the unanticipated: reflecting & looking forward

Three years ago, in January 2022, I started a new chapter – leaving formal, full-time employment in the higher education sector to work independently. In that same month, Laura Czerniewicz and I published a call for chapters for a new book, an idea we had been slow-cooking for about six months (that book, Higher Education for Good, was published in October 2023).

In early 2022, I wasn’t sure exactly what my work life would become, but I was sure that I wanted to work somewhat less than all-the-time (better work-life balance); to more fully interweave higher education work, community work, and creative time/practice; and at a deeper level, to nurture greater response-ability. In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway describes a feminist ethic of response-ability as: “to venture off the beaten path to meet unexpected, non-natal kin, and to strike up conversations, to pose and respond to interesting questions, to propose together something unanticipated” – rooted in attentive practices of “thought, love, rage, and care.” This was my starting point.

I’ve learned so much in these three years, and can easily say that they have been among the most rewarding in my working life. For one thing, I learned that having a “passion project” (in my case, co-editing the book) helped to ease the transition from formal, full-time employment to independent work. Together with Laura, foregrounding our values ––including care, heterogeneity and community–– in bringing Higher Education for Good to fruition was rewarding in real-time, in achieving the final result, and in engaging in the ongoing community that has developed. I learned also that finding a balance (for me) of paid, unpaid and creative work may be challenging, but it has been possible.

So, these early days of January offer an opportunity to review the past year, and to look ahead to 2025. The following may be of interest to no one but me 🙂 but I record here a summary of key work projects of the past year:

• Following publication of Higher Education for Good at the end of 2023, we gratefully participated in several podcasts and webinars. Laura and I continued to develop the ideas in HE4Good, finding that they were particularly useful in exploring current dilemmas in open education. We shared these ideas at two open education conferences: a keynote at OER24 The future isn’t what it used to be: Open education at a crossroads, and a workshop at OpenEd24 Open education at a crossroads. An abundance of creative ideas was generated at the latter; Laura and I will be working with the contributors to further develop these ideas in 2025.
• Committed to maximising access, we worked over several months with Higher Education for Good authors to record audio versions of all 32 chapters. Thanks to Terry Greene, who provided generous support in creating the AI-voiced chapters, and to our publisher Open Book Publishers, the audiobook was published in November. We describe the process of creating the audiobook (a combination of author-read and AI-voiced chapters) in an episode of Terry’s Gettin’ Air podcast.
• Throughout the year, I worked individually and in collaboration with others to explore issues in digital, open and higher education. A very personal highlight was a keynote at Lehman College in the Bronx. Lehman is just across the street from the apartment building in which I grew up (until age 14). As I wrote shortly after the event, the Lehman campus was one of our precious green spaces as children, for running around, making noise, and dreaming about the future. But returning to speak about open educational practices for good with scholars and librarians who are leading work in open education for equity and antiracism – that was a future I could never have dreamt.
• In 2022, I collaborated with the Galway Traveller Movement on their ‘Reimagining Life on the Road’ project to create a “proof of concept” digital map of traditional Traveller camping sites in Galway city and county (further details here). That project was restarted in 2024 and I was privileged to work with GTM and colleagues at the University of Galway to document oral histories and create a publishable digital map. A key focus of this work was documenting the project’s vitally important ethical approach including consent, ownership, access, and language. This drew on GTM and team members’ expertise as well as principles of data feminism (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020). The map will be published by GTM in 2025.
• I worked together with Louise Drumm, Helen Beetham and Rosemarie McIlwhan, to design and facilitate a workshop at the Networked Learning Conference 2024 on Generating AI alternatives: collaborating and creating intersections. The event, with a little over 100 participants, resulted in an amazingly rich collection of alternative AI imaginaries, including photos, paintings, stories, poems, and multimedia creations. We are in the process of publishing many of these artefacts, along with a  toolkit for anyone who might wish to facilitate a similar workshop.
• The year also included plenty of writing and editing about digital, open and higher education. I collaborated with a team of scholars across Europe in the DLIFE project (Digital Legislation Implications for Education), exploring the potential long-term impacts of recent EU digital regulations (e.g. AI Act, Digital Services Act, Cybersecurity Act, Data Act), including how these may impact educational access, participation and inclusivity. The full report will be published by the European Commission JRC in 2025.
• I also worked as lead editor for the National Digital Leadership Network, launched in Dublin in December. It was a privilege to work with international scholars in digital and open education, AI in education, microcredentials, and more, who collectively authored a series of ten reports in these areas. The NDLN will publish the report series in early 2025.

Some of the above work will continue in 2025, including work related to Higher Education/Open Education for Good, Reimagining Life on the Road, Generating AI Alternatives. I look forward also to keynotes at OTESSA25 and the Teaching and Learning for Societal Wellbeing conference (University of Galway). Otherwise, I continue to be guided by a commitment to response-ability – venturing off the beaten path to meet the unexpected.

With warm wishes for greater peace, for all, in 2025.