Alan 00:00:00 Hello, and welcome again to another episode of OEG voices. We're continuing our rounds of recognizing the open education award winners for excellence from 2020. And I'm your host from Open Education Global Alan Levine and I'm really happy to be here with my colleague Una Daly. So how are things on your side today Una? Una 00:00:21 Beautiful sunny day here, Alan. Alan 00:00:23 Excellent. It's always sunny when we do these. Nominations are open right now, through mid July for the 2021 Open Educational Awards for Excellence. And we really hope anybody listening is thinking about a person or project where the recognition could be along the lines of what we're going to hear about today, or there's many other categories. And so a really worthy category that we want to talk about today is, the award for research. I ended up in education and we're speaking to a representative from last year's award winning for the GO-GN Research Handbook, and I'm really excited to have Rob Farrow here. Maybe tell us a little bit about yourself, where you are and the work you do. Rob 00:01:10 So my name is Robert Farrow and I'm a senior research fellow in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK. The Open University has been a leader in citizen's education for more than 50 years now, but that's not my background originally. So, I trained to be a philosopher and specialized in modern European philosophy. It was right at the end of my PhD when I started. I really was just looking for a part-time job to see me through my writing period, and Milton Keynes, which is where the Open University is in, in the UK, is pretty close to where I grew up. So I ended up getting a part-time research job and kind of the connection to it was really through communication studies stuff, which is part of my PhD. Rob 00:02:00 And I was working on a mobile phone learning research project called Motel, which was my first kind of experience doing ed tech research. And I worked my way through a series of different other projects like that. And I almost did a kind of unofficial apprenticeship or post-doc working on just a whole different bunch of different research projects in different departments. Anyway, in 2012, I started working on, open education projects, the first of which was all net or the open learning network. And I came in really at the tail end of that project. And my job was to kind of gather together and summarize and synthesize lots of different outputs from different places. So again, I kind of had a very immersive experience and, you know, I was interviewing kind of experts and leaders in the field who, you know, didn't really know who they were at the time. Rob 00:02:48 Right. I was just like asked to come in and here's a project to work on. So quite privileged, but it gave me a fast track really to get up to speed on a lot of this stuff and to kind of appreciate what was, what was going on with openness and open approaches. So since then, I've pretty much worked on open stuff exclusively. So since 2012 and the big project after on that was the OER research hub. And we were funded by Hewlett to look at the global impact of open educational resources, which was a much sort of Nokia picture back in 2012, which is why there was a need for this kind of research. And again, that led to working in collaboration with lots of different organizations in different countries with this sort of hub hub model, you know, being the center of like different connections and central node in all these networks. Rob 00:03:37 And that was, you know, an interesting approach. And I liked the open practices around that, you know, the way we were sharing staff and kind of encouraging people to share data and perspectives in ways that they normally wouldn't. So this idea ties back to some of my PhD research. There is a continuity that runs through this, but anyway, off the back of OER research hub, we've been successful in getting funding ever since for different projects. So some of them are funded by philanthropy, like Hewlett Foundation, some of them hunted by the UK government, some are funded by the European Union and again, there's the sense of being the central point and a lot of different networks. And what we try to do is both do good quality research into different forms of openness, right? Rob 00:04:23 So I mean our VP in and so on, but we're also interested in openness as a phenomenon itself. Like what does it mean to be open if it's different in different contexts? Can we still say there's some connection between all these different things that people are doing? And so, one of our main projects at the moment, which is the global OER graduate network, which is an international network of support for doctoral students and post-docs who are working in open education research. We encourage them, not just again, to do the sort of good quality research, but also look at their own practices and what value openness could bring, you know, in their practice, you know, to their practice and what they're doing on that kind of side of things. And again, tapping into the sort of philosophy background that I had. Rob 00:05:07 I do some research, which is sort of exploring philosophical dimensions of openness, like the ethical aspects or the epistemological aspects of openness. What does it mean? How can we, you know, this kind of thing. And so it see the sort of the niche that myself, so occupies is a sort of crossover point really between philosophy and educational technology research. There's a lot of overlap anyway with this stuff, but there's a lot of people who do ed tech research, who don't have a philosophy background at all, right. There's lot of computer scientists and so on. And so they have a very different approach. And so ever since back then, so of 2009, when I started working at the AP university, you know, I could see this sort of potential to do more sort of philosophically grounded work in educational technology. And so I've sort of been powering that farro ever since really. I say I'm enjoying it as well. So, yeah, that's my, that's my intro basically. Alan 00:06:01 And it all comes together. I think everything you described made me think about the way the report is put together. It's not just a book of methods, but it's a lot deeper. So, you mentioned the GO-GN Network, how long has that been around and how many participants have there been in the network? Rob 00:06:20 Okay. GO-GN was started in 2013, but not by us at the university. It was started by Fred Mulder, who was a professor in the Netherlands and OER chair. He was interested in the fact that you have doctoral scholars in different countries working on different aspects of things, but normally there is no one to supervise them in their own department who has a background in open education or OER and that kind of thing. So originally the idea of the network was to provide that sort of guidance, expert guidance to research scholars, but also to encourage them to form stronger communities as well. So that you've got, you know, the next generation coming through, know each other through the network and also the supervisors, right? So ways for supervisors to learn more about open education we are and that kind of thing. We took on management of the network, I think 2018. Rob 00:07:12 I could be corrected on that, but it was about then that came with the tail end of the old grant. And we got a new grant with a three-year plan. And what we've tried to do to sort of move on,GO-GN is encouraging more sort of reflection on practice and thinking about openness and ways in which the network can be productive itself rather than just these people knowing each other. But there are some things that come out of this network that are GO-GN products, or find out about word that's where the research methods handbook kind of falls in terms of the trajectory of what you've been doing. I think in terms of membership numbers, I think I want to say that we've got something like 300 to 350 members. Wow. About 200 of those doctoral scholars or people who've finished their PhD or a D I think we've got about 12 people who were kind of alumni effectively. Rob 00:08:07 Who've graduated while members of goji, em, going forward. We were getting people at the start of their studies rather than they're already doing it. And they hear about us, you know, halfway through when okay. We try and support them through the end of that. So yeah, as we're getting bigger, we're getting more well-known who knows where I might leave. I mean, although we were sort of be administrators or the network or the open university, it's fairly decentralized and it's open to even having sort of chapters, you know, regional organizers and, you know, becoming a really federated network. So that may be where it ends up. But for the time being mostly what we do is the, the sort of focal point of our annual interactions is a face-to-face workshop or three to three days, which is normally we organize it so that it coincides with one of the big OER conferences, most typically Open Education Global. Rob 00:08:55 We would invite people to tell us, you know, why we should bring them and on the basis of those applications, plus some other stuff, like where are they in their study arc? You know, where would they benefit from more help now, or next year maybe, or, you know, that kind of thing. So I'm trying to work out who's a good cohort of people. And then we'd bring them all to the conference and attend the conference. But for a few days before we would all present, whether they would all present their work to each other, get critical feedback, get used to kind of the process and that sort of thing, and have a chance to reflect on what they're doing with other people who are in a similar situation. And then when they go and present, present their revised work at the conference. So that's always been the, kind of the core thing that we did. Rob 00:09:35 And around that we would have monthly webinars with guest speakers and that kind of thing, blogging, sharing staff, we have a WhatsApp group and all these kinds of different social media channels where people can connect. And we can share stuff obviously with the pandemic in 2012 and, you know, the face-to-face workshop, but it's not really going to happen. So we've had to do a lot more stuff online. So we've kind of plucked the, up to the amount of online interaction that we have within the network. And that's actually worked pretty well because, you know, not everyone can go to conference, right. Even if you fund it, they can't necessarily go and be there. So if anything has made us a bit more accessible to more people, rather than having this very sort of focus of masterclass, you know, seminar, in some ways it reflects the changing dynamic of the network, right. It's bigger, there's more people in more places. It's easier for us to reach them online than it is, you know, it's getting face to face. So Una 00:10:30 I'm curious, you know, in terms of the students are they, you know, the PhD candidates you've recruited, obviously quite a bit of Europeans north Americans, tell us about further afield. Rob 00:10:44 Yeah. Sorry. I don't have the numbers in front of me. Right. For exactly. Who's where, but we do have members on every continent and we have, we try to, always make sure we have a pretty good, diverse mix of people. We certainly don't, you know, as we're a global network, although the majority of our applications for funding and so on, they tend to be from North America or Europe. Right. Because that's where most people are doing this kind of work and they're already, you know, a bit further down the road. And so we were always quite keen to make sure that we have people from as many different places as we can. Okay. So, yeah, we've got members across Africa. We have members in China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, us, Canada, UK, France, Germany, everywhere, really, you know. Una 00:11:29 Been able to encourage, you know, cause I know, you know, I work primarily with North American folks in my consortium but there's a great interest from many of them in working with folks overseas. And so in terms of exchange of information and trying to do research together and I wonder, do you encourage that? Or, I mean, it might be difficult. I mean, you know, travel lots of around it, but I think the potential, yeah, definitely. Rob 00:11:56 So we do, we're in talks at the moment with John Hilton's OER research fellows group about trying to do some collaborative work with them because they're a similar sort of network. They're a bit more focused on a specific thing, textbooks and quick framework stuff, but there's a lot of potential for overlap, but actually a lot of those fellows are members of GO-GN as well, right. Because why not? Right. It's free to join GO-GN and you might as well, we do already have some good overlaps within our networks and the potential for these collaborations. We would always encourage it. Then it sort of temporary note that I would add is PhD students, Ed D, students that kind of need to focus on their PhD or Ed D and not saying there's a contradiction between doing that and doing these international collaborations, but some people might be sidetracked quite easily, especially if it sounds quite fun, right. To go and visit someone somewhere and all that stuff. So that would be the sort of, you know, the balancing act really leverage the networks as much as possible. But, you know, I would always probably say to our members just to make sure you've got the time and your, your home supervisor is okay with you doing this kind of stuff. Una 00:13:01 I mean, that's more of a post-doc opportunity. And I wonder, you know, as people graduate and move on, are you using them as, you know, mentors for the next generation coming up? Rob 00:13:13 Yeah, That's right. We are. And so one of the ways we do that is when we have our face to face workshops, we invite people who basically finished their PhD while they're a member of GO-GN. We always have one or two of those come back and share their experiences with people and that kind of thing. We now have a fellowship program. So we've had six fellows, I think, with a waiver for early in the year. And to just announce details about the fellowship to the girls on the GO-GN website, they're all people who finished the program. We have a small amount of funding we can make available for them to do a followup project or, you know, increase the impact of what they're doing or that kind of thing. So yeah, we've had six fellows go through the program there. Rob 00:13:56 And so they're now kind of ambassadors for the network, as much as anything, they're almost a little network within a network, right? The fact that the fellows network is there now. So it's definitely, but I think it's important because it allows, it allows people to continue to support each other in a more obvious way. Otherwise you kind of get to the end of the, of the doctoral program. It's like, okay, now you finished off you go, right. It lets it go. Gen-Z for doctoral students. But that's really, you know, not making the most of the, the network. Una 00:14:24 Potential. I think in terms of that, cross-collaboration of those folks who are in their post-doc period, they're obviously looking to establish their reputation. And so there's a lot of advantages for them to work with other folks who are coming through other and other regions as well. Alan 00:14:43 And it seems interesting because, from the beginning, it was like for people who are studying up in education, but it's broadened now to be about the process and, and what it means, and this leads us to the handbook. So what was the Genesis for putting together this handbook? Rob 00:15:01 When we have a face-to-face seminars, the most recent one being 2019, we encourage people to, to share stuff in the group, but not everyone wants to share everything. And that can be for all kinds of different reasons, cultural reasons, or just being a bit shy or whatever, being a bit unsure about something. So what we normally do at the end of the two days is, myself, professor Martin Weller, who's the lead GO-GN, and one of the two other colleagues -all of us are researchers in open education- we would just meet with each of the people for as long as they wanted to really 10 minutes, half an hour, just to discuss any issues that they might felt they might be having with their PhD, just for a perspective, you know, we can give them, maybe some tips on what they're doing or expectation management or whatever. Rob 00:15:52 But one of the things that came up with quite sort of significant irregularity where concerns about research methods and that's normal, right. For PhDs and that's normal for researchers, do you need to be a bit unsure about all the research methods that they're expected to understand and use? So yeah, nothing unexpected about that, but these things are much less frequently raised publicly because who, which, what researcher in training wants to say, I'm not sure I understand what I'm doing right publicly, right. That's not what you're trained to do, but then this raises a question about what's the role of openness here, right? Can open this really be helpful if it's just say, actually, I don't know, and leave and leave it today. Right. So we all need to kind of work out together. Can we find a better way of doing this? So there was one, one aspect of that, which was purely, just people needing help around this. Rob 00:16:45 And, you know, we could point them somewhere and we could say, look, this is a good book on research methods. But the thing that kind of adds a dimension to this is that they're all interested in openness as part of their approach. So the question is, what does open this really make a difference to research methods and why, why would it, why, why, why wouldn't it? So this, this became then a bit more like a kind of hybrid thing where it's like, yeah, it's guidance, but it's also a little bit of a research project on its own, right? How can we describe the potential impact of openness to doctoral students? And that's not necessarily an easy thing to summarize in itself and potentially controversial. So the concept behind this was we wanted to make sure that we actually had authentic advice from people who've done their, or are doing their PhD PhDs at the moment on which methods they really used and did open this make a difference. Rob 00:17:38 So we did a survey of our members where, you know, it was pretty short in about five questions. It was just about, you know, what methods did you use? Did you kind of explore some and then abandon them? Did you find any particular usefulness for openness and these kinds of things just to really encourage people to reflect on it? And so we got those back in and alongside that we were writing a kind of narrative really, which I suppose it's kind of an interesting one because the material itself, right around research methods, specifically the sort of philosophical foundations kind of abstract to most people and difficult to get your head around, but this is somewhere where philosophy can actually be quite useful. You know, one of those rare occasions where philosophy is quite useful. And I did quite a lot of work in my PhD around the possibility of interdisciplinary, social science. Rob 00:18:27 So what would it mean for social science to be interdisciplinary, number one and number two critical or a man's Patriots. That was why I was interested back then. And so I was looking at stuff to do with the history of black positivism and science and these kinds of, you know post-modern reactions to it and this kind of thing. So I was familiar with all of that already from my post-graduate work. So when it came to sort of summarizing, okay, this is why you need an ontology in your research. This is why you need to know what this technology is. This is what you'd call it an ethical aspect of what you're doing. Just kind of laying out. I mean, and also I do, I do research for a living, right? So I'm fairly comfortable banding around that, that language, but I suppose the philosophical side, not everyone can go to that level of sort of depth with it, but then the challenge is get to the right level of depth and then try to make it as simple as possible. Rob 00:19:16 Right. So, because we're really keen to make this book very accessible. Most people, most research methods, and handbooks are fairly weighty times, right? They're not messing around normally. It's like, you're a doctoral student. We're not going to like sweeten, sweeten the blow for you. Right. Here you go. Here's a textbook and that's tough for a lot of people. So we were interested in not even replacing those books right. But something that can sit alongside those books and say, okay, when you're reading about methods, this is the kind of thing that they mean, even if they don't say it. Right. And it's just trying to give people that little bit of sort of a step up to feel a bit more confident. So that was like in terms of the content of what we wrote. And we also pulled from a few places, some openly licensed stuff we were doing before we wrote a book on research ethics and open accessible books. So some stuff we could take from there, Martin Weller wrote some blog posts about how openness influences research and that kind of thing. So we already had some stuff we could pull in as well. Una 00:20:12 I thought, you know, in particular, I liked the guidebook because of sort of this soup to nuts approach where it started with some of the theoretical underpinnings, but then got very practical and gave case studies. One thing I wanted to bring up, and this may be off topic here, but something that I had never heard of before was axiology. And it's the study of values and value judgments. And maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that and maybe how that relates to openness if, if it does. Rob 00:20:43 Yeah. I can try it. Axiology is really, you know, in the context of this sort of stuff, essentially it's research ethics. So axiology is the kind of umbrella category, the holds, ethics, which is the study of morality and right, and wrong and aesthetics, which is the study of beauty and how things appear in forms, that kind of thing. And both of those things at the most fundamental level are about values, right? So you can't reduce things of aesthetic taste to ethics. So there's something separate there where they're both about values. When you look back at some of the sort of research methods, guidebooks more recently, people include this idea of axiology as a fundamental category in an inquiry. So it's a relatively new idea with this stuff, right? And if you look at stuff, you know, constructivist kind of stuff, the interpretivist kind of approaches, there's always this idea of, you know, being sort of embedded in the world, right? Rob 00:21:38 Bringing your own perspective to things and not the kind of traditional view is sort of value, neutral science. It's just finding objective facts about stuff. There's a sort of growing awareness. I would say, certainly since this is all in the late half of the 20th century, almost wearing awareness of this idea that there is no value neutral perspective, right? There's all, you're always coming from somewhere. So one way of interpreting this is that you can say, this is about positionality, right? This is about understanding your own positionality with respect to your research society, whatever else it might be, and kind of acknowledging and incorporating that into how you do your, your work and other sort of take on this could be explicitly about social justice, right? And we know that a lot of people get interested in equity education from social justice point of view, and they see increasing access to education and all that stuff that goes with it as a good end to pursue in itself. Rob 00:22:32 I would say you could probably separate those two things outright. Some people can be interested in social justice and not really recognize their own positionality. That's not really how it happens in practice where they normally would go together, but it's possible that they wouldn't have to. So one of the things that we find with students engage in a lot of them are very, very interested in this social justice angle, especially they may be from the global south. For instance, we've got a lot of members who are coming from outside north America and outside Europe. And they're quite interested in the potential of this to rethink curriculum in their home country. Now, how could they do that? What might it look like? And so these are quite explicit questions in their work, and there's a very sort of pragmatic idea behind a lot of this stuff. Rob 00:23:13 I would say there's a spectrum with in practice where you've got some people who are more sort of like scientific, right? I'm doing a survey and I'm collecting data and I'm going to show you a statistical relationship at the end of this. And at the other end, you've got, it's sort of close to activism, really people that were just kind of producing research for a very specific purpose or have been lobbying or whatever it might be looking for institutional change and that kind of thing. And most people find themselves somewhere along there. I would say somewhere on that spectrum, but if you looked at very traditional approaches to research methods where you would just cover ontology, epistemology, and method, you wouldn't necessarily even think about talking about ethics in this way. You might have to fill in an IRB or an ethics clearance form when you need to get the research signed off by an institution. Rob 00:24:01 That would be the end of it potentially. You wouldn't have to have to reflect on it. So one of the things, you know, the reason for including this stuff on axiology was to say, look, you can, you can think of this as a fundamental aspect of what you do, rather than something that's just sort of, kind of added on the side and like, oh yeah. If my break, my research presentation, but oh yeah, I was, I care about people at the end. Right. You can make it part of it, right from the start and say, look, this is, this is work. That's taking place in a particular political context. Una 00:24:26 And, you know, I haven't heard it quite express that way and open before. I don't think the open ed group has focused on that. So I do think it's very innovative and exciting to see that really well. Thanks. Alan 00:24:44 Have you gotten any surprising or interesting feedback in terms of people who have dug into this and are in the, in the network who are maybe rethinking their research methods or, or thinking about it slightly differently, we're Rob 00:24:57 Slightly sort of early for that one. Let me first talk about the impact of a little bit, and now I'll kind of tell you what's happening next with the whole thing. And it's also, I also want to say a little bit about the art style as well. I was getting to that, but that's kind of when we released it, which was sort of July, 2020, we'd already given people a heads up. It was coming out and we had a Google doc where people who contributed, could go and do some edits and suggest stuff. And that kind of thing, when we released it in July, in July, it just kind of exploded online. Right. And they won't GO-GN members when we're downloading it. Right. They're just not enough goji and members. What was interesting was, I mean, we've had something like, I think probably about 10,000 downloads of that manual now, plus it's basically it'd be licensed, you know, people are sharing it and we know people are sharing it cause they tell us on, on Twitter or whatever. Rob 00:25:52 Yeah. I'm sharing this with all these people. The implication seems to be, there are a lot of people outside of ed research who were also needing something like this accessible, so then they can share it. And it's not very sort of intimidating, you know, to give to people. Now, part of the reason for that, I think is the presentation, the language and stuff. The fact that it's partly about real life accounts of what their people done with their research, but also we had an artistic style, which is quite cartoony, makes everything a bit less serious and a bit easier to kind of understand what's going on and I think that was also a big part of kind of people sharing it and taking it on board. We can talk a bit more about that in a secretary one, or we should, we should make a, not Brian mothers for thanks for being these brilliant visual Thinkery, check it out. Rob 00:26:39 So yeah, we work with an artist called Brian Bryan Matthes yeah. We've been working with them in different capacities for, for awhile, I guess, a few years, but he's very good at kind of giving you illustrations and sort of visual ways to communicate some of the stuff you're getting across. Again, this is quite the individual approach for it. Most Pope, most doctoral research manuals are not full of cartoon penguins having adventures. Right. But we tried to use this idea of a penguin kind of going across the landscape issue, like, you know, starting off. So I was like I said, Pilgrim's progress, you know, kind of, you've got to go through this kind of series of challenges to get to the end of it but you can do it and it's not maybe, you know, once, you know, the way you're going, it's easier to get there. Rob 00:27:24 So yeah. Anyway, there's a paper about the visual style as well which you can find quite easily on the GO-GN website. We were also very pleased to get the award for excellence from OE Global, which was really the cherry on top for the whole project, because it ended up being massively more popular than we anticipated and pretty well received. And there was a few comments here and there online for people who thought it wasn't the way that they would have done it or whatever, but that's okay. Right. Because part of what we're planning on doing is having a second edition this year, possibly at the end of the year might be 2022 realistically. But the idea there will be to go, okay, we've got a kind of checklist of stuff we think we might be able to improve, you know, in the first thing, some feedback that we got here in there, or people said, I wish that section was a bit longer or whatever. Rob 00:28:16 So we've got a little wishlist of stuff there, but we can also now go back to our members and say, okay, now who's got something they want to share that we can add to the, the narrative. So I'm expecting us to do that as soon as we can. It wasn't, it wasn't planned, but we think not much extra work would lead to a good improvement of the resource. So the idea is there'll be able to kind of potentially keep increasing it. Right. You know, who knows? It could eventually just become a kind of online document that anyone can do new versions of and stuff like that. It's difficult to say, but it's, it's because it's all open. It's very open to that sort of revisioning and adaptation and future. In the meantime, we have a companion volume that we're working on. The first book is about research methods. Rob 00:29:01 The companion book is about conceptual framework. And the idea with this is it's less fundamental, I suppose, right. Then the research methods book. But the idea will be to say really that there's, there's quite a lot of confusion around the language around some of these, some of these sort of frameworks that we use in research, right. When is it a theory? When is it a kind of, as sort of a tentative framework, but someone's propose and you know, now I'm going to use that. I don't even know, but I don't believe it's true necessarily, but I can use it as a tool. Are you confident doing that to, can you make that distinction? Do you feel like you kind of understand the fundamentals of these different frameworks that people commonly refer to? How have you used them in your own research? You know, what did it, what did it mean to you? Rob 00:29:46 And again, all these things, how is openness to making a difference to this? Does it lend us towards certain approaches rather than others? Did we share theoretical assumptions with each other, these kinds of things and then they're running, it's a method obviously, but they are not the same thing as these kinds of fundamental, you know, what is research method questions? So it could be that we, you know, so this is still a work in progress, right? We've collected data from some of our members. And we should be, I think, publishing in August this, this companion book. But again, hopefully it could be another useful resource. There's a sort of a sort of third sort of sister to this, right. Which is that we've been getting our members to review research papers. So this is another new thing. And in this phase of the project, so last year we published a research review for 2020, where what we do is we identify 20 or so interesting recent papers on open education. Rob 00:30:40 And then we get volunteers from within our membership to write short reviews, 500 words, something like that. We then compile those. And we also write some reviews ourselves like that. The administrator, faculty staff, we also write some reviews and we put it all into a report and publish it openly. And then you said the original vision for all of this was by the time you get to the end of three years, which is our current grant phase, you can then compile the research methods, handbook, conceptual framework guide, and the research reviews into one book. And then that is the GO-GN and sort of handbook, if you like for new members or have just started a PhD, here you go. And he's a kind of shortcut. So in a way, that's the sort of, that's the value point, right? It's getting to that point where you've got this kind of crowdsourced knowledge about how to do this stuff at the moment, these kinds of handbooks, these are way points towards getting to that handbook at the end, which is like the master handbook. It sounds like there's room Alan 00:31:41 For research and other research, which I hear what you're saying and also that like you have momentum going so that the network itself is providing all these opportunities for, for these larger products than maybe anticipated. Una 00:31:56 I love that book of reviews. I think that is going to be really important. You haven't released one yet. Have you, Rob? Rob 00:32:03 This one already out for those sheep, but not for this year Una 00:32:05 Yet. Okay. I'm sorry. I missed it. So I'll have to check that one out. Rob 00:32:09 It's called research review 2020. Yeah. I mean, that's going to be, do I have time to read all the papers and, you know, especially if I'm not, maybe we should borrow that idea if you will, but this is the kind of thing where potentially we could collaborate outside the network to produce these kinds of, you know, here's our, so there's a bunch of people who are interested in something specific, right? Like micro-credentials or whatever. How do we use AI in open education? Okay. We could do a targeted little literary review essentially is what it is and then just produce that book that's out and it wouldn't take more than a couple of months. So we're quite interested in these kinds of like agile, rapid turnaround things that use the network, right? So we're using the network to be able to do it quickly or to be able to do something. We couldn't do it ourselves in that time period. So it's kind of, you know, a test of, does it work? Can you do this then? Do people respond? Alan 00:33:10 Like, what are the ways that people can participate? Maybe if they're not necessarily, you know, a graduate student researchers, Rob 00:33:18 You can join, GO-GN just as a friend of the network, whoever you are, right? There's no criteria for joining GO-GN. You wouldn't be eligible for some of the face-to-face stuff or the fellowships, but they wouldn't be relevant to you anyway, in a way, right. But you can join up and attend the webinars and be part of the network and use it to ask questions or whatever, anyone can do that. Write blog posts for us, you know, connect that way. All those things are very easy, very doable. And we do have, you know, a significant number of members who were like, that might be a bit more casual in that connection to things. But I think instead of useful source of information, you know, even if you're just interested in what goes around on the circulars and stuff like that, Alan 00:34:01 That makes total sense to be part of that network. Rob 00:34:04 Getting involved. We have webinars every Wednesday, the first Wednesday of every month is our kind of regular slot at anyone's welcome to attend those. We have guest speakers and we also have sort of more workshop style things and the initial sketching and sort of vision stuff for the research methods handbook was done in GO-GN webinar. Right. And that was the initial kind of skirt scoping and feedback on the idea and that kind of thing. So yeah, there are ways to influence what I'm doing. It's also quite easy to find us and contact us, right. So we're on Twitter. So our main kind of external facing thing apart from our own website, which is go-gn.net and there's lots of different ways to connect also once, you know, so who some of the members are and you work out, who's doing the stuff that's closest to your own interests, then you can just basically you pass through the network to them. Rob 00:34:58 Right. And you find something useful there. So partly it's the stuff that we put out there. It's partly the stuff that our members are putting out there, but the main thing really is the community, which is very for a bunch of people that maybe haven't met. Right. And don't necessarily see each other that often when they have, it's a pretty tight knit group. Right. And it really comes down, I think, to trying to model what it looks like to be supportive and collegial and do high quality work in this field while also kind of making the most of those open dimensions and then sort of embracing it as a, as a way to, as a way to do research and as a way of kind of being, you know, a researcher that just keeps getting stronger, that sense of like the values of that community. Rob 00:35:49 And they're not, they're not imposed, they're sort of emergent, right. It's people who were interested in the same sort of missions, the same sort of ideas. And hopefully they feel connected in a way that they didn't feel before they joined the network. And another, you know, obviously we are primarily there for the doctoral students, the kind of, you know, feedback that people can get from just asking within the network. Can anyone have a look at this? You know, this piece of work that I've got on the go, but people who have graduated from the program are rapidly becoming leaders in their fields. And increasingly now if you go to a conference, half the program is like, yeah, that's a good thing. Really. It's proof that people are coming through and it's all sort of working. And then our work is pretty strong. I think pretty much that's Alan 00:36:35 You've modeled how networks should operate. So, I really want to thank you Rob for taking the time to bring us insight into GO-GN and the research methods handbook. And I want to thank everybody listening to this episode of OEG Voices. This is the podcast that we're producing here at open education global. We're going to have some music that will be in the final production. It's open license, it's called "Joyful Meeting" by an artist named Crowander found at the Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons attribution non-commercial. And so you'll find this episode at voices.oeglobal.org, and we really want you to engage and follow up in conversations with Rob and our space at OEG Connect. And again, we really appreciate you bringing this in and want to remind people, we really encourage you to think about nominating similar projects or other projects for this year's Open Education Global Awards, and we'll be talking to them throughout next year again, and just repeating the cycle. So I really appreciate it. Thank you, Rob, Una for sitting in on this conversation. Rob 00:37:460 Thank you. Thanks for having me. Una 00:37:44 And great, wonderful to see Rob you too.