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Good morning, and thank you for joining these important conversations over the next two days here at Kean University in New Jersey. I extend my gratitude to the organizers of the conference and the senior leadership team whose visionary leadership makes this event possible, especially my friend, President Lamont Repollet.
My name is Walter Greason, and I am an historian. Before I began this path in my life, I spent a decade learning to code and creating educational games. The question of educational access has been the core challenge of my life. My family desegregated New Jersey schools as students, as teachers, as nurses, and as educational leaders. The mission of Open Educational Resources reflects a deep, intergenerational mission in my life, and I have never been more proud to be a part of the work every one of you does every day.
I am especially indebted to the library staff, led by Angi Falks, at the DeWitt Wallace Library at Macalester College who constantly support students and faculty in engaging and creating OER materials. However, today, I must celebrate two of the scholars who made my work in this area possible. First, I honor Angel David Nieves who passed away far too soon in December 2023. If you haven’t seen his work, please take a few minutes today to search for his research. He has made open principles the heart of digital humanities work around the world. Second, I honor Kurt Wagner, University Librarian at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. Kurt is a champion of open educational resources and his revolutionary approaches to information science deserve widespread study and emulation.
Nieves and Wagner’s respective works resonated deeply with my commitment to open access. In 2013, shortly after I returned to New Jersey to teach economic history, I put together a free online resource titled “The Engine of Creation” – a collection of academic essays about education, history, politics, and economics. By 2018, over 4 billion users had accessed the materials in that resource, and it continues to be one of the most vital tools in my teaching.
Two years ago, when I first jumped at the opportunity to participate here at Kean, I focused on the ways that OER materials could blend different kinds of media (text, images, and sounds) to create immersive educational experiences. This presentation focused on the results of a decade teaching courses related to “Controlling Information” – a thematic approach to media ecology. Those students have taken these lessons and built new industries across the United States, based on skepticism of received knowledge. Critical media literacy has grown, despite the overwhelming influence of social media, because the principles of information science enables audiences to decode the messages that advertisers and influencers attempt to use in their campaigns.
In response to recent breakthroughs in these courses, I was able to publish the book, Illmatic Consequences, in 2023. It was organized like a musicians’ album, blending graphic art, legal analysis, and spatial design studies. At its foundation, it showed the evolution of Black Studies to Hip Hop Studies to Afrofuturism. Today, I suggest to you that we can create a Black Speculative Arts Movement series as Open Educational Resources to empower the next generation of students around the world.
But we cannot stop there.
Last year, my presentation for this conference focused on the dire necessity for multi-lingual OER materials. It was based on a series of museum exhibits I created in 2019 that expanded on the creation of Wakanda for the Marvel Studios’ film, Black Panther. I worked for seven years in designing the basic principles for the fictional nation as it was shown in that film. The evolution of the design in the films followed the guidance of the museum exhibits by creating the concept for a fictional undersea nation, featuring Indigenous Design elements – untouched by the centuries of imperialism. That same year, these ideas restored the National Historic Landmark dedicated to Timothy Thomas Fortune in Red Bank, New Jersey. The same design prevented the destruction of the first formally incorporated Black community in the United States in 2022 – Eatonville, Florida, hometown of the world famous anthropologist and writer, Zora Neale Hurston. This same design has been built into a new $3 billion initiative to restore Black and Indigenous communities destroyed by the Interstate Highway System. These projects, and thousands more like them, are miraculous. They push us to expand this work beyond the United States – to the Caribbean, to Central America, to South America. At Rutgers University in Camden, Chancellor Antonio Tillis hosted the Afro-Latin American Research Association (ALARA) meeting last summer to facilitate this work. We can create an ALARA OER library right now!
But we cannot stop there.
Kean University has become an international leader on the use of Open Educational Resources. We need more “intake pipelines” to share these tools with secondary schools and community colleges. We need more “outcome pipelines” that support small, mid-market, and large businesses in New Jersey, in the United States, and around the world as our graduates take their first jobs and seek to become entrepreneurs. These powerful systems of OER materials needs stronger assessment frameworks to demonstrate precisely how valuable our collections and innovations are. But, most of all, OER systems must adapt to the emerging impact of Artificial Intelligence.
In this area, my skills as a user experience designer and an academic scholar converge. Years ago, I designed webcrawlers to aggregate data on the Internet. Those tools became the basis of chatbots that my students designed in economic history classes over the last fifteen years. Those chatbots have now evolved into Large Language Models on platforms like Reddit that collect vast amounts of data, but have no effective frameworks to discern the shifting and subjective worth of the information they collect. I propose to you today that we can create an Open Educational Resource version of Artificial Intelligence, based on the principles of Information Science to safeguard against the worst fears of Large Language Models.
But we. cannot. stop. there.
A better model will yield a better AI.
My promise today as I close this presentation is that we can create OER.AI in the short term. More importantly, I offer to share with you all a blueprint for the design of a more human, and humane, LLM – one that will aggregate wisdom as well as intelligence.
As we think through our presentations over the next two days, keep in mind this enormous opportunity we face, this massive responsibility that we carry. Together, we can build the educational futures that all learners deserve.
Thank you for your time and attention.
To DaVinci, From Imhotep 