Education was already moving online, when covid19 hit; now learners, K-12 to grad school and beyond seek and find knowledge virtually and voraciously, even outside formal schooling. Meanwhile, museum educators open treasuries of educational digital cultural objects to locked-down publics. OER OpenGLAM promises to free knowledge. Openness counters copyright and paywalls, but it can re-entrench cultural appropriation and omissions. Not “neutral,” metadata reproduces particular cultural perspectives and biases. A digital crossroads arises: the colonial legacies of museum collections and academic canons get reproduced in OER--unless interrupted. What is the pedagogical and methodological potential of metadata, for tracing and transcending the plunder and empire embodied in digital cultural heritage objects’ journeys? These encounters teach critical analysis, agency, anticolonial dreaming, indigenous data sovereignty. We invite educators to think through descriptive metadata and geographic taxonomy as useful platforms for recovering, reclaiming, layering, and liberating cultural knowledges and diverse ontologies.
This would be the first session of a three-part journey. This is where we lay the theoretical groundwork for the more applied, pragmatic subsequent workshops on UX Design and content moderation. So, the short term goal of this Discussion session is to give an efficient, provocative introduction to the pedagogical and popular potential of metadata layering. In particular, this entails introducing OER, OpenGLAM, movements to decolonize the internet, and the complex politics of open knowledge. We relate these topics back to the pedagogical potential of expansive, layered, decolonial (linked, open, descriptive) metadata. The goal for these three sessions at large is to build community among those already doing such work, in OER, OpenGLAM, open knowledge movements and sectors. The goal of building such communities of practice is to advance this work at large.
We're hoping that many efforts and discussions will continue after Mozfest. Share any ideas you already have for how to continue the work from your session.:We have presented preliminary versions of this session at CAA, CC, Open Ed, Open Education Global Conference, MCN, Allied Media in 2020. These all build toward this triple session at Mozfest 2021. We plan to build off of these three sessions with ongoing collaborations in spring and summer 2021 via our Slack channel, twitter feed, Medium story series, and webinars with collaborators. In particular, we plan to use this Discussion session and subsequent workshops as an invitation to Mozfest community members to join us as a cohort of user testers as we iterate the design and build of our OER toolkit.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?:We have had experience designing and leading conference sessions of varying sizes and formats. We are excited by the possibilities of leading a more interactive intimate session with a handful of enthusiasts. Here we would invite participants to unmute (and/or show video if they wish) to join us more directly with questions, comments, and contributions. We are also excited by the possibility of leading a large group; here, we would use Menti polling to engage and interact with the audience participants. And the chatbox, where we invite everyone to drop relevant links as well as offer questions, comments, insights, reactions, and ideas.
Researcher with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, India
Community-based scholar of agricultural policy, critical geography, ontology, and food, farm, land, labor, and data justice. Advancing anticolonial open educational resources from layered metadata for digital cultural heritage objects.
As the Director of Product and Content, Virginia Poundstone works on the product and content strategy for the nascent open access art and cultural heritage project MHz Curationist.