose.
What all types of ‘washing’ have in common is that there is no real shift in the power base. Control remains with whoever has it rather than being distributed and shared. Gender equalitywashing provides some particularly infuriating examples, from equating balanced gender representation with having a token woman at a tech conference (‘there was A WOMAN on stage…’) to featuring appropriately photogenic stories front and centre without ever actually changing practice (…our organisation and its assets may be entirely dominated by men but we have stories about woman succeeding in the industry on the website).
From reports misrepresenting everyday sexism to glossing over structural pay and policy inequality, every single day brings examples of gender equalitywashing. There is so much evidence of inequality that is both persistent and pervasive that the kind of window dressing marketing that International Women’s Day seems to prompt each year seems laughable.
We know that we and YOU are not doing enough, not nearly enough, to redress the balance. Not anywhere. Not at any time. We are not closing gaps or nearly closing gaps. It may be more profitable to appear to address the issues in the workforce, company or industry, but only to a certain extent. Real change might disrupt profits and redistribute power.
This type of washing again gives the appearance of much positive activity or indeed activism without addressing the underlying inequalities effectively (and often without intending to do so at all). It creates a sense of futility, leads people to question why nothing is changing when we appear to do so much. And it does not support but often counteracts genuine efforts to affect change. Having a ‘women in X’ initiative does not equal ‘problem solved’.
I am well aware that there are many who don’t feel gender inequality continues to exist. Having won the right to vote and the existence of the Equal Pay Act has addressed any outstanding issues they argue. If this is your view, I am glad you are reading this blog post. You may wish to continue reading and books like Invisible Women or Inferior would make an excellent starting point.
I talk about inequality pretty much in every talk I give (there is a review of 2019 here) and there are always follow ups from people who don’t feel that in their lives, in their office, in their organisation this is an issue. Partly, I think, (wilful) ignorance is to blame (please refer to the reading suggestions above to become more informed).
But the kind of equalitywashing I am talking about is also to blame. It promotes a false sense of progress and change that does not prompt people to critically examine their own role and responsibility. In my view, we are all responsible both collectively and as individuals.
It is much harder, I find, to feel complacent when considering if there is anything more I could do to contribute, to make change happen – because there is always more to do. A lot more.
As the tide of misinformation gets whipped into a frenzy, the challenge to separate ‘washing’ from authentic voices can appear to become harder. But I find that most people do know. They can differentiate dishonesty from the real thing. What does become harder is to make your voice heard. Not to drown in other people’s dirty laundry.
And we do see those who engage in that kind of washing… those who use words like open and community and equality and try to divest them of their true meaning for their own convenience. The reality of open, the living of equality, the being part of a community is much more messy and nuanced, far less marketable than ‘washing’ requires it to be. It’s by no means all easy or good or uncontested. And yet, despite the messiness, the arguments and the disagreements, it is at least a reality beyond the imagination of corporations.
I want to note my thanks to all the people in my life who do what they can to make a difference. Who don’t engage in just applying a wash, a veneer of values but who live by them instead. Many of them identify as women, but many do not, and I am grateful for all of them, especially on International Women’s Day. I see you, I hear you, thank you.
Space for uncommon conversations
(Send your media enquiries and keynote panel invites via email to… 😉
In a recent post on positive feedback I talked about how to use positive feedback for personal & professional development. As I wrote the post I had an idea to try out a new approach to giving and receiving positive feedback in a virtual, distributed team: I made a template and sent an envelope to each of my colleagues in the post, enclosing a piece of positive feedback from me to them, as well as templates, envelopes & stamps for them to send each other positive feedback. That way, I hoped, we would each receive several pieces of positive post in the mail over the next week or so. If you’d like to have a look, here is the CC-BY template I created.
So, what happened next?
Writing and sending feedback
I really enjoyed the process of printing, folding and making each envelope to send and in particular writing the feedback by hand. I hardly send or receive any personal letters and putting pen to actual paper made this feel special.
Writing solely positive feedback, rather than including constructive criticism like I would for a performance review, felt liberating.
I wasn’t sure what to say, at least initially. Or how much to write or what to focus on. But looking back at the original article that prompted me in this action, I tried to find something that I felt had made a big difference and why. Once I got started, there was a lot I wanted to say.
Once I had written everyone’s feedback I put the envelopes in the post and I didn’t keep copies.
You’ve got post!
The following week I told my colleagues about the project, shared the blog post I’d written and everyone started to wait for their letters to arrive.
As a distributed team we only rarely receive physical materials, mostly equipment or printed materials. My last letter from work was a tax certificate. Sending and receiving mail that we all knew would contain only good news made a difference.
We send each other secret santa presents by post, and sometimes souvenirs from conferences or thank you presents, but it’s a rare occurrence to get those, so a special delivery like this is noteworthy.
And it wasn’t just a single person, i.e. me, sending something to everyone one way. Instead, everyone sent a letter to everyone else (our team being small enough for that to be practical).
You also never quite knew when a letter would be arriving and for remote workers post and parcel deliveries (mostly for other people) are a common feature of work days. But getting something just for yourself makes for a welcome change.
Reflection
Creating, distributing and receiving small moments of positive feedback was a very worthwhile exercise.
Firstly, it made me focus on the positives more and once I did, there seem to be more of them!
Secondly, it was useful to practice receiving positive feedback. It is true that it feels more powerful when not accompanied by negative feedback at the same time. Making space to absorb positive feedback meant that it stayed with me a lot more than it may have done otherwise.
The reaction from colleagues to both the method and the focus of the exercise was also positive.
A cpd task, which we as a team set every month, that focused not on learning new stuff or improving something, but on recognition for what is good, what we do well, proved a joyful experience and a relaxing one, too.
As well as practising receiving positive feedback we all had the chance to articulate something positive to each other and that, too, felt worthwhile.
P.S. Maybe it’s time for further thinking about postal projects for distributed teams… .
I recently came across this article in the Harvard Business Review on how to use positive feedback for personal & professional development. The article points to a tool/service but in itself contains useful pointers and ideas explaining why positive feedback is important, how to give/receive it and reflecting on why this may be difficult:
‘Most people are well-attuned to critical feedback; it is jarring, threatening, and emotional, and as a result, quite memorable. In contrast, it is often easy to let positive reflections on our actions subtly slip us by. Lingering in the glow of praise can also feel uncomfortably immodest. It therefore takes practice to savour moments of positivity and to hold them in your memory.’
In my experience that certainly rings true and I found the suggestions the authors make for practising helpful. They come up with five steps:
Noticing positive feedback, including creating a space where you can save it, like an email folder or pin board;
Asking questions, teasing out exactly what it is about what you did that made a positive impact;
Studying your success (personally I don’t like this phrase, but the idea is sound), reflecting on what you did and how/why you succeeded;
Practising enacting the most positive aspect of yourself, making space in your day to day work where you can see the positive impact you have on others, or on the organisation;
Share positive feedback with others, establishing giving and receiving positive feedback more firmly in your practice.
One of the things that really stood out for me is the prompt to reflect on what I did well, what made a positive impact, rather than reflect in order to improve, focusing on what I could have done better or to gain a more critical perspective. I don’t think I habitually make time or space to focus exclusively on positive feedback although I receive quite a lot of it.
That brings me to another point, which is how this sits within open practice. There are many upsides for me to being an Open Practitioner. It often brings with it a lot of valuable input from others, interesting ideas, suggestions for how to develop, sharing their perspective etc. But it doesn’t (for me) make for the most comfortable space in which to share praise or reflect on positive feedback. I can express a balanced perspective, i.e. including things that went well alongside things that could have gone better, but there’s always a sense of vulnerability when I write about a success because someone might well respond to point out flaws, mistakes or their own personal negative experience. In a leadership role especially it’s common to express positive achievements in such a way that there’s always room for contrasting views. And that doesn’t create the right kind of space for focusing on positive feedback alone.
I’ve also come to realise that positive feedback means more to me when it’s given in private. Sometimes I receive heartfelt praise, sent to me personally rather than shared publicly and often the tone and content of feedback like is more meaningful for me. It matters that someone took the time to send positive feedback specifically, thought about it enough to feel the need to share it with me. I try and do this myself regularly and what I say and write to individuals personally differs from what I would say when praising them in public. Even within a small team, praising someone has meaning for all who are present, whilst personal positive feedback can be worded to be more relevant to the individual alone. It’s not an aspect of my practice that I feel can easily be translated into the open – but maybe that is something worth thinking about.
Next: Positivity by post
Given that I work in a virtual team, positive feedback generally comes in digital form. But I want to try and create something very tangible to test out some of the ideas I’ve discussed above and here is how: I’m going to send an envelope to each of my colleagues in the post, enclosing a piece of positive feedback from me to them, as well as three feedback slips from them to each of us and envelopes to send those to each other. That way, I hope, we will each receive some pieces of positive post over the next week or so. Positivity by post, if you like. I’ll report back on how it turns out.
OER19 is nearly upon us and as part of the organising team the next two week will be really busy for me. I am really excited about the event this year and so while there’s still time, I want to share my thoughts in this preview post.
I’ve also been reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez (it’s an excellent read) and one of the points I took away from the book was how women’s rights and gender equality more broadly are treated as a minority interest, something that is never at the top of the list of priorities for government or industry even though we have evidence that shows why it should be. Instead it’s treated as a ‘nice to have’. This is far more eloquently expressed in the book, but my own day to day experience reflects this attitude very clearly: every time I speak about the issue somewhere there are those who roll their eyes or those who nod along patiently waiting until the talk turns back to things that really interest them, things that really matter as if they’re thinking ‘who cares about the gender data gap when there’s an AI revolution to profit from’.
Now, openness I find provokes a very similar response, and is equally demoted to the bottom of the list of things to do, because it also seems like a ‘nice to have’. To those who don’t know better openness is the domain of the dreamers, the prerogative of the privileged, a idealistic idea that doesn’t fit into the education industry of today other than as window dressing, as a veneer to enhance current business models.
In both cases short-sightedness, self interest and lack of imagination present real barriers for meaningful progress – but that isn’t to say that there is none. Fortunately for all, those committed to driving forward the open agenda are succeeding in winning many arguments, changing policy, winning funding and developing viable business models all across the world. This year’s conference programme is filled with examples (https://oer19.oerconf.org/programme/) from a broad spectrum of practice, research and policy making. From institutional case studies and national reports to individuals collaborating on open projects the programme includes sessions that set out to tackle the difficult questions and dilemmas that will come to define the future of openness.
Openness is many things to many people and the vision that the conference co-chairs have brought to the event has really inspired me and helped me reach a new understanding of the challenges we face by including more diverse voices and perspectives and also by ensuring that openness has been stitched into the fabric of OER19.
In turn, that has inspired the work that ALT does to support this conference in the run up to the event such as tweaking our systems to encourage more sharing, the Board of Trustees funding more scholarship places for students than ever before, contributing to global events during Open Education Week led by the Open Education Special Interest Group, and post-OER19 to the Creative Commons Global Summit.
Openness is a very practical core value for ALT as an organisation but it’s also become a more practical and fundamental aspect of my own thinking and practice in particular on open leadership and also contributing to the oer19 open space for femedtech has been inspiring.
Thanks to everyone involved, everyone who puts time and effort and resources into making OER19 happen, I feel like actually getting to go to the event in Galway is just the finishing flourish. OER19 has been a living, breathing, inspiring part of my professional practice for over a year already. But when I watched the sun rise over Galway Bay nearly a year ago, I didn’t realise how rich, how thought provoking and nourishing a journey working on this event would be. I’m grateful that I have been able to contribute, and I look forward to playing my part in making it happen and to build on what will be shared at OER19 to continue to promote openness and support those involved in the coming year, weaving a stronger thread of openness into the fabric of things.
I have chosen to focus on the question: “How do we manage sustainable spaces for exploring challenging issues around open?” and my response has also been inspired by a recent blog post by Martin Weller on ‘Learning the rules of predicting the future‘. In the post, which deserves extra credits for inspired use of Parks and Recreation gifs (note to self: up your GIF game), Martin sets out the following “rules” for predicting the future for education (I am quoting only very briefly here, so you should really read the whole post, as it makes for excellent reading):
The first rule to learn about change in higher education is that very little changes, while simultaneously everything changes.
A second rule is that technological change is rarely about the technology.
The third rule is to appreciate the historical amnesia in much of educational technology.
The fourth, and final rule I would suggest is that technology is not ethically or politically neutral.
And that has inspired me to think about rules for making sustainable spaces, which links to the broader question of who takes responsibility and how to take responsibility for the future of open spaces of all shapes and sizes. It also relates to the question of permanency on the web and in technologically mediated social spaces in general (I have written about Cemeteries of the web: parallels between Victorian burial culture and digital infrastructure previously). So here goes:
First, I would argue that in most cases planning for the long term, for sustainability in any sense, does not come into the development of new spaces, platforms or tools. So many sites and systems come and go, disappearing often with all the content we have created and without much notice or help for migration. Interoperability standards, transferable file formats and all that goes with it are rarely at the top of anyone’s priority list whilst iterative, agile approaches to development force users to move along regardless. When funding dries up or business models change repositories, community sites, communication platforms etc become unsupported, derelict collections of broken links and unanswered support requests. This is not only inconvenient, but has serious consequences: it makes it difficult to have a sustained critical debate as we constantly loose records of what we have already done; it puts the focus always on reinventing, re-establishing, re-designing new spaces and it promotes the kind of historical amnesia in much of educational technology that Martin Weller warns us about.
Sustainable spaces for exploring the challenging issues around open also require us to address the question of who has ownership of those spaces, both in a practical sense, i.e. who owns the domain, who controls access, who pays the bills, as well as the social aspects such as who controls the conversation, who records it, who can participate and who ends it. Some of the hardest questions we must ask have strong political and ethical dimensions. If the organisation or entity that hosts or supports such a dialogue has a strong agenda, be that commercial, political or social, then we need to question how that impacts on the kind of discourse we can foster and also how this may impact on the sustainability of the project. Open means many things to many people and there is a whole range of motivations to get involved and try take ownership of spaces that support open communities.
One of the things that’s really tricky about both open in education and technology in education is what Martin Weller describes as ‘very little changes, while simultaneously everything changes’. I find that is often to do with our goalposts constantly moving further ahead and at the same time the spectrum of individual and organisational practice spreading out. What I mean is that the range of challenges we ask technology to help us meet is huge – from basic infrastructure to educating millions across the globe. Similarly, when it comes to thinking about open, there is a vast array of situations to tackle. It all depends on the perspective you start from and it can be difficult to find common ground in a conversation that brings together many different contexts – this is exactly the reason why an open space like this one can help.
I don’t seem to have come up with very clearly articulated rules, but rather characteristics and questions around the lack of long term planning, questioning ownership and motivation and the need to appreciate different perspectives from which what we find challenging about open can be explored. One very generic sounding conclusion to draw is that the only rule is to make use of your voice, to continue to engage and question, not to become indifferent or disengaged no matter how difficult that can seem at times. But it is, for me, a powerful reminder that we each have agency, and that taking part, contributing something that helps others understand our way of seeing the world, our perspective on open, our world view (as a women, as a feminist, as a contributor in my case) is a meaningful and important act.
