conferences-etc

Openness Reimagined: Continuity, Change and Shared Vision https://www.alt.ac.uk/OER26-Proposals

Sustaining the Ethos and Values of Open in a Changing Landscape

Open education has always been both a practice and a proposition. It is grounded in enduring commitments to access, equity, collaboration, and the sharing of knowledge as a public good. Over decades, these commitments have taken institutional and technological form through open educational resources, open pedagogy, open research, open access publishing, and global networks of collaboration. Openness has expanded participation, reshaped practice, and challenged assumptions about who education is for and how it should be delivered.

Yet openness is not static. It evolves alongside the social, political, and technological conditions in which it operates. The rapid development of AI systems, platform-based infrastructures, shifting policy environments, new economic pressures, and renewed global debates about equity and justice are reshaping the terrain of open education. In this context, openness must be revisited, reinterpreted, reimagined, and perhaps reconfigured.

OER26 invites delegates to reimagine and re-theorise openness while recognising the enduring ethos that has sustained the movement from its earliest days. We seek to examine openness as a living project that must continually negotiate continuity and change.

OER26 positions openness as an ongoing collective endeavour requiring critical inquiry, practical innovation, and sustained ethical commitment. We are particularly interested in contributions that explore how the ethos of openness is sustained, challenged, institutionalised, or transformed in the current moment.

Area the aligns with my research:

Cluster 2: Reimagining openness: theory, technology, and futures
This cluster foregrounds critical, and future-oriented engagements.

• How might openness evolve in response to new technologies?
• Can AI-aligned technologies be genuinely open?
• Can open and participatory approaches offer balance to the extractive nature of generative AI?
• What sociotechnical imaginaries are embedded within open education movements?
• Do we need new theories of openness? What emerging practices are not yet fully theorised?
• What futures of open education are desirable? How can new educational forms be open?
• What conversations are we not yet having (but should be)?

Submission formats:

We encourage submissions from researchers, practitioners, educators, students, policymakers, technologists, librarians, instructional designers, and community organisers.

• Research Papers (20 minutes)
  Presenting completed or near-completed research studies (empirical and theoretical).

• Workshops (60 or 120 minutes)
  Interactive sessions focused on tools, practices, methods, or collaborative exploration.

• Panels and Symposia (up to 90 minutes)
  Curated discussions bringing together multiple perspectives on a shared issue.

• Posters
  Visual presentations of emerging research, projects, or initiatives.

• Lightning Talks (5 minutes)
  Short presentations highlighting new ideas, provocations, or initiatives.

• Experimental Formats
  Innovative or non-traditional formats that embody the spirit of openness, including collaborative design sessions, multimodal contributions, artistic interventions, and community-led dialogues.

^ these feel potentially viable

RiCE Workshop : https://riceworkshop.github.io/

Theme: AI Support for Reflection

AI models that respond to complex, open-ended, and multimodal inputs at scale bring forth unique opportunities and challenges for supporting creative practitioners’ reflective thinking. Concerns persist regarding the potential negative cognitive effects of AI use. For instance, there is a cognitive process mismatch between creators and LLMs: LLMs typically operate through direct, goal-directed reasoning whereas creative practice is inherently non-linear and characterised by loosely defined intentions.

• How can creators contend with the cognitive mismatch between LLMs and their own thinking?
• Can structure be implemented in LLMs to scaffold creative reflection without impacting characteristics of the creative user experience?
• Will creators retain the opportunity to reflect on surprises and follow tangents within an AI’s constraints?
• Will creators feelings of agency and creative intent be preserved when working with reflective AI scaffolds?

What to submit?

To participate, please submit either: A) a 2 to 4-page paper; B) a 2 to 4-page pictorial; or C) a 3 to 5-min video.

Submissions can be (but are not limited to) position papers, user studies, design concepts, case studies, or theoretical pieces, relating to the conference themes. We particularly encourage submissions of first-person reflective pieces on people’s own computer arts practice, especially with a brief meta-analysis (1 paragraph) of how reflection occured in their making.

The submission requirements are:

A) Paper

Please prepare your paper using the ACM two-column format. Latex users should use the ACM article template with ‘sigconf’ style (\documentclass[sigconf,screen] {acmart}). Microsoft Word users should use the Interim template. For details, see here.

• Papers should be between 2 to 4-pages long excluding references.
• Include the workshop details in your submission’s header and footers. For LaTex, use the following command in the preamble of your document: \acmConference[RiCE W1]{The First Reflection in Creative Experience (RiCE) Workshop}{July 13, 2026}{London, UK}.
• Papers do not need to be anonymised.
• Papers do not need to include the CCS codes.
• Papers do not need to include the submission date information.

B) Pictorial

Please prepare your pictoral using the C&C 2026 Pictorials template: for inDesign, Microsoft Word, or Powerpoint.

• Pictorials should be between 2 to 4-pages long excluding references. Maximum file size 50MB.
• Include the workshop details in your submission’s header and footers.
• Pictorials do not need to be anonymised. Include the submission’s title, author(s) and their affiliation(s), and a 150-word abstract on the first page.