#femedtech Open Space [O-121] Members : OER19

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Public Group Active 5 years, 7 months ago

Wed, Apr 10 2019, 1:45pm – 2:45pm

Authors: Lorna Campbell, Frances Bell, Maren Deepwell, and Sheila MacNeill

Room: G009

Theme: Back to basics

Type: Open spaces (30mins)

Description

Session Description

This Open Space session, facilitated by the #femedtech network, will provide an inclusive space to explore themes and conversations that have emerged from previous OER conferences around equality, diversity and inclusion. This session is for anyone who is interested in these topics, including anyone new to the conference and new to #femedtech. Everyone is welcome to participate.

We will seek to question dominant narratives of “open”, explore whose voices are included and whose are excluded from our open spaces and open practices, whose voices we choose to amplify and whose are silenced. Our session will be embedded in the context of an evolving Open Space that will also explore how we build our communities and practices within that space and elsewhere in the #femedtech network, informed by the work of Michie, Balaam, McCarthy, et al (2018) in their online activism and story-telling during #Repealthe8th.

Questions we hope to consider before, during and after the OER19 session include;
* How do we balance privacy, openness and personal ethics?
* How do we mediate our place in the open community, aspects of which might conflict with our personal ethics?
* Is openness an act of conformance or defiance?
* Is there a performative aspect to openness? If so, what does it achieve?
* Do we feel pressured to be more open than we are comfortable with, or do our boundaries constrain us?
* How do we manage sustainable spaces for exploring challenging issues around open? (Campbell 2018; MacNeill 2018)

Our extra-institutional project is taking place within the broad venture of #femedtech. We welcome all perspectives and encourage participants to raise their own questions and tell their own stories. We acknowledge that our understanding of openness is highly personal and contextualised, and appreciate that there is no standard definition of openness to which we must comply.

In order to seed our discussions and to ensure the widest participation from the community, beyond the physical and temporal boundaries of the conference, we propose to build a dedicated WordPress site to gather stories, thoughts, reflections, responses and reactions, in the form of written content, images, audio, and media. We will open the site prior to the conference and commit to maintaining it for 12 months. Building and supporting this community space will also help us to evaluate whether this is a sustainable model for growing the #femedtech community and network.

Inspired by Dignazio & Klein (2018), we will develop our inclusive values statement iteratively in conjunction with activities on the Open Space and across the femedtech community.

Session content

We will structure this Open Space as a 60 minute open, participatory discussion facilitated by members of the #femedtech community.

The conference session will be one component of the #femedtech Open Space initiative which will run over the course of the year. We will launch the #femedtech Open Space WordPress site in the months leading up to the conference and invite members of the community to contribute their stories and reflections on the questions and themes outlined in this proposal, in advance of the conference in Galway. We will also welcome contributions and reflections on all aspects and experiences of openness from feminist perspectives.

During the session, we will briefly introduce the Open Space for those who haven’t seen it before, and invite participants to contribute and discuss their own ideas and reflections. We will summarise progress to date, invite feedback from session participants, outline future plans, and encourage participants to engage with others’ contributions after the conference.

In order to ensure that engaging with the #femedtech Open Space will be as widely accessible and inclusive as possible, we will seek to enable participants to contribute to the WordPress site anonymously. We will also explore the potential of enabling remote participation in the conference session through technologies such as Google Hangouts, Collaborate, Periscope, Padlet, Twitter and SPLOTs.

References

Campbell, L.M., (2018), The Soul of Liberty: Openness, Equality and Co-creation, http://lornamcampbell.org/higher-education/the-soul-of-liberty-openness-equality-and-co-creation/ (Accessed: 24 November 2018).

D’Ignazio, C. and Klein, L. (no date) Our Values and Our Metrics for Achieving Them. Available at: https://bookbook.pubpub.org/pub/zkzi7670 (Accessed: 24 November 2018).

MacNeill, S., (2018), Open Chasms – definitions dividing or uniting the open community? Some thoughts from #oer18, https://howsheilaseesit.net/open-education/open-chasms-definitions-dividing-or-uniting-the-open-community-some-thoughts-from-oer18/ (Accessed: 24 November 2018).

Michie, L, Balaam, M., McCarthy, J., Osadchiy, T and Morrissey, K, (2018), From Her Story to Our Story: Digital Storytelling as Public Engagement Around Abortion Rights Advocacy in Ireland, CH2018.

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