OEG Voices 54: Walking on the Flaggy Shore With Catherine Cronin
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Alan Levine: And hello, we are recording and welcome. I am Alan Levine, your host from OEGlobal. I'm really excited to have a conversation today with Catherine Cronin. We could talk for hours and also so happy that my colleague Una Daly could join us.

How are things with you this morning, Una?

Una Daly: It's rainy here, but otherwise, yeah, I'm so glad to be here. It's always wonderful to spend time with Catherine and you, Alan.

Alan Levine: I've known Catherine for a long time and like it's another person where I can't even follow the origin point. I know it's been so many interactions , through blogs and social media and meeting in person at conferences. And I have to credit when I did a podcast in December with Jonathan Poritz, I started asking our guests to recommend other people who we should invite for a show.

And Catherine was the first one on his list. And I was like that's easy. I know her very well and I've been overdue to talk to you. So first of all, I'm blabbing so much, Catherine. Good morning and tell us how you're doing today and tell us where you are right now.

Catherine Cronin: Good afternoon from rainy wind swept Kinvara County, Galway. That's where I am, about five miles, about four miles from the Flaggy Shore, which you know by my photographs, Alan.

Alan Levine: I know I want to talk about that. Flaggy Shore just connotates so many things, but, we got to know each other through, through our work, but also through Instagram, seeing your pictures there and it's just majestic. So what is it about Flaggy shore. Let's talk about that.

What's the magic there?

Catherine Cronin: I live in, as I said, a small village called Kinvara in County Galway, which is about maybe 20 minutes to drive into the city of Galway, where the university is and where I worked for many years. But Kinvara is really on the border between County Galway and County Clare. And I'm quite near the coast, so if you go out to this area called the Flaggy Shore-- actually the name comes from these big natural flagstones from from the Ice Age when the ice, scraped across and created these huge flat flagstones.

So everyone calls it the Flaggy Shore. And when you walk along the Flaggy Shore, you're right on Galway. To the north you have Galway, beautiful Galway and the mountains of Connemara. And to the south you have Clare and The Burren. So it's just beautiful and wild. And Seamus Heaney wrote one of his most well-known poems, "Postscript" about a walk along the Flaggy Shore.

Alan Levine: And I know you, you've quoted that poem before. We might ask for a reading, but let's get to talking you and your work and your influences and what you think is important. But I always like asking, tell us what, where'd you spend your childhood years and what were you like as an early student?

Catherine Cronin: Great question. I grew up in the Bronx in New York City. And I went to school and we'll say like the late 1960s and the 1970s. It was a time of great social upheaval in the US which you'll know Alan. And my parents were very politically aware, so as were the teachers in my school in terms of kind of understanding what was going on in the US in terms of, racism, sexism, the Vietnam War. It was something that was talked about at our dinner table and in school and in the playground literally. So it was a fantastic place to grow up and our neighbors in the apartment building where I live were from, a lot of countries around the world.

My father worked in the fire department in New York City. So it was a wonderful place to grow up and . I've made my home in Ireland, now. I've lived here half my life. It's home for my children my grown children. But when I get off the plane and walk down the street in New York City, I always feel like the rhythm of walking down the street in New York City is like the rhythm that's inside me.

I don't know if you get that about Baltimore, Alan, it's something really deep and wordless. It's just I know this.

Alan Levine: It is. And I also know it from having spent time in, in New York and I did an internship there as an undergrad and you see it in the movies and the TV shows, but it is so different when you're in the middle of it that, that vibrancy. I remember like you always get this impression, these stories that people in New York are mean and rude.

They're so nice. 

Catherine Cronin: It's just the opposite.

Alan Levine: I know. 

Catherine Cronin: Everyone will talk to you.

Alan Levine: It's a secret. 

Catherine Cronin: When I was young, I was quite talkative in class and out of class, and that's what I remember about being young and in school.

Alan Levine: Do you remember like teachers that were really influential?

Catherine Cronin: Yeah I, different teachers Mr. Cathill I remember who really encouraged me in what I would call now Maths or Math. And gave me a lot of confidence and a social studies teacher, Mrs. Ross. Yeah. It's amazing how these people just stay in our minds, don't they? Just giving you horizons beyond where you needed you to stretch beyond where you thought you could go.

Alan Levine: See, I just got one of the phrases I wanna quote when I write this up. That was brilliant. We'll wind our way, talk about to the work you're doing now, but your interest or entree-- what drew you or made you aware of open education or open pedagogy?

Catherine Cronin: It's so interesting that you ask that cause it's a question I often ask of people as well. People come from all kinds of different places, don't they? My initial degree was in mechanical engineering and I migrated from that into it the early days of IT, and I was working in the IT industry.

Then I had an opportunity to teach in in a master's in IT program at the university in Galway in the 1990s and also with the Open University. When I was working with the Open University and with NUI Galway I started getting involved in really early days of online education.

So I was teaching with the Open University when they brought in the CoSy system, which was the first kind of text communication system between students and teachers. And that was in about the mid 1990s. So I progressed along that kind of online digital education in the early days.

And then when I realized that I didn't come find my way to OER but I found my way to open tools where other educators who were teaching online, were sharing their stories and ideas with each other. I got it then, and from there I just followed the threads, connected with people and found my way to Open from that.

And once I found open education, it clicked with so many things that I had done in my life. Community education, women's studies. I had done a master's degree in women's studies. Because again, others have noted as well that, a lot of the roots of open pedagogy are in feminist pedagogy.

So it made sense for me in a lot of ways. And here I am.

Alan Levine: That's a rich path of influences. I just noticed that your background in mechanical engineering, some, IT Una spent time working in the IT field. I came from science. I often think about having a grounding in a specific discipline that you really focus intently really help rather than studying educational technology. Does that make sense?

Catherine Cronin: I'm not sure because it maybe makes sense for us, but, thinking of other people who have followed other paths because what you study is only part of who you are and what you bring to your work, isn't it? So like from engineering, even though I haven't practiced it as an engineer in a long time, I consider myself a structured problem solver.

And I would say to my friends and colleagues, is my engineering slip showing because, I'll just be really structured about how I approach something and want to get it all organized. But in terms of the worldview of mainstream engineering about having right answers and wrong answers and leaning towards technology as a solution. I wouldn't consider myself a typical engineer and other experiences, formed who I am.

Una Daly: I think that background is so valuable. Having a science background because often when you're engaged in conversations, I will say that there's a little bit of one-upmanship in the engineering field, I'm sure. I've experienced that certainly as a woman, that it's I have to act differently.

And so having the background, having that knowledge brings you into the conversation in a different way than if you didn't have the background. So I can feel quite confident when I enter conversations on technology having that background of over 20 years working in the industry.

Catherine Cronin: I, I get that completely. Una yeah I'd agree.

Una Daly: It's lovely to hear about the Flaggy Shore, and I don't know if you know this, Alan, but Catherine and I do have roots in common. I didn't grow up in the Bronx. I grew up in San Francisco, but I had relatives in the Bronx who I visited as a child. And my mother is from Galway County she's from not very the other direction from Kinvara, but out of Galway City and grew up on Galway Bay and yeah, it's it's a very near and dear place to my heart.

Alan Levine: We're having like a Galway / Bronx reunion here. So that, that's part of the beauty too, is finding that those overlaps that we have with people. I'm curious too, like I, I'd like to hear, you did a lot of fantastic work with the National Teaching and Learning Forum in Ireland and made a lot of things work at that level.

But is there something, and it's a little bit like how do you do this? Can you characterize like what, like the culture in Ireland? Or what life there means that influences like this support and interest in open education?

Catherine Cronin: Ooh. That's an interesting question. I was chatting to the son of a good friend of mine over the holidays. He moved to Japan three years ago and we were talking about the fact that when you move someplace, usually it's within about six months or to a year, you can really describe to people like how things are different and, what's strange, what's the same, what's different.

After a while when people ask you what it's like, you just say, It's just normal, because you've adapted to the culture. So in some senses it's hard for me to answer that question, but I think I can address it. Part of it is the size of Ireland. So like the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning was just a small body and it worked in collaboration with, all of the higher education institutions in Ireland.

And when I say all of the higher education institutions in Ireland, that number is in the 30s. Okay. I did some work with the Virginia Library Association. And that was about the same size. We were having really interesting discussions, whereas when you talk about a state like California, it dwarfs the size of, Ireland's higher education sector.

The other thing is that what we just did about figuring out our connections or whatever, Una will know, this is what Irish people do all the time. That you meet and you figure out, who you have in common and invariably you'll find something with only about four plus million people in the country.

There are a lot of personal connections in this sector. So even though those higher education institutions that I described are really diverse in ways, in size and focus, some are technological higher education institutions, some are big universities, there's a connectedness and an affinity with all the people that work, across the sector.

Which I think helps.

Alan Levine: And it's really not fair to ask you to characterize Ireland. I remember a speaker once who came when I was at Maricopa, and he was talking about his experience as a missionary and like a tiny south Pacific island of 400 people. He told them they lived in the north. He says he wanted to walk to the south cause there's a little general store and they're like, "Oh, don't go down there. Those people are very not nice." All cultures have like such diversity and things that we don't know about. So it wasn't really fair to ask.

Una Daly: This is so true of Ireland as well.

Catherine Cronin: Does that resonate with you, Una?

Una Daly: Oh yeah, because my father's from a different county, from my mother in Ireland and oh, the culture is so different. I think that's true of all small countries and yeah, get that diversity even though they're basically cousins twice removed.

Alan Levine: Can you tell us a little bit about I can't ask you to summarize, but what was the work that you did with the National Teaching and Learning Forum? 

Catherine Cronin: Yeah, I'd be happy to talk about it. I was hired as the the digital and open education lead within the forum, but all of the work within the forum was collaborative, both collaborative within the small staff of the forum and with the sector. Almost every project we did, you'd be working together with people from different institutions, but there needed to be a focus for the work when I came in and we came to call that "developing open capabilities."

It ended up being really generative concept and kind of pillar around which to organize the work. It draws on the capabilities approach, from the area of human development, which is about what a human is able to do and to be. And the key I think for me around capabilities is that you don't look at just a person's abilities, but you look at a person's abilities within a bigger context, the kind of social, political, economic educational context. For the National Forum to state as its overall aim to build and develop open capabilities, recognize that people, students and staff and everyone are coming into the higher education sector with a whole range of different backgrounds and sets of skills and levels of confidence .

They're in different kinds of institutions, but we really want to be sure to help each person to develop. So yes we need to talk about policy and strategy and structures and so on, but if the focus is helping each person to develop their capabilities, then I think that we're winning.

And that's winning in the sense of that is what many of us talk about when we talk about critical and social justice approaches to Open. To be able to do that, within the auspices of a national organization was really exciting. And a lot of people really, in different institutions got on board with that and are continuing that work.

Alan Levine: Which is inspiring cause it, it moves past, like sometimes we get so focused on the stuff and resources and the open things. 

Catherine Cronin: Yeah. And they're complementary, right? They're totally complementary. I also think it shows that we're always building and developing because, I've done presentations and had discussions with UNESCO and the first OER recommendation is to build capacity.

And we just took that and rift on it and just, for our context here and on and said we thought that, building capabilities, again, is a more generative concept. And we focus our work on that.

Alan Levine: Yeah and I love the word capabilities and capacity cause it, it is pretty broad and so that leaves a lot of room to really push that out and understand what it means.

Una Daly: And did that lead to the work then that you did the more recent project with GO-GN, where you worked with the communites? 

Catherine Cronin: Yeah, exactly, because if you're always thinking about the individual in their context and what they're able to do in their context. Last January a year ago I moved from the National Forum to working independently and I applied for that fellowship with GO-GN and knew that I wanted to change my focus and with my involvement in different, community groups and activities, I knew a couple of things.

One is that there generally isn't an awareness about open licensing and open education at the community level and also, the work that's happening there is so essential and so fundamental, it's completely connected to what the community needs. By definition, they're community organizations.

So that thing that sometimes happen in higher education or are we talking to the students and are we talking to all kinds of staff? That distance is gone, because the community groups are actually, the people in the communities are doing the work, but they're often working with very few resources.

And, little support. So I sought to engage with community organizations around what I called, the name of the project was Just Knowledge, but it was around the concept of open knowledge. So I just went in and asked, " What are you sharing, with your community? How are you sharing it? What challenges do you have doing that?" And particularly in a post- can we say post pandemic? Particularly in a COVID environment. A whole lot of things had started to be done online that had never been done online in community groups because of COVID so it was ripe for having those kinds of discussions.

So they said, oh, we're sharing this online, but we don't really know what we're doing. Or we're thinking about sharing this online, but we don't really know how to do it. And when someone wants to share something, and that's the milieu in which you talk about open licensing., It's magic.

You're not going in talking about open licensing to someone who's maybe not desperately trying to share something at that moment. You're going in and talking to people who really want to connect with their community and find out that this is how people globally are doing it, that it's a UNESCO recommendation that people do it this way. And it was brilliant. 

Finding the organizations was the hardest part, but the kind of relationships that we built and what happened, in the project was-- I learned so much. It's fantastic.

Una Daly: Do you wanna talk about one specific example of the community organization?

Catherine Cronin: Yeah, I'll mention one comment which you might like, which is there was one organization called Green Sod Ireland, which had developed education programs around biodiversity from primary school up to adult education. And they had this one course that they wanted to share.

They wanted to put it online. And we started talking about copyright and they said, yeah, we know that copyright gets in the way and so we just call it "copyleft". So they thought they had made up that term. It was just so wonderful. So it wasn't even like trying to explain the barriers.

They understood the barriers, they knew it, but they just didn't really know how to get past it. So it was a very short conversation about, these are open licenses, this is how different people use them, and they just ran with it. I helped them do one course and now they are just, doing it with others as well.

Compared to some of the kind of long-term challenges that you have in institutions where you're trying to change culture and so on it was really refreshing and really rewarding.

Alan Levine: Can you give us a quick rundown of the other organizations that you worked with?

Catherine Cronin: Yeah. The organization that I probably spent the most time with was the Galway Traveller Movement. And that's group based in Galway that supports the traveling community. The Galway Traveller Movement itself is comprised of travellers and Non-Travellers working together to combat racism against Travellers and human rights for travellers who are often, excluded and marginalized in various ways in society here in Ireland.

They had done a project about three years ago where they tried to map all of the historical Traveller campsites all across County Galway, and it was on a big oil cloth map, and they just had an idea, what about if we did this digitally? So that's what I helped them to do. We created a pilot version of that, and of course when you do it digitally, then you can add photographs.

Some of the people in the Galway travel movement recorded stories with older people, talking about the histories of different campsites. And this can end up being a really rich resource and other Traveller groups in Ireland are doing something similar. Exciting conversations started to happen about what if we connect this, all across the country.

So that's work that's in progress, but that I just worked with during the year. And then the third group was another group around biodiversity, which is around the declining population of Swifts. And again, this group was trying to share information about how people can build nest boxes and conserve swift nesting sites.

And they had done work all across Europe and so on. Their work had been translated into other languages, but they never knew about Creative Comments licenses. So now their booklets are all getting CC licenses so that people know that they can use the work, wherever they want to use it.

Alan Levine: And it sounds like these groups, they desperately want their work to be shared. That's the point of what they're doing, right?

Catherine Cronin: That's the starting point. Yeah. I suppose the end point of that project, because it's, it was less than a year, the project, the end point was, I'm talking with the Community Knowledge Initiative at the University in Galway, which is the university based group that supports community organizations in all kinds of ways about, how can we support more of this kind of work, cause this is just three organizations and there's so much, important work going on in communities. So I'd like to see it grow. 

Alan Levine: When you were first meeting with them, what did you find was the effective route? You hinted at this a little bit that it wasn't coming in licenses, licenses. Can you speak more about what really appealed to the communities like that didn't make them worried or scared about what, or overwhelmed by what you are proposing?

Catherine Cronin: Yeah. That's such a great question, Alan, because that was the kind of tender point, isn't it? That initial meeting and initial conversations about not coming in and saying, I can do this. . That's wasn't what I wanted at all. So one thing that helped was that I was able to say, it was a research fellowship, for a set period of time that had the support of GO-GN based at the Open University and that what we did in those projects would be shared with other researchers. And that ideas from those researchers would come back to the community groups. And that did happen in the mapping project with the Galway Traveller Movement. I shared it at the OER22 conference and in researchers that OER22 knew of other indigenous mapping projects in Australia, Canada, North America.

And I brought that information in those examples back to the Galway group. So that kind of materialized right away for them. But the other one I myself started with the seven principles of data feminism. They do a lot of their work with community groups and social justice work.

And really it's about just listening. What do you do? What are your challenges? What do you need? I have this small, specialized knowledge, but I'm here to learn. And if I can't help you, know I might be able to connect you with other people. So it was really that approach was key.

Alan Levine: I would guess though that like the things that came out of these three groups could be the kind of momentum that spins out for other groups to say, oh, look, we can do this. And I'm intrigued as well. I'm just thinking about this idea about things that are place-based or the idea about maps because that's where a lot of this work is rooted. 

I spoke last month to Ewan McAndrew at University of Edinburgh and, we're talking about the Scottish Witch Project, which is just magical about how that can it gets people excited about the information there, not the platform or the technology.

Catherine Cronin: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. It's a great focus for the work, different to what we do in higher education.

Una Daly: I wanted to ask you, do you get resistance sometimes when you bring in these conversations about the open licensing and maybe a sense that we don't really need that. We just share this stuff, and why would we be worried about these licenses, per se, and I know it's an education.

Catherine Cronin: Yes. Far less resistance than in higher education. Far less resistance.

Amazingly. The one thing that helps is I do share, the UNESCO approach, just so people realize this is not like an academic thing that universities are doing. This is about the ground level ethos of Open Education, about equity, globally.

So that helps. I share the UNESCO call to action during COVID and so on. But secondly, there's a bit of agency there because I prepare a short description of the different licenses and why people might choose different licenses, so that if there's any inkling of, oh, I'm not sure I'd want someone to use only part of it or whatever, that they can choose a slightly more restrictive license, if that's important to them.

And so that bit of agency I think is really important. 

Una Daly: Yeah, and I think when I've encountered, not resistance, but just like wanting to go deeper, they're not just community groups. They're, I hesitate to call them for-profit. Some of them are for-profit businesses. I'm not sure how profitable they are, but they might be doing films or something and that are based around their community.

And so there's some concern, I guess maybe about appropriation from once put it out there, who is gonna reuse this and maybe they're gonna use it, maybe not even for commercial purposes, cause you limit that, but it may just reuse it in a way that wasn't originally anticipated by the creators.

Catherine Cronin: Yes a hundred percent. With the two biodiversity groups, they immediately chose open licenses. And with the mapping project, the intention was never, that the map itself would be openly editable. That wasn't the case. But the discussion about Openness and what Open means meant that we had really productive conversations about privacy and consent and those kinds of things.

It opened the door to a lot of those discussions. And to be honest, the various projects that the Galway Travel Movement had done had hit snags before around things like consent for use of photographs and so on. So we were really clear upfront about the practice of how we were gathering information and what would be shared and who would be shared with.

Una Daly: And that takes time. 

Catherine Cronin: Yeah, it takes time. And building relationships and building trust.

Una Daly: And that sounds so similar to the folks up in BCcampus talk about some of the work they do with their Indigenous communities. 

Catherine Cronin: And I learned a lot from them. There was a wonderful webinar last spring about about OER and indigenous communities and that was really helpful for us.

Una Daly: Yeah.

Alan Levine: Wow. I had this question in my mind and then I just lost it, but I, now I got it. Now my brain's working. 

I was losing track of how many conversations on these podcasts I've had with people who've been part of GO-GN and it's such a marvelous community. Can you give us a little insight, like from being part of that network?

What makes it so dynamic or what has been the value in that network for you?

Catherine Cronin: So many things but I think, perhaps now as open as getting more embedded, things are not the same as they were, six or seven or eight or ten years ago. But certainly for many people working in open, if you're in a higher education setting, there may be very few other people who are doing the work that you're doing in your institution.

And really wanting to have those same conversations and, not understanding why they're not, open policies and so on. And, we're having to really do the very tough work, of changing culture. The GO-GN network is a network of researchers who are truly global who you can go to immediately whether they're in online conversations or the annual workshops or conferences. It's a community where you can bring the issues that you're having, talk about theory, talk about practice, talk about policy with people who really understand and have sophisticated understanding of open.

At whatever stage I got involved. I think I became aware of it even before I, I went back to do my PhD. But certainly when I was a PhD researcher and in the early days after I finished it, it was so valuable, when I doing research, but in all the other times when I'm just I'd call myself an open practitioner, that community is really valuable.

Alan Levine: Yeah, and it has penguins.

Catherine Cronin: It has penguins and it never lets you forget that whatever, we three live in the global north and different countries in the global north that, that's only a very small part of the world, so that's the other thing. It never lets you forget that. And we often try to remind people about the importance of context, but GO-GN is the global context.

So it's part of every conversation.

Alan Levine: I also wanted to ask you about the other big project that you've been working on is the book, Higher Education For Good. Can you tell us about that and where it's sitting right now?

Catherine Cronin: Yes. I took a break to do this podcast from writing and editing, and I'll go back to it.

Alan Levine: It's hard work. It's incredible hard work. I've never done it and I know it's hard work.

Catherine Cronin: It's wonderful. I'll wind back and say that before we started recording here, Alan and I were talking about the OER19 conference and Galway, which unfortunately Alan didn't get to, but Laura Czerniewicz and I were the co-chairs of that.

Una Daly: I was there.

Catherine Cronin: Una was there. Yes. It was so amazing, Una being with you in Ireland. That was just such an incredible experience, organizing it with the ALT team, Maren and company. And then just the experience in Galway, the people who were there.

So Laura and I we always had this germ of an idea about we'll have to find something else to work on, together. We've collaborated and talked of course since then, but in mid 2021 we started talking about this idea for a book and in the year 2022, Laura was on sabbatical and that was my first year working independently.

So the timing was perfect and we just threw our conversations in that latter half of 2021. We just kept challenging each other. The concept of Higher Education for Good was there right at the very beginning, and we know that we're facing multiple and intersecting crises globally and in higher education.

So COVID climate, austerity, inequality, surveillance, et cetera, et cetera. We wanted to send out a global invitation to invite people to speak to the current crises but also find some hope. So look to the future and paint possible hopeful futures. If possible, because we think like in looking at other areas in the work in the area of climate, for example, some of, I think the most powerful work is work that does that, doesn't just diagnose the issue, but points to ways that we can move forward, more positively and more hopefully.

So we sent out this invitation last January, 2022 and a hundred people sent proposals nearly a hundred. And we said we invite you to acknowledge despair, but take a critical approach to how we can resist some of these forces that I've just mentioned and find hope and courage in moving forward.

So we have at this stage we have 27 chapters, 70 authors, 17 countries, I believe. We had a amazing review process that was also global reviewers. Many of those reviews were open. And throughout the course of this year, we've been editing, revising and what's really exciting is that we don't just have academic chapters.

We invited people to write in whatever genre they chose. So there are chapters written in the form of a dialogue. There's poetry, one in the form of haiku. There are theoretical pieces. There's an audio podcast. We also invited artists to contribute artwork because I was just writing our OER23 proposal cause Laura and I hope to share some of this work at OER23. 

Angela Davis talks about how we widely acknowledge artists as agents who seed resistance and provide tools for us to imagine otherwise. That kind of came in after a while about halfway through the project we said we need artwork here as well. We are just a few weeks away from submitting the full manuscript now that's going to the publisher at the start of February.

And it'll be published openly this year, probably towards the middle of the year, I'd say. 

Alan Levine: Where's it gonna be published?

Catherine Cronin: I can say that we have been having ongoing conversations with Open Book Publishers who are provisionally willing to publish the book, but that's pending a full review of the full manuscript. With all going well, you know that, that will be accepted. So it would be open book publishers and they've published, if you check the OBP website, they've published a lot of interesting work. Also other critical work in higher education.

Una Daly: Catherine, since you've left Higher Ed, the formal Higher Ed, it's been really busy.

Catherine Cronin: Yes. That was the idea.

Una Daly: Do you find yourself busier now than you were then? 

Catherine Cronin: I'm not busier Una. Every bit of the work that I'm doing, I love, so I'm, I'm doing some writing, some speaking, some research and this editing. But I feel physically healthier. I am working probably fewer hours. I think it was just any of us who were working in, within higher education during the time of COVID and I have so much sympathy for my colleagues who are still working in higher education.

It was just impossible to do all that you saw needed to be done. So you tried to do it and wrecked your body and your mind and your spirit, or you had to leave things undone or not help people, and that was, debilitating in other ways. 

I feel like it's just way of you know, giving back or contributing in a different way.

Una Daly: And choosing your priorities, right?

Catherine Cronin: Exactly. Yeah.

Alan Levine: In the time that you're not doing this work, what are your interests or passions that kind of fuel you like when you need to get out and do something? Or just what motivates you?

Catherine Cronin: First of all, I walk. Living where I live in Ireland is just fantastic cause we have some hills, we have the sea, the Flaggy Shore, and so on. So I spend more time outdoors and probably physically active. Which is, I feel, much healthier for all that.

I also have two adult children, one who lives in London and one who lives in New York City just for the past year. Just taking, even though they're rare, opportunities to spend time with them, either here or where they live, is just a joy. And, just being able to construct my life so that can be a priority. I don't have a super demanding work schedule, so my priorities can be a little clearer. And yoga and those kinds of things. And reading things other than than higher education books. So novels and poetry and that kind of thing.

So really enjoying that.

Alan Levine: Now that the book has a time when it's gonna be publishers and what's next on your horizon, do you know? 

Catherine Cronin: There will still be a little bit more writing because what happens when you do these things, you just get more ideas. There are a few more collaborations in the works in terms of research and writing. And there are new, some new projects in Ireland in higher education around the area of digital education.

And so I've had some conversations with people about, consulting on some of those. That's work I'd like to do over the next couple of years of just, collaborating with other people, around the whole area of digital and open education and just bringing in maybe these, some of these wider perspectives.

Yeah, a few things on the burner.

Alan Levine: Since I started this thing, Jonathan recommended you. Is there anyone that you think we should talk to? Like someone who has a voice that we should bring to the show here? 

Catherine Cronin: There are so many amazing people to speak to. One that first comes to mind is because she's my partner in crime is Laura Czerniewicz. I don't know if you've spoken with Laura yet, in terms of work that Laura has done at the University of Cape Town over so many years, just so important to speak with her. 

We did this with the book as well, is that our brain goes immediately to the people that we know of, and then, because our book was around, futures and looking into the future, we have a couple of forewords and a couple of afterwards to the book. Some of those people are experienced.

Then we asked a new young PhD student to write the final, afterward the last word. And we have other, early career graduate students even who are authors in the book. So I think that kind of diversity is really important because, when you talk about the future, their perspective is different.

Alan Levine: And I have to admit like a little bit selfishly, like I get more out of these I think because I learned so much from talking. I'm gonna go back and edit and I'm gonna be looking up all the links and projects you recommended and then like when the book comes out, Like I, I hope we can, do something to help tap into the energy that's gonna come out of this fantastic book that's gonna be out this year.

Catherine Cronin: And when you mentioned book, I think one of the books that it's been most influential for me over the time of the Pandemic, is a book called Begin Again. Do you know of it? It's written by Eddie Galude. It's about the writings of James Baldwin and I read it last summer, summer 2021 and has just been part of so many of my conversations in my work since then. 

He looks at the work of James Baldwin, particularly his later work, and so many people, value James Baldwin's earlier work and not his later work. And his later work was written in the time, after the civil rights movement had, soured in some ways-- what he calls, the after times. Eddie Glaude says we live in another after times now when we're dealing with, hopelessness and despair. So he thinks those writings of James Baldwin really speak to us a lot just now. I think the way he describes it, he says, we just like James Baldwin, we need to stand askance at the way things are in order to imagine better futures. 

So I think that's a great way to think about being an open educator today.

Una Daly: Thank you for that.

Catherine Cronin: You're welcome. 

Alan Levine: Thank you for this episode of the Galway Connection and also just thinking like we, we started out with you describing growing up in basically an environment of social justice in the 1960s. It's not new. You've been immersed in that and I think your parents would be extremely proud of the work that you're doing.

Catherine Cronin: Thanks Alan.

Alan Levine: Thank you Una for joining us, and thank you, listeners to join us for this episode of OEG Voices.

We're producing this podcast at Open Education Global, and each time we do one of these, we like to feature a different musical intro track that I choose from the Free Music Archive. And I went in there yesterday and I started looking and I found there's a lot of really good music related to walking.

I found this really peppy it's a little bit of a, like a South African style music called Soul Walking by an artist named Juanitos, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Share Alike. We'll get to hear this when I finally edit this podcast.

But that's part of what we do. And so you'll find this episode at voices.oeglobal.org. And we hope you wanna follow up with questions with Catherine in our OEG Connect community. And then as always, anybody else, if you wanna be on the show or think someone that we should have on here we'd love to hear your suggestions.

Thank you both Catherine and Una for spending this time with us today.

Catherine Cronin: Thank you so much. This is wonderful.