This document discusses the challenges of creating an open and equitable online space. It outlines 4 key challenges: 1) Articulating why openness is sought; 2) Taking a critical approach to openness; 3) Developing interpersonal skills for open scholarship; and 4) Engaging in inclusive democratic practice whether open or not. It argues that moving from just a functional online space to a "conscious community" can help address these challenges by acknowledging individuals, celebrating diversity, and fostering understanding between all members through respectful communication. The goal is to create a space where all people feel they can freely express themselves and participate fully.

1. Working Towards a Sense of Equity and
Dignity in Open Online Spaces
#OER17
Suzan Koseoglu
Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre
Goldsmiths, University of London

2. Who are we?

3. A little bit about Goldsmiths,
University of London

4. We work in partnership with Goldsmiths' staff to practice, support and
promote excellence and innovation in teaching and learning.
• help Goldsmiths shape the Learning, Teaching and Assessment
Strategy
• develop institute wide initiatives relating to technology enhanced
learning
• run courses and workshops, the PGCERT program
• offer HEA fellowships and awards
Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre…

5. Why Openness?

7. Our context:
Open scholarship… Identity…

8. We wanted to create an online meeting space but...

9. Contextual Realities

10. Barriers for moving towards open
practices involve much deeper issues than
lack of technology, support, time or skills
– existing hierarchies within institutions,
lack of diversity or limited framing of it,
lack of shared vision are all barriers for
institutional openness.

11. Challenge 1. We need to be able to
articulate why we seek openness.

12. “The open education movement and the creative
commons support universal access to knowledge. They
are intentionally democratic movements (Capetown
OED 2007, Creative Commons 2015). So the challenge
that open education presents to established modes of
teaching and learning, scholarship and knowledge
production, should go beyond local organisational
‘disruptions’ to global issues of educational capital and
social justice.” (Beetham, 2017)

13. “Though few would argue against framing
practices around ideals such as democratization,
human rights, equality, and justice, it is presently
unclear whether these ideals are essential
components of the open scholarship movement
or are merely incidental to those who are
pioneering the field” (Veletsianos & Kimmons ,
2012)

14. “Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into
the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated –
overpopulated– with the intentions of others.
The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes one’s "own"
only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own
accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own
semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of
appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal
language... but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other
people's contexts, serving other people's intentions; it is from there
that one must take the word, and make it one's own” (p.294).
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1992).

15. Challenge 2. We need to have a
critical attitude towards openness.

16. We shouldn’t advocate for openness, we
should advocate for the positive things
openness might enable, which are all
subjective...

17. Challenge 3. We need to have the
necessary “social skills and cultural
competencies” to engage in open
scholarship (Jenkins, 2009).

18. Let’s also talk about “carefulness,
thoughtfulness, humility, criticality,
receptiveness, resilience, courage, stillness”
(Barnett 2004 as cited in Bell 2017)

19. Challenge 4. We need to engage in
democratic and inclusive practice,
whether we are open or not.

21. Conscious community: A vehicle
for institutional openness

22. Moving from function to…

23. … conscious community
(Shaffer & Anundsen, 1993)

24. acknowledges “members’ need for personal
expression, growth, and transformation”
(Shaffer & Anundsen, p. 11).
“…honors the individual as well as the group,
knowing that the well-being of one cannot
be bought at the expense of the other” (p.
11).

26. “Such a community renews itself
regularly, celebrating individual and group
passages and revising and recommitting
to its vision and mission. In doing so, it
challenges its members and itself to move
beyond roles to wholeness” (Shaffer &
Anundsen, p. 11).

27. “Healthy communication reconciles
differences, deepen intimacy, fosters a sense
of wholeness, and opens individuals to a
broader view of themselves and others”
(Shaffer & Anundsen, p. 253).

28. Seeking for a space where we “can breathe”
(Cronin, 2014)

29. Seeking for a space where we have “identity” …

30. Seeking for a space of our own...

31. Thank you!
s.koseoglu@gold.ac.uk