I’m reading this as a question about narrowcasting in online publication (apols if I’m taking things the wrong way). The post above represents pretty much how I communicate on a day to day basis – seriously, it does! ask @VivienRolfe! Obviously it is going to be in the language of the “elite” sub-culture I am postulating, as that is the sub-culture I most closely identify this. Why is interesting, as I’m an administrator not an academic….

I do worry about taking on the voice of a culture I don’t have a connection to – it feels like ventriloquism, like cultural appropriation and inserting my voice as a proxy for an “authentic” intervention in a conversation. All I can do is flag where an intervention is needed, and then amplify that as best I can – when I overstep that, I do feel very uncomfortable.

But “authenticity” is a concept that is increasingly giving me cause for concern – are we talking about lived (physical) experience or a decision (be it conscious, unconscious, serious, ironic…) to identify? Or – more likely – both, in some mixture. President-elect Trump’s “authenticity” is seen as an electoral advantage … what does that mean? Who or what is The Donald authentic to? How? Why?

So if I’m problematising authenticity you’d better believe I’m on thin ice if I think I’m using “conspiracy theory” in a neutral sense to describe a set of narrative conventions! Using open education (or indeed, I love your suggestion of education theory) as an example is me trying to subvert that by applying it to a belief system that manyboth of my likely audience hold in order to give myself the Derridian space to play with the tension therein. But this is a trick I only know how to do within my own sub-cultural milieu. How anyone else would take it, I’m not sure.

I’m glad you liked the post, and can only apologise that most of my writing is roughly as awful as this, and that I don’t tend to stick on a single subject for long.

So here’s the thing, though. As much as I love this post and what it’s getting at… I have to say you cannot use a value-laden term like “conspiracy theory”, claim to have made it neutral, and just move forward. We don’t remove baggage from words that way and even though you are turning that term on your own self and critiquing “us” the “elite” (even recognizing urself as white male cis etc. and myself as….not…but definitely seeing myself as included because I know I am in there somewhere and am an academic etc) – would anyone who isn’t “us” be able to read this and nod? Can or would you write it in some location where “they” are meant to find it?

I say this as I have a small project in my mind right now….where I am about to publish something in an Arab Higher ed magazine to call for ideas but where I also need to publish something somewhere Western to get these ideas heard…and where if I published any of it for a non-academic audience it would still sound like gibberish. Which is OK for THAT topic coz it’s academically focused. But are topics like Open Ed meant to address a broader audience (the learners over whose learning we feel responsible? Their parents?) and do we ever really address them in our discourses? This gives me a brilliant idea that I should blog about. One day 😉

How do we make confirmation bias a core topic in primary school?

Now, if you could just please advocate for shared datasets as a place for “us” to start challenging our assumptions and finding common ground with “them”, it would be appreciated 😉