Creative Commons Virtual Global Summit

Abstract: Reimagining open education as social justice would entail decolonizing dominant modes of searching for and curating cultural knowledge. Can co-curating digital cultural content licensed under Creative Commons and public domain serve as an effective and equitable open educational resource and practice? This interactive discussion gathers a team working toward this exact goal. Curationist.org, a new platform currently in public beta, is a digital space for finding and collecting significant cultural and historical resources that are not limited by copyright. People-driven, not algorithm or profit-driven, the project aspires to communicate liberated cultural narratives that enhance curiosity, intercultural exchange, and critical thinking by prioritizing collaboration and directing attention to the source(s). Our team identifies metadata and taxonomy as key sites of knowledge and cultural erasure, excavation, and recovery. Metadata and taxonomy hold popular pedagogical potential for intercultural dialogue, exchange, and intervention, particularly in light of the colonialist power dynamics of collections, categorizations, and curation. This discussion brings together content curation, editorial vision, metadata schema, taxonomy guidelines, ‘open’ intellectual property licensing, feminist archiving, community-based partnerships, academic contextualization, storytelling sovereignty, the free knowledge ecosystem, and the community shared values governing our practice of an emergent educational justice approach to co-curation.     

Curationist is developing the technology for a specialized search tool and interface so people can search and curate openGLAM collections and archives in one centralized hub. The team explores ‘user-interfaces’ and ‘user-experiences’ conducive to student-crowd-sourced co-curation and critical open pedagogy for educational and epistemic justice. Students and informal learners would explore subjects in an intercultural, interdisciplinary, and interactive format. Concurrently, they would be learning about  and contributing to data structures and search algorithms, indigenous data sovereignty and dialogo de saberes (dialogue of knowledges). For instance, our Regional Taxonomy structure starts with standard UN world regions, but the OER/OEP platform will add in indigenous and nomadic place-names and diasporic routes. We look forward to learning how this project could develop and align with open educational justice goals and movements.