From another Helen
First, she connected through a Virtually Connecting session planned for OEGlobal with the GO_GN group. Then, I found and read several blog posts she had written, linked from her twitter account. I wondered why I hadn’t found this other Helen before. Lots of common threads were running through her writing. I later met this Helen at the OEGlobal and immediately felt a closer connection to her – as we walked and talked during the tour of old sections of Delft. So Helen Crump is now in my connected, PhD related network.
Her blog post An open reply, realizations and a request #selfoer #CR2518 is the piece of writing that I want to bring into focus here. She links to other relevant resources and conversations that I will investigate separately. The Twitter hashtag for #selfoer is also an interesting place to observe the conversation.
Helen mentions the “socio-material assemblage” of our selves in the open. She says “it combines a human actor (the self) with non-human actors (texts and technology etc.). All very actor-networky (ANT)“. This connects the idea that production of text is a “sociomaterial practice (Goodfellow and Lea, 2016; Gourlay and Oliver, 2013)” and extends it to the production of texts by the ‘self’ as production of self as OER. This thinking is extended when she says “considering selfOER as an assemblage, I was drawn to thinking about how the self was constructed“. This automatically links for me to the reading from Mewburn & Thomson Towards an Academic Self: Blogging during the Doctorate (2018) that I have recently read.
There is a link in one tweet that is embedded into the blog post that caught my attention – defining identity vs subjectivity. This needs to be further examined in terms of how “individuals must situate themselves in relation to power and the role that discourse plays in constructing the subject“.
Helen introduces the link to Foucault’s theories and some writing done by Katia Hildebrandt and Alec Couros, which I immediately looked up.
One observation Helen made really stopped me and prompted further thinking: “This made me realise that I’m seen as a member of the open community and that an observer-participant role just wouldn’t wash. I’m a participant, observing and trying to make sense of the development of openness as practiced by individuals, and as I’ve also come to realise, this brings with it a whole bunch of responsibility. Extra responsibility that requires great care, precisely because it is in the open.” What are my responsibilities to myself, my students, the institution in which I work, the greater open network in which I’m immersed? This will need some careful thought as I venture into this PhD research. It may be resolved through the ethics review process, but I’m thinking it’s going to go deeper than that – with some prompts and tweets made by Apostolos Koutropoulos recently around ethics permissions and requirements for anonymity for openly shared documents such as blog posts and tweets.
From here, she examines the need to openly examine our ‘selves’ as part of the call for criticality in open education spaces, to “engage with the construction of the subject (Knox, 2013) and to take up critical approaches (Bayne et al., 2015)“. In one of the comments to this blog post, Helen references “collaborative auto ethnography, ‘Signals of Success and Self-Directed Learning’ (Bentley et al., 2014)” which may be worth further investigation. This is followed by a comment by Suzan Kogeoglu where she prompts Helen to think about OER we would like to be – “I really like the perspective that the issue is not (should not be) so much about what kind of OER we would like to be. What kind of OER can we be with our resources, with the networks we build, within and despite our institutions? Quite a complex question“. The phrase ‘within and despite our institutions‘ resonated for me since I feel disconnected from the institutional network and tethered to the digital networks in open spaces.
More connections to come in the next post!
