As a supplement to the Syllabus, this Reading List is intended to give you a sense of current conversations within these topic areas. As you will note below, some of our presenters are known for their scholarship in these emerging areas.

OER: A panacea for all social ills?

Watters, A. (2015, January 16). What do We Mean by Open Education? Hack Education.

Though written 10 years ago, Audrey Watters’ blog post meditation on implications of the word “open” in higher education feel all the more relevant in today’s emerging context of AI.

“And it’s complicated, of course, by the multiple meanings of that adjective “open.” What do we mean when we use the word? Free? Open access? Open enrollment? Open data? Openly-licensed materials, as in open educational resources or open source software? Open for discussion? Open for debate? Open to competition? Open for business? Open-ended intellectual exploration?"

McDermott, I. (2019, February 20). Open to What? A Critical Evaluation of OER Efficacy Studies. In The Library With The Lead Pipe.

Penned by CUNY Library faculty member Ian McDermott, this article delves into questions relevant to all new-fangled educational modes being introduced into higher education.

“The Hewlett Foundation’s definition signals an interesting shift, emphasizing “high quality” OER, which is not surprising since Hewlett, as an OER funder, has a financial stake in OER development.”

Open Access

Buranyi, S. (2017, June 27). Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? The Guardian.

This article is an engaging and eye-opening overview of the commercialization of scholarly publishing and the motivation for open access. [Note: Despite the word “scientific” in the title and the focus on “scientists” in this excerpt, this article will likely interest researchers from all disciplines. It’s also a really engaging read!]

“Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.”

Pia, A. E., et al. (2020). Labour of love: An open access manifesto for freedom, integrity, and creativity in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Commonplace.

“The undersigned are a group of scholar-publishers based in the humanities and social sciences who are questioning the fairness and scientific tenability of a system of scholarly communication dominated by large commercial publishers. With this manifesto we wish to repoliticise Open Access to challenge existing rapacious practices in academic publishing—namely, often invisible and unremunerated labour, toxic hierarchies of academic prestige, and a bureaucratic ethos that stifles experimentation—and to bear witness to the indifference they are predicated upon.”

Artificial Intelligence & Content Creation in Higher Education

Wiley, D. (2024, September 2). How Generative AI Affects Open Educational Resources. Improving Learning.

One of the major advocates for OER argues for a turn to “generative OER” in response to AI.

"In order to more fully leverage the potential of generative AI to make educational opportunity more accessible and more effective for learners everywhere, we need to apply the lessons learned over our 25+ years of work with OER. And the first lesson is this: open licensing - giving people permission to use their agency, enthusiasm, and creativity to engage in the 5R activities - unlocks human potential. And so we have to move beyond narrow thinking about how generative AI impacts our work with traditional OER and begin thinking more broadly about the power “generative OER,” in which we treat generative AI itself as an OER. As we engage with open prompts and open weights in the service of learning, we will open entirely new vistas of possibilities for teaching and learning - both formal and informal."

Weller, Martin. (2024, September 23). Openness isn’t just about product. Edtechie.  

A Professor of Educational Technology responds to Wiley, arguing that it is not the product that ought to provoke the Open Educator’s interest, but models that cultivate transparency.

“…it’s hard to say that AI systems based on closed box algorithms, unknown data sources and controlled by large corporations with an agenda of expansion and control are in the spirit of open, whatever the practical advantages on a day to day basis. If openness in education meant anything then it should be about advocating for openness in these areas – transparency around models, clarity of data sources (and over whether your own content is used by AI models), and open source approaches. Carving off a small area for prompts and weights seems like thin gruel for the ambitions of open education. If the past couple of decades have shown anything it is that the product is the least interesting and meaningful aspect of open education.”

Archives & Primary Sources

Mina Rees Library. Archival Research Guide.

This guide contains information on archives and archival repositories, collection finding aids, conducting background research, and finding both analog and digitized collections.  It includes links to resources, research tips, and tools for working with the sources you find.

Putnam, L. (2016). The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast. The American Historical Review 121(2), 377-402.

The digitization of archival resources has transformed historical research. This article by University of Pittsburgh Professor Lara Putnam maps the corresponding turn among historians towards the transnational, and the promises and pitfalls of accelerating digitization.

“The world lies within reach as never before. The radically reduced time cost, geographic un-anchoring, and heightened granularity of digital discovery have transformed the structural conditions shaping the generation of historical knowledge…Digital research that carries us deeper into real-world connection may indeed create the border-crossing wisdom that our border-riven world needs.”

Brier, S. (Spring 2017). Why the History of CUNY Matters: Using the CUNY Digital History Archive to Teach CUNY’s Past. The Radical Teacher 108, 28–35.

This essay, by a former professor in the Graduate Center Ph.D. Program in Urban Education and founder of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program Stephen Brier, explores the potential of the CUNY Digital History Archive for teaching CUNY history in the classroom.

“…the history of CUNY…hopefully reminds us that only through a commitment to progressive ideas, mass action, political will and organization, and, last but certainly not least, innovative forms of teaching and learning, can an institution like CUNY be sustained and enhanced in the coming decades.”

Critical Theories of the Open Internet

Earhart, A.E. (2015). Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies. University of Michigan Press.

This book provides a twenty-five year history of digital study as a “necessary prelude” to future developments in the Digital Humanities. This history provides an important backdrop for many of the resources we are exploring.

“My analysis of the development of digital literary studies itself owes much to new historicism, which theorizes that movements should be contextualized within power structures and examines the impact of theoretical, economic, social, and historical impacts on scholarship. By examining the evolution of what we have come to call digital literary studies within such contexts, we might better understand how the form has both shifted and maintained certain conceptions of text, literature, and scholarship.”

West, J. (2016). A Framework for Understanding Internet Openness. In A Universal Internet in a Bordered World: Research on Fragmentation, Openness and Interoperability. Centre for International Governance Innovation.

Papers in this text collected by the Global Commission on Internet Governance explore issues of the nature of the Internet, economic effects of regulation, and broader issues of sovereignty. This chapter provides a framework developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development outlining the benefits and harms of Internet openness.

“It is well known that certain technical elements of the Internet’s architecture, such as publicly available and commonly adopted data transport protocols, have had profound effects on economies and societies by virtue of their contribution to openness. By including economic, social and other elements in the definition, this chapter recognizes that Internet openness also depends on an array of non-technical factors such as affordable access, privacy rights and transparent regulations. If the implications of this definition of Internet openness can be distilled into one phrase, it is that Internet openness leads to the global free flow of data across the network.”

Roh, D. (2015). Illegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity. University of Minnesota Press.

In an exploration of copyright issues surrounding fan fiction and parody texts, David S. Roh sketches the potential for a cultural dialogue strengthened by “literary versioning,” a concept drawn from computer science that maps onto the concepts of “remixable” and “reusable” in the world of OER.

“A disruptive textuality. . . . openly acknowledges source texts and the right of successive texts to perform alterations; it aims to expand and alter in iterative rather than paradigm-shifting moves; and last, it tends to revel in complicating and problematizing rather than claiming centrality.”