Slides form my talk at the conference "Rethinking Educational Ethnography: the learning context", Copenhagen 3.-4. june 2014 entitled: "Open Formations – Networked Thinking and Tinkering:Rethinking the People, Processes and Products of Learning Contexts as Open Formations" The talk outlines some of the central potentials of open formation courses, products, processes and organizational settings. Furthermore, inherent empowering, emancipatory and transformative potentials in allowing students to be self-reliant designers/researchers partaking in actual participatory academic communities through submitting research for actual conferences, intervening in and transforming actual learning contexts for themselves as well as for the subjects they design for and through being invited to showcase their didactic designs online and offline to international research communities are also sketched out. Moreover, the students’ (auto)ethnographic quests to break free of their professional practice (as teachers, pedagogues and practitioners of learning) to become adventurous designers/researches that set their own course and curriculum, take place through breaking out of institutional settings and into international research communities and operative learning contexts such as communal schools or museums are hinted at. In conclusion, the students ‘movemental’ journey towards becoming open formations through confidently taking their own places and paces within and across educational settings and learning contexts are adapted into a model for thinking abut digital technologies, learning processes, contexts, people and own professional practices as open formations.

2. WHAT’S THE OPEN PAPER?
 A work in progress
 attempting to present students’
ethnographic processes [the
course]
 in order to perform an
ethnographic analysis of these
processes [the paper]
 in order to develop a processual
concept – open formations – that
rethinks and opens up the people,
processes and products of learning
contexts [the outcome]

3. WHAT’S THE OPEN PERSPECTIVE?
The concept of open formations is an attempt to
rethink the people, processes & products within
learning contexts as ‘agents of change’
 As unbound & unbridled by institutional
settings/contexts – breaking out of courses
setting their own course to find, take & make
their own ‘unsafe’ spaces & places
 As ‘unteachable’ empowered constructors of own
participatory academic communities – being self-
reliant by taking mattering into own hands and
interacting in peer-communities
 As ‘unstructured’ and ‘unsettling’ emancipatory,
transformative forces making own pathways –
crafting own networking and networked
pathways across people, processes, products,
communities outside the institutional territory

4. WHAT’S OPEN PARTICIPATION?
Central challenges of being a learner in open formations
 Not any more simply students taking an online/offline
course on didactic research/design using digital
technologies
 Being in charge of a process:
 DIY curriculum / practicum = so what do you need to
learn & do to matter?
 Being a member of a community:
 contributing to online/offline academia = so how do
you participate to create real impact in communities?
 Being a responsible, self-reliant subject:
 researcher/designer of actual research/design = so how
do you matter & make impact as a professional
practitioner?
 Being an agent of change in society:
 interventions/transformations of actual contexts = so
how do you impart affecting change in unbound
learning contexts?

5. WHAT’S THE OPEN PRODUCTS?
Constructing products-as-processes to meet posed challenges
 So what is important is not digital
technologies/digital products/digital
literacy/online communities in themselves
 But the processes of developing knowledge,
design thinking, ethnographic insights and
analytical findings that flows
as/through/across these products as open
formations
 = a radiant prism of resources, reflections, &
result that allowed the groups – their thinking
& tinkering – to take place as an open
formation in the making
 A united multiverse of products processes,

6. WHAT’S THE OPEN PRODUCTS?
Products as interconnected networked/networking processes
 Moving through the city at night reflecting on things to come – using the ipad as
conversational partner
 Reflecting with participants about their experience of things just passed – using video to
present and discuss this with others
 Presenting own experiences as a piece of autoethnography – using Prezi to make pixi-books
for future students and teachers

7.  Building a curriculum together as a participatory academic community – using videoblogs and textblogs
to present and discuss texts among each other
 Merging processual products – videoblogs, prezi-narratives, mindmaps, scenarioes, academic portfolios
and so on – into a conference paper to interact within online/offline participatory academic communities
 Remixing processual products into a blog containing the variety and entanglement of processes across
learning contexts and domains – binding the multifarious open products together and presenting them as
an open processual formation to construct an ethnographic understanding to act designerly on
WHAT’S THE OPEN PRODUCTS?
Products as interconnected networked/networking processes

8. WHERE’S THE OPEN PLACE?
 In this way a structure of entangled participation in networks constructed
 a vibrant and fluctuating place of ’movemental’ belonging and taking place
 not as a sedimentation into contexts, settings or structures but as a concerted
movement ’across & beyond’ to make places of their own emerge amongst
networked and networking online/offline communities

9. WHAT’S THE OPEN POTENTIALS 1?
By viewing digital technologies as open formations we can
 Move away from digital
technologies as information
containers / set tools for
teaching/learning ’X’
 Towards digital technologies as
putting forward configurable
invitations for interactions /
experiences / relations / networks
to take place

10. WHAT’S THE OPEN POTENTIALS 2?
By viewing learning processes as open formations we can
 Move away from learning towards
set goals you design/teach for
utilizing digital technologies
 Towards learning as creating /
construction participation in open
formations supported by digital
technologies

11. WHAT’S THE OPEN POTENTIALS 3?
By viewing people in/and contexts as open formations we can
 Move away from designing didactic
structures & teaching as contained &
controlled ‘creative’ products &
contexts
 Towards didactic design & teaching
for ‘innovation’ as open invitations to
intervene, move and mobilize people
to take place and participate as
networking and networked unbridled
open formations
 A place where practice, teaching &
learning form, reform, rack and
revolt into everchanging new
formations

12. WHAT’S THE OPEN
PITTFALLS?
 Open formations processes:
 gratification & emancipation or bewilderment & abandonment?
 Danger of giving privilege to certain learning and thinking styles
 Open formation people:
 meaningfully emancipation in bloom or meaninglessly becoming beached?
 Danger of sacrificing one segment of students on the behalf of others
 Open formations contexts:
 wonderful mattering or vicious maddening?
 Danger of making it too agoraphobic by letting go of responsibility and
structure
 Open formations communities:
 powerful self-reliant students networking people, processes and products or
powerless students networked by people, processes and products
 Danger of uninformed and subdued participation just tagging along

13. WHAT’S THE (BULLET)POINT(S)?
 Engaging the empowering, emancipatory and transformative
potentials (& pitfalls) in rethinking people, processes and products in
learning contexts as open formations
 ’Learning contexts’ happening everywhere as emerging formations
in people, processes and products supported by digital technologies
 Becoming ’an educated agent of change’ as the ability to
thoughtfully navigate, interact, intervene in and transform
networking and networked online/offline open formations (people,
processes, products)
 Participatory academic communites as open formations of self-
reliant students taking place and being recognized as peers through
their scholarly/designerly work supported by digital technologies

14. WHO ARE THE OPEN PEOPLE?
Central multiplications opening up people in open formations
 Students accepting the invitation to be (treated as) peers
in open formations researching/designing
 Multi-sited / multi-methodologically across ‘unbound
contexts’
 Multi-fariously / multi-modally scholarly/designerly
‘products-as-processes’
 Multi-layered / multi-level processes of ‘everywhere
formative learning’
 in order to
 investigate actual learning contexts as actual
ethnographers
 present their research findings & results as actual
reseachers
 design actual contextual change as actual intervening
designers
 Not any more simply students taking an online/offline
course on didactic research/design using digital
technologies

15. WHAT’S THE OPEN POTENTIALS 4?
By viewing practices as open formations we can
 Move away from viewing
teaching/didactics as unchanging
stipulated ‘best case’ practice
 Towards teaching/didactics as an
iterative reflective interventionist
practice where practice form,
reform, rack and revolt into
everchanging new formations