Day 3 of OE Global was a good final day. I'll talk about some of the sessions I attended first, and then I'll circle back to the keynote, with which I had some sort-of philosophical differences. I attended a session about the watershed events of system-wide OER implementations where I learned quite a bit about the early successes of organizations like BC Campus, Maricopa College, and eCampus Ontario. Maricopa as published over 400 OER textbooks. BC Campus, which really got going on OER in 2012, has saved students over $40 million in the last decade, in addition to completely changing the culture at their campuses. They attribute a lot of their success to "mobilizing and providing tools for students and their organizations to advocate for themselves." Students were instrumental in convincing BC's Minister of Education to give $3 million to their system to promote OER. Washington State resolved the question of what constituted "inexpensive" on their course-marking utility by first asking the students (having the student union poll over 10,000 of their members) and then getting the students to lobby legislators to have it implemented.
In another session, I learned that the mega-repository, LibreTexts, now has an AI translation utility that is over 95% effective in Spanish, that allows a textbook to be fully translated for about $25. There are about 220 million post-secondary students in the world and 75% don't have English as even a second language. So this seems like the beginning of a big opportunity to extend OER coverage globally. In another session I learned a bit about how libraries are dealing with OER discoverability in their catalogs. One take-away was that Leganto is something Minnesota should look at more seriously (I've also heard this from our own library people), to help instructors make resources available in our learning management system.
The final session of the day (and the conference) was a ten-year retrospective on Z-Degree programs. The very first program offering a complete degree track with zero textbook cost was at Tidewater Community College in 2013. The findings in Virginia show students used the money they saved on textbooks to take additional classes, so the impact of decreased textbook cost on enrollment was immediate. At BC Campus, 34% of students said OER was a big reason they chose their college or university. In California, the 115 Community Colleges have recently received $115 million to extend their Z-Degree programs. Like California emission standards, this will probably set the bar for student expectations nationwide over the next few years as it rolls out. One of the interesting suggestions that came out of this session was that low-income students who gain access to college via "Promise" grants ought to be specifically counseled as they begin, to seek zero-textbook-cost courses.
This was a very good conference for me. I learned a lot that we could apply in the Minnesota system. I was also challenged to think about some issues that have been in the air recently, that were front and center at the event. The final day began with a keynote by Kayla Larson, who is a librarian at the University of British Columbia. She is Métis, I think she said, and works primarily with indigenous knowledge at the library. Her ideas about what she proposed as the Six Rs of indigenous OER were a bit challenging for me. Kayla began her talk by echoing ideas that have been expressed a lot at this conference about "positioning" and "locating" oneself, which I think in this case refers specifically to locating oneself relative to native land acknowledgements. Kayla asked the audience to ask ourselves, "Who are your kin? Where are you from? What is your territory? Who are you accountable to?" The implication, which she stated rather than implying, is that as a consequence of acknowledging that indigenous people had been first on the land of North America, the "Settlers" who took that land away from them have some responsibilities. I agree. But I'm not sure I accept her claim that this responsibility extends to epistemology.
Kayla's argument seemed to be about "what western knowledge has done to indigenous knowledge." I agree that western ways of thinking such as the scientific method have devalued and undermined "traditional ways of knowing", but I think that term, knowing, is being used differently. Kayla seems to imply in her argument that all western ideas are based on the *authority* of dead white guys. I don't think this is supported by history. Giordano Bruno's or Galileo's ideas didn't become accepted because they were white guys. I do agree that structures of ideas and "master narratives" were built in Europe and European America that support and validate colonial and imperial claims (and still do). But this doesn't mean that all knowledge comes down to a battle of authorities for precedence. If everything we know about physics or chemistry was simply a matter of which authority we follow, then I'd say "yeah, let's follow ancient wisdom".
That's not to say there aren't things that science isn't good at understanding. Other disciplines contribute and for that matter, other indigenous traditions, or peasant traditions, or subaltern traditions have things to teach us. I agree with Kayla that it was absurd that until recently native people lost their tribal status in the eyes of the Canadian government if they got a college degree. But I get uncomfortable when she suggests that an indigenous religious perspective should become part of the type of "two-eyed seeing" a previous speaker described. Why indigenous religion? Why not Islam? Catholicism? Tibetan Buddhism?
In the OER space, Kayla seemed to be arguing that David Wiley's Five Rs don't work for indigenous knowledge. Part of her argument is about data sovereignty, or people's right to control information about themselves. I think this is a pressing problem in the digital age and applies to all people, not just indigenous. Jaron Lanier has written extensively about this problem. I'm less comfortable with the idea that "we only tell stories about trickster in the winter", so anyone else who discusses this archetype is bound by the same "protocol". Maybe what I'm uncomfortable with is the idea that there are protocols that determine what can be talked about. Kayla told a story of a friend of hers who had been traveling with an elder. At one point the elder observed, "that flower is called XXXX". Kayla's friend asked a question about it and the elder corrected her, saying "I am just telling you, I am not teaching you." I thought this was a very interesting story, but I'm not sure I take the same message from it that Kayla seemed to want to impart. Seems to me it's just fine for an elder to say, I'm not going to teach you things about this plant that I consider sacred or medically useful or whatever, because you aren't a member of my community or you haven't "paid" in whatever protocol is expected. I don't think that implies that the questioner shouldn't be allowed to seek that knowledge, or talk about it when she discovers it, just because that particular elder (or even a whole community) said no.
In practice, maybe knowledge often does behave like this: belonging to people who are gatekeepers. But is that our ideal? Is the idea of "open" education just based on some type of privileged understanding of freedom of information and speech? Is the whole Liberal tradition just a privileged stance we don't recognize because it's the water we're swimming in? On the other hand, Kandiaronk. The Liberal tradition comes from the indigenous critique of European culture.
I don't feel like because I live on land that had previously been the home of other people, I'm obligated to adopt their worldview. This is a claim to authority rather than evidence. I don't feel like ideas of indigenous sacredness trump anything else. Of course, our local historical society was right to give back grave goods and culturally sensitive native items in our collection. But this additional requirement feels a little bit like "you can't draw a picture of the prophet Mohammed". I don't have any inclination, of course, to draw any pictures; but I still consider that commandment absurd.
There were some interesting questions after Kayla's talk. One woman asked, what about *other* indigenous traditions? Are we supposed to reflect them all? Whose takes precedence? An older man from Europe asked, what about all the years of work we have out into critical pedagogies and pedagogies of the oppressed? I thought this was an especially relevant question. A lot of work has been done, for generations, addressing decolonization throughout the world. The idea that this is new seems to discount this work when people might gain by integrating (and citing) it. Similar to my earlier comment about issues of identity crowding out issues of class.