Foraging for ‘Good Hybridity’ in Third Spaces [O-038] – TWITTER CONVERSATION #HybridSpace Members : OER20

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Thu, Apr 2 2020, 12:15pm – 1:15pm

Authors: Gabi Witthaus, and Gill Ryan

Room: Other

Theme: Caring pedagogies and designing for diverse communities of inclusion

Type: Open spaces – 30mins

Description

Updated Description

Our original plan for a craft-based session exploring concepts of hybridity and the Third Space (see trailer) has evolved, with OER20 moving online and serendipitously creating its own “hybrid” space for the conference.

Instead of a 30-minute synchronous session, we’re going to facilitate a twitter conversation throughout the conference, inviting participants to share something about their lived experience of #OER20 as a #HybridSpace.

If we imagine the First Space as the physical conference, which no longer exists, and the Second Space as our ideal (as a community) of how the conference should work online, then the Third Space is everyone’s lived experience of the online conference. This will be characterised by hybridity, a particularly timely concept as we all merge our work and home spaces to accommodate remote practice in the time of Covid-19.

Throughout the conference, we would love you to tweet photos of your desk at home, your feet in your slippers, your cat on the keyboard and so on, as well as any comments you’d like to share about how you are feeling about engaging online with the conference and the OER community. The creative element may not be entirely lost, as we can also use the Remixer flipbook to visualise our #HybridSpaces.

After the conference, we will collate and share the visually rich expressions of our #HybridSpace as an #OER20 artefact!

For updates, watch #OER20 and #HybridSpace on Twitter…

Original Session Description

Introduction

As open education enters its twenties in 2020, we consider how far it has come since the first ‘open courseware’ materials were published by MIT in 2000. The JISC-funded OER projects that shaped the sector in the UK from 2009 to 2012 were characterised by an emphasis on open licences, metadata, and technical standards for content sharing. The discourse has since shifted towards open educational practices, and has taken a ‘critical turn’ (Cronin, 2016). Today, much of the dialogue about open education takes place within a paradoxically closed community, and has not robustly engaged colleagues in mainstream higher education.

This session will create a space for participants to interact and engage with emerging issues that can help transform the culture of higher education, based on principles of openness, transparency, co-creation and care. The metaphor of the ‘Third Space’ (Bhabha, 1990) – particularly the associated concept of ‘good hybridity’ (Bauhn & Fulya-Tepe, 2016) – provides intriguing possibilities for conceptualising such ‘bridging’ work. The facilitators have previously used the Third Space concept to explore aspects of agency amongst refugees and displaced learners in open and mobile learning (Author 1 & Author 2, in press).

Session format

The Open Space session will have a pre-conference ‘trailer’ – a short video explaining the concept of the Third Space and inviting people to participate. This will be disseminated online and will also appear at the conference via a poster with a QR code.

The session will be structured as follows:
– Introductory presentation by the facilitators on the concept of the Third Space (10 minutes).
– Participants apply Third Spaces thinking to dualisms (such as formal/informal, classroom/online) in their settings, also considering other themes that have emerged throughout the conference. Together, we will identify and share examples of ‘good hybridity’, using template ‘flipbooks’ (both physical and virtual) as a visual communication tool (20 minutes).

Outputs and reflection

The flipbook format will be similar to those on Visual Thinkery’s Remixer site (https://remixer.visualthinkery.com/a/flipbook/), and the outputs from the Open Space will be added to the Remixer for people to engage with after the session. The physical flipbooks will remain in the venue for conference attendees to add to before and after the session.

The facilitators will invite reflection on Third Space ideas put forward in the open space via a post-session tweetchat.

Resources requested

The space can be within a circulation area, with a table for displaying the hard copy flipbooks produced during the session and as people pass through, during the conference. Ideally, the space should be set up in cabaret style, with five to six tables for the session but no chairs, to enable easy circulation of participants. A computer and projector would be appreciated but are not essential.

Anticipated number of participants

We expect approximately 20 participants for the ‘live’ session, but anticipate that many more conference delegates and remote participants will be engaged in the dialogue as they pass through the circulation area, or will contribute to the flipbooks and tweetchat online.

References

Author 1 & Author 2. (In press). ‘Supported mobile learning in the “Third Spaces” between formal and non-formal education for displaced people’, in Traxler, J. & Crompton, H. (eds). Critical Mobile Pedagogy: Cases of Inclusion, Development, and Empowerment. New York: Routledge.

Bauhn, P. & Fulya Tepe, F. (2016). Hybridity and agency: Some theoretical and empirical observations. Migration Letters 3 (13), 350-358.

Bhabha, H. (1990). The Third Space. In J. Rutherford (Ed.). Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (pp. 207–221). Dagenham, UK: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd.

Cronin, C. (2016). #OER16: A critical turn. Blog post, CatherineCronin.net.

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