My OER (open emotional response) to #oer17 | howsheilaseesIT
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-04-09
Summary:
"#Iwill try to be be generous, inclusive and extend notion of open hospitality in everything I do #OER17
— Sheila MacNeill (@sheilmcn) April 6, 2017
That was my response to the #Iwill challenge given as part of the final plenary session at the #OER17 conference this week. Starting with the end in mind seems apt for a post reflecting on the conference. But how did I get here? Why did I end up selecting generosity, inclusivity and hospitality? There are plenty more that are still swirling round my brain.
I think the answer is these are things that I think I can do, and in doing so can maybe start to address some of the bigger issues politics, power, criticality, definition and action that wove their way through all the presentations, discussions and conversations over the two days of the conference.
Thanks to Kate Bowles and her contribution to the panel session I took part in, the importance of hospitality needs to be highlighted. If we want to extend practice to embrace open then we need to provide hospitable spaces – both physical and digital. Spaces that are welcoming, where you can choose where and when to enter, that make you want to explore and more importantly want to stay, come back to and bring others along.
I think we are all a little bit (and a times quite a big bit) guilty of presuming hospitably in our open spaces without really considering how they are experienced by others. What we might assume is an open, hospital place because we know how to navigate it, can actually appear to be quite hostile to those who don’t come from our context, who aren’t privileged to our understandings of how those spaces work and how to interact within them and with 'us'."