29 Open as a Set of Values, Not a Destination
Billy Meinke-Lau
This is the transcript from a keynote delivered November 11th at the Open Education Ontario Summit in Toronto. Thanks to David Porter, Jenni Hayman, Terry Greene, Lillian Hogendoorn, Ali Versluis, Jessica O’Reilly, and Lena Patterson for facilitating a smooth, engaging event and for giving me the opportunity to share some big, difficult ideas with the Open Rangers.
Aloha mai kākou.
Thank you for sharing your time with me this afternoon. Part of this has to do with the very warm hospitality of the typical person on the street. The customs agent at the airport told me to break a leg in my talk – and I’m going to try to do just that.
But being in Canada also feels a little like home because I’ve worked in the “open” for a number of years now, and my worldly colleagues from this place on the continent have continually impressed me with their kindness and generosity. The seemingly small, personal gestures that make working in this community worthwhile do not go unnoticed – they signal a sense of shared values. For the next short while here, I’m going to share with you the brief history of me, my work in things you would consider “open” and how I think this community is actually nearing an inflection point where we must hold strong to our values while we face challenges from all angles. The publishing industry does not always appreciate the work we do, obviously. Policymakers are waiting for us to prove that this thing called “open education” actually works. And while this community grows, I’m afraid we are developing an unhealthy tolerance for the lack of empathy and care required for us to appreciate the human aspect of this work… and this absence will divide us more than it brings us together.
It’s also important for me to mention that as a white male, I am given an extraordinary amount of privilege and quite honestly there are others in this room who should probably be at this microphone instead of me, and that would deliver messages I would stand behind without question. This isn’t to say that I’m experiencing imposter syndrome…as I do understand that I have a place in this community and this movement…but that it’s important to listen to many voices, not just mine.
So I live in Hawaii and I work at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa campus, the “flagship” campus of the system, offering undergrad, graduate, and doctoral degrees. I serve as the OER Technologist for the campus, but that title is something of a misnomer because like many titles, it doesn’t reflect the work I actually do. I’m also a first-year PhD student in the political science department, specifically the futures studies program, which has something of a reputation. I figure that even if at the end of this road I conclude that being a “futurist” is not actually a thing, I’ll at least know better how to argue with the tin-foil hats that pop up from time to time. Or I’ll become one of them, I’m not quite sure.
But I wasn’t