Against Hope: OpenEd24

It has been a long time since I’ve heard Robin speak, or seen action over on the actualham blog, but we have the privilege of getting a sneak peak at her OpenEd24 talk Against Hope. This is not your usual Open Education talk, but it is a leitmotif of many conversations I’ve been in and around over the years. Now, I’ll admit I had forgotten about Robin’s “Open Textbooks; UGH” blog post from 2015, but I did write recently about that conference and how a lot of folks seemed to forget that there was a negative reaction to the overwhelming presence of open textbook work at the conference – as there is a negative reaction to the amount of AI presentations this year.

The leitmotif that hits me for this talk is two-fold. One is about stepping back from the problems right in front of us and asking what do we believe are untenable truths in the contexts and work we sit in? The other is the very big question that comes up every now and then, what is a university for? Robin provides a starting point to pull on these threads beginning from the stand-point of the climate crisis. Weaving through her journey since 2015 she comes to a point where she names and challenges a number of things we believe are untenable truths about our work and what a university is for.

I can’t do it much justice, so you should go watch the piece for yourself.