Hello and welcome. I’m one of your new contributing co-editors, Elle Dimopoulos (she/her/they). Akin to the titular titles of svelte fame, I wanted to give you a very short introduction to some of the topics and ideas you might see in the coming year. In my current role as OER Coordinator for my local college, I am part of an interdisciplinary team that works across departments to increase student success and promote open pedagogy. As my background includes information and data literacy, knowledge management and systems programming as well as archival and museum studies, I approach those goals with both a tech-forward and human-centered approach to the Open movement.

My current work is, of course, looking at the impact of AI in higher-ed with a critical eye cast towards the equity and access barriers it both creates and dismantles. As one example, in one of the recent projects that our OER team produced (and openly licensed cc-by), the lead Faculty for Political Science created an audiobook for the American Government 3e OpenStax version of the text. This is an obvious boon for students that need that additional mode of engagement with the material, not to mention opening up the possibilities for passive listening while doing daily tasks. A few chapters of these materials, along with another upcoming audiobook, used AI in the development and production cycle of the material. However, not everything is rosy in the state of Denmark. Issues of equity, bias, and verifiability have always been reflected in the cultural production of instructional material: taking into account the scalability and non-transparent nature of most of the current popular language models, today’s technological climate is a time of both great possibility and even greater pitfalls.

A few of the topics that you might see from me in this space include thought pieces around access and accessibility, practical introductions and primers on integrating information literacy into the curriculum, strategies on including underrepresented and student voices into OER as well as collaborations with the co-editors in conversations with OER communities and discipline leads. Savvy readers might also spy some occasional lighter fare on the menu including incorporating open into D&D and board games, storytelling as information literacy and the occasional adorable picture of my cat.

As we round out Open week (or month, depending on your preference), I hope everyone has had the opportunity to participate in all of the exciting and thought-provoking professional development activities both remote and local. In the spirit of Open, I implore you to engage with us and this community using the experience of our collected knowledge to inform your own shared practices.