OEGlobal Voices 86: OEAward Winner Colin de La Higuera === Intro Music and Highlighted Quote --- [00:00:07] Colin de La Higuera: So this comes also with the UNESCO Chair, being allowed to speak, being allowed to make, not just claims, but to make an analysis, which may not be the one that is done by everybody else. I think that's what leadership is about itself. It's also about convincing people that it's fun to do things or it's interesting to look at things. [00:00:34] Alan Levine: We're here in the studio on Friday, June 13th to record a new session of the OE Global Voices podcast that we produce here at Open Education Global. And each one of these episodes we share with you conversation style, people, practices and ideas from open educators around the world. Meet Colin de La Higuera --- [00:00:56] Alan Levine: And in this case, we're traveling to Nantes, France where we're speaking to Colin de La Higuera, unless he's traveling. [00:00:57] I think our last conversation during Open Education Week, he was in Ireland. Colin was recognized last year and deservedly so, with an individual Open Education Award for Excellence in leadership. And we waited until now for a good reason because just this week the nominations are open for the 2025 awards. [00:01:17] And, I firmly believe, and you'll find out in this episode that Colin's voice will truly help to both inform you, about his work and his leadership and influence listeners, we hope to consider, submitting a nomination or maybe 12. [00:01:31] So I'm just your host here and editor and button clicker, Alan Levine, and I've been talking too much as usual and so warm. [00:01:39] Welcome and hello Colin. How are you today? [00:01:45] Colin de La Higuera: Bonjour Alan and bonjour to everybody who could be listening into this. I'm okay. It's, hot in France and, it's nearly summer. We've had a great year for open education. Yeah, I'm quite happy to talk about it and also to relate some of the good news with, with this lovely prize I was, I was given last year. [00:02:08] Alan Levine: we, First this will be a good chance for me to catch up with everything that you're doing and we'll, touch on that a second. But, so pretty much you, said the affiliation, but I do like to say where you are, map location and also, if you could describe for audience, 'cause I can see you through Zoom, but they can't, what's your physical surroundings? [00:02:28] Where are you sitting right now? [00:02:30] Colin de La Higuera: So I'm actually a UNESCO Chair in Open Education, which means that I somehow escape the normal lab routine. And I'm in a sort of, a bit of a special place at Nantes University. It's a place which the general public can come to. So on some days it's actually very busy and I can't get much work done because you end up talking with people and it's fun. [00:02:55] Today, let's say the truth, on Friday afternoon, it's pretty deserted and I've got quiet. I can be in a fairly open space and speak. So Nantes itself is a city in the west of France, nearly touching the Atlantic at the end, last bit of the, Loire River, which is, one of the famous rivers in France. [00:03:17] And, it's university, one of the big ones, not necessarily one of the prestigious ones or the most prestigious ones, but we are big in terms of a number of students, about 40,000 and a number of staff, which might be about 4,000. [00:03:34] Alan Levine: And we should mention that Nat was the host and you were heavily involved with, the OA Global conference in, was that Spring of 2022 is, [00:03:44] Colin de La Higuera: Ah, actually we got, we had the honor of organizing two, two conferences. [00:03:49] Alan Levine: yeah. [00:03:50] Colin de La Higuera: those, were COVID days. So those were COVID days. And, we got to organize the 2021 conference, which was supposed to be the conference we were, and to organize, but we had these tremendously complicated, calls to make of deciding cancel, not cancel. [00:04:07] this, are we able to open even if we open up? Were going to be able to travel and so on with, so we actually held a really fun, I thought it was fun. 2021, online conference with, exciting ideas. Those were the days where we experimented multilingualism. We had rooms discussing open education in. [00:04:28] Spanish and French and English. It's rather fun. And then we organized the 22 one, which was important for us as a team, but was also very important for not as a university. if your university wants to actually move forward, organizing an event like open education Global is one way forward because you suddenly realize. [00:04:51] By bringing in people from the rest of the world, how varied the ideas and opinions about this are. And you can also get your top brass to come and be part of the conference. And they also suddenly understand that this is not a sort of a niche type of event, but it's a, it's, it is a very broad event, which is going to be interesting to all aspects of university life. [00:05:19] Alan Levine: This is great. And, just, an elbow to my colleague, Iger Lesko, who organizes the conference. We didn't expect this, but Colin just gave a great plug for hosting future conferences. So everybody tune into that. Colin's Background and Education --- [00:05:31] Alan Levine: You're in Nantes France now, but where on the globe did you grow up? Where'd you spend your childhood? [00:05:39] Colin de La Higuera: Okay, so my accent might not betray things, but I am not French. So I'm actually a European, in the full sense of European, coming from various European countries. And, but nevertheless, I did do all my life in France. I think I arrived in France at the age of three months out, and then did my studies and my career in France. I moved through sabbaticals and things, but, but I did it in France. [00:06:06] But nevertheless, the fact that you do have various nationalities, various languages, which is why I firmly believe in multilingualism, does make you have a different perspective to people who are only brought up in-- in one language. [00:06:21] Alan Levine: And, a child in France, what did you think of school? What kind of student were you? [00:06:28] Colin de La Higuera: I suppose it was pretty good, but what I do remember, what does matter, was that school did give me opportunities that probably went there to be seized. What I mean is that school in France allowed me, for example, to learn French. When I went to school, I didn't know French. I learned French in school with other kids who helped me learn French. [00:06:51] And, school has got the capacity still today, or at least one of the things we're struggling for when we're pushing, the open education agenda is, equity and equity is that, basically some people, for example, an immigrant might not have the same chances as somebody else and the school and education should provide him with the chances to actually, be successful. It doesn't mean I've been successful. I feel I've been successful, but even if other people don't, you, do still feel that you've fulfilled your dreams. So, that's what matters. [00:07:29] Alan Levine: And, this could be a long, but let's see if we can do this short travel. You went to school, obviously in France. You mentioned doing postdoc. What did you study in school and what was the path that led you into being in open education and and the UNESCO chair, 'cause that's a fascinating journey, I'm sure. Journey into Open Education and AI --- [00:07:50] Colin de La Higuera: Yeah, so, I am, I'm not from social sciences boo. I'm actually, I'm actually, just a scientist. So I'm a scientist. My, my topic was, I did my PhD in, in mathematics and in those days, because I'm. Pretty old. the mathematics were still including computer science. Computer science hadn't imposed itself as a, a unique topic. [00:08:18] I then became a computer scientist and, inside computer science started doing very theoretical things and then appeared this sort of rather strange idea that machines could learn. So I, got interested thinking this out, rather exciting, what does it mean? And so I did what you call machine learning, a lot. [00:08:37] I was doing that last century and, doing things that basically today correspond to the, research program of, say open AI or the, big. Text. But of course when we were doing it, it was completely naively thinking, this is a really interesting idea. We're not, at all sure that it's gonna be of any use, one day. [00:08:58] but, any, but, it was, interesting problems, nice algorithms, 'cause some coding, nice things. So I did that and with a number of other people, we did that all through, let's say, the beginning of this century. until some point we started realizing that something was this little bit getting wrong because all these lovely technologies were starting to be useful, but they were not necessarily starting to be useful for the common good. [00:09:25] They were starting to be useful to make some people, I'm immensely rich or some companies very, rich or for States to control the individuals. So we thought, this is a wonderful technology, so machine learning led to ai. I hope you are all understanding. And so we created with, people from European networks, something called, knowledge for All Foundations. [00:09:52] So this was a foundation whose idea was saying, can we use AI to disseminate knowledge? And when you start wanting to disseminate knowledge, you are thinking we need a model for this. And the natural model was Creative Commons licenses and what went with it, things that were called open education resources, or even in those days, open education course. [00:10:17] Okay, so, these ideas were, struggling around with people trying to come up with the, idea of doing it, from the, teacher's perspective. And we were a few trying to do this from the computer scientist perspective. Can we develop tools, models, things that can do this? So that's where we moved in and UNESCO started thinking that what we were doing was. [00:10:40] Exciting, interesting. And a number of us went in to start working with unesco, who in turn said, Hey, we'll give you a UNESCO chair to actually, make sure there's a little bit more visibility to what you're doing. So that's the story. [00:10:56] Alan Levine: That's beautiful. I'm getting distracted 'cause I really wanna like your perspective on, on AI now. would you, was it. Anywhere near what you imagine is, this state where we are, what you had hoped for, or is it beyond, 'cause you were working, like you say, in the early days of machine learning and asking the same questions like, can [00:11:17] Colin de La Higuera: Oh yes. No, we weren't asking that question. We were asking some very much more naive questions. We went, of course-- no, very few people were asking that sort of question. The sort of, "Can machines think?" Those were questions that might have been asked in the fifties and sixties, and then people had to become pragmatic and say, "What problems can we solve?" because that's beyond being able to be solved. [00:11:41] So we were on problems that could be solved. For example, the sort of problem I spent most of the time trying to work on was can I predict what the next word is going to be? Okay. Which really sounded like just a, a little, like a game, a prediction game. Can I put a distribution of probabilities on words? [00:12:00] And, I never would've thought that this problem, which obviously I didn't solve, but that I was working on, was actually the key to the success of the large language models, 'cause that's the only thing they're doing. They're just predicting what the next word is or what the distribution of the next words can be. [00:12:21] So yes, we were very naive in not understanding the potential of the sort of things we were working on. UNESCO Chair and Leadership --- [00:12:29] Alan Levine: And so, so UNESCO just came to you and said, "we believe in the work you're doing." That had to be an incredible honor. And, what's it like to be UNESCO chair? What's a day in the UNESCO chair? [00:12:45] Colin de La Higuera: So it's not exactly like that, right? UNESCO approached us. We approached  UNESCO , we started inviting each other to events, and little by little they suggested that there were these "tools", I think we should call them tools, which are UNESCO chairs to do this. So these tools, UNESCO chairs, they are four year contracts. [00:13:03] We don't get any money. There's no money involved. So luckily when you have a UNESCO chair you're able to ask other people for money. Doesn't mean they give you it, but we can ask. [00:13:13] So, what's the day like? You got to understand and, from the perspective of let's say United States where you are, or France where I am, we've got extremely, I should say we had, extremely powerful ministries of education. [00:13:29] Okay. So Ministries of Education's job is twofold. One fold is logistics. How do I make sure that, things are happening in the schools and we may able to put one teacher in front of each classroom, but there's also a second job, which is intellectual. Which, is what should we be teaching, right? [00:13:47] How do we teach it? At what rhythm should we be teaching? Why are we doing this? So in the, let's say the richer countries, where we've got universities, we've got researchers, we've also got people working directly in the ministry to solve this question. [00:14:03] But in probably more or less half the world, you don't have that. You've only got the logistics. And even the logistics is hard to cope with. We calculate that there's still something like 64 million teachers missing on the planet. So even the logistics problem is there. So when you are in a country where you are only dealing with the logistics, you've still got the same problems. You've still got to know what you teach and how you teach it. [00:14:28] So you can either go and fetch the big brothers -- the big brothers can be the big companies or the big countries for them to tell you what to do. But those are just different forms of colonialism, which some countries don't really like. Or you go and look at the documents that are produced by UNESCO, which are usually produced by teams which involve multiple countries and multiple perspectives. [00:14:53] So there are these documents which correspond to what you could call, policy documents, frameworks on which you can build your own policy saying, okay, we want to introduce AI in the curriculum. You can use these documents to, to say, okay, we're doing it in, using a framework which has been studied in a broad perspective. [00:15:17] So I think that's what makes it really exciting. You talk with people very different and you do know you have this extra responsibility. [00:15:25] Alan Levine: Excellent. Last September,-- sorry, excuse my cat who's distracting. Last September, you got an email from us letting you know that you won this award for Leadership, the Open Excellence Award. [00:15:38] Obviously, it seems a silly question I asked, what was your reaction? But what was that moment like and, who, who were like some of the first people that you told about it? [00:15:49] Colin de La Higuera: So I didn't get an email. I was listening live to the ceremony. [00:15:54] Alan Levine: Oh, that's right. And see, I forgot. [00:15:56] Colin de La Higuera: I only found out there, it's much more exciting than a boring email. [00:16:00] Alan Levine: Yeah. [00:16:02] Colin de La Higuera: No, You're sitting there and you're in full sort of Listening to it. [00:16:11] Clearly, yes. You know let's call it the "opposition", even if obviously you don't regard these people as your opponents. But the people who are also are on the shortlist, are pretty impressive. So, you're thinking you know, mmmmm. [00:16:29] But yes, I was very excited. And I know that the people around me were very excited. So it wasn't just me winning the prize. clearly there was the whole of my team that were feeling very concerned by this. But I think in many ways it was my university-- my university had pushed my candidature. It wasn't my own idea to do this, and if they did this, it was because they wanted to. [00:16:55] It's not the word "show off", but claim some sort of leadership and say, we are in Nantes well positioned to actually tackle these issues. And, having prizes helps. It's difficult. it's a difficult one. You can never give a causal effect to a prize. You can't say thanks to this prize we have produced 20 more OER. [00:17:24] Obviously if, there was money involved, but in this case there wasn't any money involved. But if there isn't money, it's just the prestige. And you feel, you sense, you're pretty sure that it's gonna have an effect. [00:17:40] And it does have an effect. It means that people will, not just look at you, but will look at the choices you have made with a, a new sort of respect. People who are doing the typical choice in universities of going for a pure research career, right, will look at somebody who's done a choice on, say, spending some time on UNESCO values or on open education or things like that, which let's face this. It's not the winning choice as far as careers go. But then suddenly they think, okay, one second. You know who's right, who's wrong? It's not that obvious. So, it does matter. So it matters for me. It matters for my team, and it matters for my university. [00:18:24] Alan Levine: And, what does it mean when people say we recognize Colin for his leadership, what does, it mean? Leadership is one of those terms that has its connotations and baggage, if you will. But also it means something and leadership is important. [00:18:42] So what's, like your perspective on what it means to be a leader or what leadership means? [00:18:48] Colin de La Higuera: So leadership I suggest means that when you are asked to talk about these things, you respect your own opinion and you don't just have to come up with saying what other people have said before. Okay, so leadership means that you're able to synthesize, obviously from the work of other people, from, from, from history, from research, and, but you can come up with new ideas. [00:19:17] You-- you've got the legitimacy to, to, speak out and to speak up. You're making a risk also. It doesn't mean you're some suddenly, non- vulnerable. People can say, "Hey, what you're saying is absolute rubbish now," but, you are allowed to say things. [00:19:33] So this comes also with the UNESCO Chair being allowed to speak, being allowed to make, not just claims, but to make, make an analysis, which may not be the one that is done by everybody else. I think that's what leadership is about itself. It's also about convincing people that it's fun to do things or it's interesting to look at things. [00:19:56] But I think it is the ability and the possibility to saying things. [00:20:02] Alan Levine: And since that time -- let's do a little bit of recap of what's been capturing your interest. Current Projects and Interests --- [00:20:10] Alan Levine: I, remember you did a lot of work on translation. We talked about the power of AI for translation, and you worked on that multilingual guide to AI and, and this thing that had a certain number of reasons that, that you led during Open Education Week, but also just what's really capturing your interest? [00:20:29] Where's your curiosity going forward? I'm asking a lot of questions. So what's Colin been up to? [00:20:37] Colin de La Higuera: So, I'll try and just give, 2, 2, 2 trends. the UNESCO Chair is in Open Education Resources and Artificial Intelligence. So what I'm really interested is in the link in between the two. One of these links is, as you're saying, the question of translation, automatic translation, and there's a number of things linked there-- what does automatic translation allow us to do? [00:21:02] So we've explored at least two ideas here. One of them is "What is an open textbook?" So we've spoken about this, before. We have been lucky, we produced an open textbook on Learning About AI, which Incentively got another prize this year. We got the MERLOT 2025 award, for that. [00:21:22] So we're really happy. And, as it's an open textbook, it's something that we can test ideas of what is an open textbook, how do we make sure that it can be translated as easily as possible using these new technologies into other languages-- because if we oblige everybody to read English, it's just not gonna work. How do we do this? We're trying some really, exciting things that way. [00:21:46] Second, around the same lines, we're thinking what is a multilingual blog? So here we've tried and we've opened two multilingual blogs. So multilingual blog means we've chosen a bunch of languages-- and, you can actually read things in the different languages, but we don't want to just, run an automatic translator over this because it wouldn't be good quality. [00:22:08] So some of those articles have been partially translated by AI and then finished off by humans. Depending on the articles, they may be written in some languages, but not in the others. And you can read them in a variety of languages,-- your own, the original version and so onwards. So we're exploring that because I think it's a really exciting concept. [00:22:30] And so since we've got these blogs, we thought, as you mentioned for the Open Education Week to challenge our friends and colleagues. And, I remember on a Monday morning in January writing to a bunch of 40 people around the world saying, "Okay, we've come up with, 22 good reasons for doing open education." And we think that, motivating people is important. So we've got this motivation problem. How do we onboard people? [00:23:04] So would you be interested in taking one of these 22 articles and write writing about it? And we will publish it on these multilingual blogs in, during the Open Education week. [00:23:19] So this is what we did. The only thing we also let the door open saying if you have another reason we haven't thought about you can. So somebody did come up and say that open education for public service was something important. We thought that was a great reason. And so we added it to the bunch and we've got now 23 Good Reasons, which was the name of the operation. [00:23:38] But again, it was a way of not only exploring open education, why we should do it, but it was also about exploring the multilingual aspects of communication. And so we've been playing with that. [00:23:53] So that's one big line. The second line is also about motivation. It's probably the thing that's really exciting in this moment. [00:24:00] AI in education is-- I've been reading you, I've been seeing what we've been publishing. There's a lot of things published. One of the things that in my view is very absent is, is the "why" question, right? Which is "why do we learn?" Can we capture, why does a learner, this learner might be 12-year-old or might be 20 years old-- why does she get up in the morning and go and learn? [00:24:27] And so it's essentially, we understand this because, depending on the reasons that motivate this person, AI will or will not have an effect. Or we'll have a positive effect or a negative effect, or we can actually use AI and divert it positively or at the contrary, if we're not careful, AI is just going to break that reason to pieces. [00:24:48] And if the whole reason for which that person was happy to get up in the morning to go learn is now vanished because of AI, we've had it. [00:24:55] So we are doing a number of things, here and we're working with students, of course, we're working with, school children also to try and capture their idea of why they learn. [00:25:08] And we're trying to also publish on the blogs what they are actually having to say about this. [00:25:14] So what's this got to do with Open education? Because I'm supposed to speak about open education. My point of view here, it's the point of view that we're trying to transmit through the Chair, is that AI is the question and Open Education is the answer. [00:25:32] Okay? So we have to understand the questions that are raised by AI and then come up with answers that are based on Open education. [00:25:41] Alan Levine: Oh wow, I got much more than I was expecting. That is fantastic. And so we'll follow that work on the blogs obviously. Encouraging Nominations and Recognition --- [00:25:51] Alan Levine: You've pretty much said this, but I'm also like looking for little clips that we can use for you to help persuade someone why should they go to the effort to submit a nomination this year? [00:26:03] And, part of this is because sometimes we hear "Oh, my work isn't really as important as Colin's" or someone else's. So there's that comparison thing where people downplay their own work. And we're trying to put out a message this year that it's the importance is the nomination, is that the naming of the work and projects that people are doing so they become more visible and it's recognition of the field as well as the ones that get identified as winners. [00:26:36] So can you do a little promotional pitch as to why someone should go forward and think about something to nominate? Especially I think one of the best things to do and it's really rewarding is to nominate someone else or something else. And it's such a great expression of gratitude and I'd really like to encourage more of that. [00:26:57] [00:26:58] Colin de La Higuera: Yes. 2, 2, 2 answers. The first one is that, so the field is vast and the comparisons are multidimensional. So you may be less active with the media than Colin. But you are probably much more active in research than Colin. So basically, I don't think that people can compare. [00:27:23] If I look at, the winners of last year, we just didn't look the same whatsoever. we had completely different approaches to what we were doing there. So I first think that is that you just can't compare people. It's just completely different. [00:27:38] The second thing is, yes, you are helping somebody by nominating that person, you are really helping. I suppose we've all gotta be modest and say, oh no, please don't nominate me. I would hate it, or, oh, I would feel so ashamed, it's not fair, whatever. Yes. Okay, we're allowed to put that show on, but it helps tremendously to have a bit of gratitude, to have a bit of people saying thank you. [00:28:03] So it helps you as a person, but it helps what you're doing. As I said in our case, the prize meant that, suddenly, I dunno, local newspapers started approaching me to ask me questions. And I spoke about the prize like this one little bit, but I was able to speak about open education the rest of the time. [00:28:24] So I've got, suddenly somebody's giving you a microphone and you're able to speak. So perhaps by saying this, I'm even frightening more people thinking, I don't want to do that. That's not the sort of thing I want to do. Sorry guys. [00:28:36] But somebody has to do it, right? If we want these open education issues to work, we have to onboard, not just, the teachers. We have to onboard the students, we have to onboard the parents, we've got to onboard the policy makers, this huge amount of people that we have to convince out there. [00:28:54] So give us the chance to actually speak about these things. And I think that the prizes work, [00:29:02] The fact that I nominate somebody, actually unless I tell that person, that person's not even going to know that person's been nominated. [00:29:12] It's not necessarily that big deal, but I think we move things. If I nominate you, I'm going to go and chase for letters. If I chase for letters, I'm committing perhaps the university to actually write a letter and realize how important it is, and so onwards. Okay, so these are important things that will help us on the long term. [00:29:34] But even on the short term, because as I say, it happens very quickly. Suddenly nobody knows what this prize is in, let's say the, in the local press. But yeah, as soon as one of them said, "oh, he's obtained this prestigious prize, then the next media will say, oh, we have to interview him also. [00:29:52] Alan Levine: We're also mixing it with this theme, this idea about recognition is like planting a seed. And what we do, like the things that you decide to do in open education, it all starts with a seed of an idea and the idea about things grow and they don't start off great. [00:30:10] We're really trying to think of a nomination that's just like when you garden, you put a seed in, you take care of the soil, it rains, you hope it grows, you nurture it. And, I think that's what we do. That's what open education, education in general is about. Conclusion and Farewell --- [00:30:27] Alan Levine: Obviously you're busy-- when you're away from the Chair, what's something that you do outside of your work that really gives you joy, pleasure? [00:30:37] Colin de La Higuera: I was gonna say gardening in this moment, not much more than gardening and resting and reading books. I suppose it's not just the Open education, but speaking about AI and education is, there's a lot of it. People are expecting me to give talks all the time, so it's, very quickly tiring. [00:30:56] And so you do need to find your moments to rest and to relax. No, nothing energetic. I don't go mountaineering or things like that. [00:31:06] Alan Levine: No, I, think what you described is the perfect thing to be doing. So I really appreciate, it's been great talking to you on your Friday afternoon and, glad had a little bit of quiet time at the office there in Nantes. [00:31:19] And I wanna thank, people out there listening to this episode of OE Global Voices. [00:31:23] Again, the podcast that we do here at Open Education Global. Each episode we select a different musical track trying to find something that's relevant. And I choose music from the Free Music Archive because it's all Creative Commons licensed and it supports independent musicians. I found an interesting track called " Leader of Tomorrow" by an artist named X-Cute and it's licensed under Creative Comments Attribution non-commercial license. [00:31:48] Colin will have to wait till I edit this to find out what kind of music I picked. And you'll find this episode on our site, voices.global.org. And we also try to start, conversations. about the topics in our OEG Connect community space or wherever you interact with us on social media. And anybody listening and you wanna suggest someone we should have on the show or suggest yourself, just please let us know. [00:32:15] I always enjoy talking with you, Colin. I've been lucky that we've had these opportunities to engage and you always answer my call for request and I just so appreciate that. [00:32:26] Colin de La Higuera: It been a pleasure as usual.