Demystifying Open

 

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

I am delighted to see more educators engaging with OpenEducation or at least taking a greater interest in things "open" but I think it would be helpful to have a sort of beginner's guide to the many forms of open which are relevant to educators. I do not profess to be an expert in all things open but, as chair of the Open Education Special Interest Group and as an open education practitioner, I feel I could contribute a little to demystifying some of the terminology which comes under the banner "open". Here goes. 

Open Access:

Probably the first term most academics engage with as it relates to academic publishing. Essentially this is a category of publication which is accessible to anyone rather than being restricted to those who are registered with a university. Some publishers require APCs (article processing fees) in order to make publications available to a wider public. For more detail see Jisc's useful guide.  Librarians are often experts in this area. 

Open Source:

A term that applies to computer software and how the coding has been created. Open source software is usually created by a community and the source code is shared openly so that developers can build on it. Contributors to open source are not always paid, some do the work as a passion project. There are many examples of open source software which practitioners may encounter such as Moodle, H5P and others. Here's a more in depth article which explains why open source is helpful for teachers and learners.  

Open Educational Resources:

Often referred to as OERs, these are resources which are shared openly on the internet usually under a Creative Commons licence. UNESCO provides information here about the origins and place of OERs in education.  Many practitioners and institutions create OER as part of a mission to broaden access to learning, such as these from the University of Edinburgh.  Practitioners often share their own resources, known as Little OER (Weller,M) through sites such as Slideshare or social media free of charge, expressing their sharing preferences through a Creative Commons licence. 

Open badges:

Open badges are digital artefacts which can be created and issued to recognise participation or activity according to the criteria defined by a badge issuer. They are made up of a digital image which has hard coded data "baked in". Open Badge platforms build on a shared standard which enables portability of badge display for earners and, when used in a learning context, can allow the creation of an ecosystem of badges to support educational aims. Here's the handy badge wiki site to find out more. 

Open educational practice (or praxis):

OEP, or the act of working openly as an educator, may include creating and sharing OER, using social media to connect and collaborate with learners or other practitioners online, maintaining a digital profile which is visible to anyone online and curating digital resources. This is an emerging activity which is described in more detail here (Cronin,C) and is clearly connected with achieving the aims of open education. 

There are other "open..." terms in use out there - for example open data, open pedagogy but these are related to the ones mentioned above so I think this may be enough for a primer! However, here are some additional resources  should you wish to know more. 

An introduction to Open Educational Resources and Open Licensing. 

Open Education Policy Hub

The OER world map. 

The recent OERxDomains21 conference has many recordings and resources available openly as part of the #OpenCovid4Ed pledge. 

Open Education is a route to addressing the many inequalities suffered by our populations around the world which have only deepened during the pandemic. 

You can't stop wildflowers spreading!

Warwick's wildflower roundabout Summer 2019 CC BY 4.0 @warwicklanguage

It is now a year since the end of the Warwick International Higher Education Academy (WIHEA) #knowhow project ended. The metaphor for talking about open practice which we employed was based around wild flowers and I took a moment last week to revisit the campus roundabout which was one of the enduring images used to promote our activity, delighted to see that the wildflowers are back and blooming. The disadvantage of funded projects is that they often disappear once the funding runs out leaving little in the way of legacy. I'm pleased to say that our legacy continues as many of the project outputs are open and freely available, but they are sometimes changed by circumstances beyond my control:

• WIHEA has a set of project pages for #knowhow (sadly the G+ community is now only visible to those who are part of our GSuite)
• Our You Tube channel is open to all, as it our blog (frozen in time it reflects the experiences of project members)
• Dissemination of open practice is available on my website and my slideshare feed. 

The recent open education conference #OER19 shared many great ideas for the development and implementation of open educational practice which I have started to investigate now that my exam marking has finished. These conferences, supported by ALT, leave lasting footprints year after year modelling the advantages of open practice. Their CEO Maren Deepwell is committed to open practice and shares her learning as she participates in a range of educational activities and events. She is one of many open practitioners in my personal learning network (note to self I must update this as it was last done in 2017) who inspire me. She is a sower of seeds. Learning is lifelong, sharing that learning can help others in their journey. It is not a competition or a race which depends upon beating others by withholding information. We thrive through collaboration and co-creation. This may require compromise. There will be times when we become more vulnerable than we would like to, times when we have to admit we get things wrong, times when we have to as for help. Some of us have to learn this the hard way.

 Through posting openly online I offer an imperfect work in progress. As you will see in this recent update to a previous post on an EU project called Video for all. I hope others find it helpful in some way. I will be presenting at Eurocall 2019 on open practice, continuing to sow my seeds. I may have little control over where they fall and whether they grow but you can't stop wildflowers from spreading. 

From CMC to VE #wlvmlearn

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Just home from participating in an event held at the University of Wolverhampton Walsall campus at the invitation of Howard Scott and I would categorise it as an opportunity to provide my experience of CALL, or more specifically CMC and my subsequent journey into the Erasmus Plus Virtual Exchange initiative. I was able to provide myself as an OER. My focus was particularly upon the importance of finding suitable networks to support our professional development  and I am pleased to say that I have come home to connection requests on various social media platforms which mean the conversations can continue. Particularly important given that it will take the Palestinian teacher trainers I met today 2 days to return to their homes. We will be able to overcome our geographical distance and continue to interact and learn from each other. 

My slides from the session and the google doc with the tasks we tried to cover are linked here. Our conversations were urgent and rather restricted as we were part of a packed programme and participants were eager to find out as much as possible during their visit. We talked about how technologies of all sorts have long been part of our practice as language educators - from blackboards and chalk (chalk and talk was the expression used by one of the visiting teachers) to digital tools which they are very keen to embrace but wish to understand what works. Both myself and the final keynote speaker Michael Thomas  spoke about the importance of critical reflection when adopting digital technologies, alluding to the dangers of a solution based mindset and techno evangelism and the importance of prioritising the learning when designing with technology. Central to these arguments is the notion of ownership. The digital wilds, where your data is harvested, trolling, spam and fake news abound, are not exactly a safe space. If you are insisting that your students engage there, you need to ensure that they are digitally savvy. We as teachers need therefore to be well informed and to ask better questions. As Michael said we need to uphold our responsibilities as "difficultators" (taking learners out of their comfort zone).

Much to ruminate on, I hope the conversations will continue.

I captured the social media footprint of the event here:

The invisible permaculture of learning and teaching.

The importance of open educational practice.

I'm no artist as you can see on this my first attempt to sketch the role of open educational practice in supporting the sustainability of teaching using open educational resources. Clearly the image borrows from the water cycle. Admittedly it is stretching the analogy a little, the earth's natural climate is not driving this, rather it shows how the agency of individual practitioners can drive the sustainability of learning resources. OERs on their own would repose in their repository, we would see the sunlight glint from their surface and congratulate ourselves on a sea of wonderful "content". However, once practitioners get involved in the uptake, remixing, improving and shring of OERs, then the magic can really happen. Not only do the resources become more visible, moving further into the landscape. As they travel they bring new life, new connections between practitioners, new ideas, new ways of working. A vital tool in this permaculture is provided to the practitioners in the form of Creative Commons licences.

A culture of sharing has long existed in schools, the workload is intense and collegiality important in order to thrive. However, sharing a worksheet with a colleague does not always transfer to the digital domain. Back in 2009 my friend Kate Borthwick presented the results of work which was undertaken in the then languages subject centre around a repository called Language Box. A key difference in the interface of this system was the understanding that sharing is a social practice, it works best when we know who we are sharing with, when we get feedback and accreditation for our work. This emotional aspect, very familiar to those who engage with social media, seemed to increase the engagement of students who pilotted the resources, they were more likely to comment and remix the resources. 

Today I was able to participate in a Virtually Connecting session with participants in the #digped conference in the USA. This is another great way to use technology to embrace the human need to connect with others and thus enhance and intensify the international connections and discussions around teaching and learning in the age of the internet. I had been following the #digped discussions on twitter and it was clear to me that these folk (many of whom I was already following on twitter) share my passion for the intelligent use of technology and the use of a critical digital lens when implementing learning technologies. fortunately my social media skills are greater than my sketching so I will be actively continuing my sharing with these folk with the aim of ensuring that the digital agenda is not dominated by the "solution providers" who will be selling their AI driven systems as ways to save money in education but by the nature of human interactions which are so rich in often invisible or unseen ways.

“Why as a species are we so invested in the future of AI? Why aren’t we investing as much in people? That’s not a technical question. It’s a moral question.” @anya1anya #digped

— Digital Pedagogy Lab (@DigPedLab) 30 July 2018

As for the sketching, my PLN made me do it! Encouraged by them I will try new things, one day I may be a better sketchnoter, and even if that doesn't happen I will have confronted an aspect of my life that I neglected after a bad experience during my schooling. 

Creative Commons Accreditation

This week I have started a 10 week course of study towards attaining accreditation in my use of Creative Commons licensing. I am joining a group of about 30 international educators who, like me, see the value of formalising our knowledge and skills in the area of open educational practice. According to our conversations on the course forum man, also like me, are asked about our use of CC licences and want to acquire a greater in depth understanding of the history and implementation of these tools when working online. 

The video above was created in response to the first assignment of the course. Made using Lumen 5 it uses images and music which is shared under CC licence, remixed to communicate a narrative which I hope resonates with many and shows why creative industries have much to gain by welcoming Creative Commons licencing to their activities. 

I am including in this blog post further factual detail around the history of the Creative Commons movement. I didn't wish to include these in the video as I wanted to keep the message simple and focus on the potential offered by CC to enrich our lives through digital creativity. Since much of human communication and activity is now facilitated through online activity thanks to the internet, it has become clear that the law around copyright is not sufficient to clarify our intentions when sharing online. Here are some of the landmarks on the road to clarifying the rights of all internet users:

• 1998  Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). The US extends the term of copyright to the life of the creator + 70 years (longer than that agreed in many other countries). Sometimes referred to as Mickey Mouse extension and you can see why in the copyright section here.

• 2001-2 Eldred vs Ashcroft: a challenge to the CTEA which professor of Law Lawrence Lessig believed to be unconstitutional. The copyright extension was upheld. 
• 2001 Creative Commons founded.
• Dec 2002 A set of Creative Commons licences were created, built upon copyright law and increasing the flexibility of licencing. Inspired in part by the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL).
• 2017 There are 1.4 billion Creative Commons licenced works

The existence of the global network that is Creative Commons, a movement which upholds open education and greater fairness for all has been of vital importance to my work as an educator and an open educational practitioner. 

Stating the unspoken #oer18 #knowhow Sowing the seeds for a fairer world.

Having returned home from the #OER18 conference where I presented this session I have decided to clarify some points which I may not have made clearly on the day as time was short and I had to rush to run another session elsewhere. 

I shared the experience of running a small staff and student investigation into open educational practice at Warwick. I believe there are aspects of the way this was done which were exemplary and effective. There were also aspects which could have been improved were it not for internal tensions and confusion over roles, responsibilities and mission. I am not blaming anyone, just looking to surface the points where barriers appear which can prevent us from achieving our aims. 

What went well:

• the bringing together of people from different parts of the institution over coffee to share our perspectives
• the freedom for participants to choose which project aims they wanted to contribute to and when to do that
• the agreement to create a metaphor and communication channels we could all embrace and understand
• the open validation and publishing of contributions, leaving a legacy which can be built on by all.

What could have been better:

• the insecurity of some participants due to job changes and political climate (Brexit, funding etc). 
• the lack of shared understanding of open education and evident suspicion of a hidden agenda.
• confusion over whether the project's internal communication should also be cleared by our external communications as it would be openly available. 
• Delays in funding had a knock on effect on spending, staff and student time is limited and when funding is delayed and time limited it can prevent the possibilities which we had planned being realised. 
• internal alignments of this project were clearly with agendas such as those of academic technology, skills development and research support and yet there is little evidence of follow up from those areas.  

I can see that the emphasis on compliance in institutional discourse creates fear and lowers confidence, it cripples innovation, makes individuals afraid to take risks. If we are to realise the win-win that is open educational practice we must bridge the gaps of understanding, sharing and mainstreaming (as identified by Nacimbeni et al, 2014) at the most basic of grassroots levels to align practice with a clearer confidence in our mission and greater understanding of our values. 

Free for all

Why Open Education Matters from Blink Tower on Vimeo.



I have just completed the first iteration of a new module LN306 Developing Language Teaching. The course has attracted a good cohort of students including a number of Erasmus students from Germany Italy and France and I have constantly been impressed with their instincts for what makes good teaching. The central objective of the course is to look at how as teachers we can create interventions to address a specific learner need and includes critical analysis of learning design and pedagogies. In passing during the course I have shared some of Open Educational Resources (OER) and tools for creation. In our final session this week I asked my students to critically evaluate the winning video from the Why Open Education matters campaign above and again the level of understanding proved a useful bridge to a constructive dialogue.

The video paints a rosy picture of how OER can improve the world, but said one of the students:

• how do you know what "good OER" look like? After all, text books have a kudos and an authority as they are endorsed by your tutor. Who can you trust?

This has frequently been a criticism levelled at the OER movement: too idealistic, all fluffy clouds and rainbows. I explained my position. 

I am very much in favour of what has been called by Martin Weller "Little OER", resources created by individuals to fit their context and subsequently shared under Creative Commons licences so that others can remix, re-use and re-purpose. The main benefit of this sort of creative activity I posit is as a means for contributing to your professional community. I admitted that I have created and shared slides which have carried the odd typo (as indeed do many text books I have used) but the benefits of this "open educational practice" (OEP) outweigh the disadvantages of the escalating costs for students of course materials. 

Surely the ability to critically evaluate all materials should not be sacrificed in favour of a blind acceptance that material on the reading list is automatically more trustworthy? Surely a student would be happy to know that his/her tutor is actively engaged in their professional community and able to adapt and create resources which best meet their local context? The students agreed (or seemed to at least) and I look forward to seeing their learning designs as part of their e-portfolio assessment in April. I am happy they have plenty to think about. 

The truth of course is that this learning design challenge matters more than ever to their generation and those who follow. The expertise of teachers is constantly undermined by politicians and the very existence of teaching jobs under threat thanks to "austerity". I am far from alone in seeing the potential of the open internet to inspire and support my profession.

The creative opportunities for learning design offered in the digital domain are endless:

Making your open textbook

A set of resources to get you started in curating your open textbook

It takes courage and commitment to engage in open educational practice there are few rainbows unicorns or fluffy clouds. This post describes the situation beautifully. Going open is a sign of strength worthy of Camus' approval as in L'Homme Révolté:

« La vraie générosité envers l'avenir consiste à tout donner au présent. »

More stories of connection

And so to phase 2 of my Clavier story for Simon +Simon Ensor 

When you look at the literature around the use of technology in education you will soon come across references to disruption. Having been an early adopter of technology in language teaching I have experienced this and my Master's research (on the user perceptions of voice over the internet) also identified that embedding technology in learning design does require a return to first principles if it is to be embedded successfully. As such it is a useful mechanism if you need to focus teacher attention on why we do what we do. This perspective from IMS Global on disruption clearly assumes that there is something inherent in the existing status quo in education which needs a shake up and gives an industry insight into learning technology in the business of education. Many of us working "at the chalk face" felt that disruption was "a good thing" I'm sure. After 30 years in education the never ending re-invention of wheels and flow of buzz words takes its toll. However, taking a more critical stance we need to challenge that underlying assumption - what do we value about education that needs to remain in place?

The next phase of my Clavier journey saw new connections, collaborations and co-creations. (This story is not chronological you may have noticed, it is thematic). The serendipity of networked practice together with a heightened attention to the importance of protecting the place of human interaction in education resulted in many conference presentations and publications . The Clavier experience had ignited a spark which fed an intellectual curiosity. Central to this was a realisation of my own agency in progressing educational opportunity for all. I decided to be an open educational practitioner and again my network - an international collection of educators in many different contexts - were reliable in getting involved. This internal event about teaching excellence at Warwick saw staff exploring physical and virtual spaces, connecting virtually with Marcin Klébin @makle1 in Poland; the doors to the EuroCALL conference were opened this year thanks to collaboration with Maha Bali +Maha Bali and Virtually Connecting, my students have created open educational resources and even contributed to online conferences, the WIHEA #knowhow project (see https://storify.com/WarwickLanguage/warwick-window-on-teaching) produced resources and connections to help others decide on a path to opening up their work. Having found my voice in the academic community and a means to engage in the meaningful deployment of my abilities across institutional and national boundaries thanks to the open internet, I have made yet another career "modification" - one where I can pass on a new perspective to students considering teaching languages.(https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/applying/undergraduate/crossschool/ln306/) I do not wish to be a "teacher trainer" but rather a co-learner in order to support the sustainability of a profession which I have loved throughout my career. Clavier has been part of that unexpected sequence of events and the network which has stretched around the world has seen me working with colleagues in Egypt, Poland, Sweden, Australia, the USA, Spain, Finland, Canada and the UK! 

Working in the open

🦋🌸🌼 #dandelion #dandelionblow #field #nature #scenery #pretty #sky #plants #pretty

A post shared by Becky Skrine (@beckyskrinee) on Jun 13, 2017 at 12:47pm PDT

Currently I'm at the #eurocall2017 conference and wanted to put together a couple of posts around my experiences there. Firstly, like the video image above I spent yesterday afternoon as a virtually connecting onsite buddie and it was very gratifying to be able to provide the means for those who couldn't attend the conference to speak first hand to our first keynote speaker Steve Thorne who was generous with his time and engaged passionately with the network, providing additional insights into his presentation. You can view this session here.

If you are not aware of the virtually connecting network take a look at their blog. Co-directors Maha Bali and Autumn Caines set up the organisation as a way to help those who don't enjoy the freedom to attend conferences for whatever reason, most of which will affect all of us at some point: family commitments, financial or visa restrictions for example to get a flavour of the conference proceedings and get up close and personal with keynote speakers. Everything is managed on a voluntary basis through Slack channels and the resultant recordings shared openly through YouTube.

We had a great session and there is another on saturday with Shannon Sauro and Kate Borthwick sharing their reflections on the conference so join us!

Investigating the student experience

I am about to start a second #WIHEA project with an even more ambitious remit that the previous one and I'm delighted to have many of the first team on board as they have already proven themselves to be great co-researchers. The focus of the earlier project was upon how language teaching and learning is changing in the digital age. We found essentially that there are far more opportunities to connect and interact than before and that, despite the learning curves involved in navigating digital spaces incorporating digital approaches (when done well) helps to extend learning and brings access to new literacies which had not always been fully explored in a learning context elsewhere. 

This project will be focussing more on the nature of such approaches and the issues that arise when we embrace open online resources and practices as part of the learning landscape. We are reaching out to a wider Warwick audience for this, involving our careers and skills professionals, Education and Linguistics as well as a fully open audience through a G+ community here. The project, #knowhow will offer opportunities to explore how we manage our professional digital identity, how to manage issues such as copyright and ownership online and of course how to understand the various micro-cultures that operate within the digital environment. The "students" in this case are all of us, whether we are staff or students as we are all learning together. 

I have enrolled on the #lermooc as a way of finding a community of practice to support this work as there is a tight budget and deadline ('twas ever thus) and I need to ensure that I find time and space to reflect on what we discover. I usually find my reflection is facilitated by the input of others. As an open practitioner myself I am keen to understand how working in the open may be perceived by others so I look forward to a challenging but ultimately informative experience. 

#BYOD4L: Thoughts on curation

To curate 

When I checked the verb I was intrigued by the connections. Curare in Latin to to take care of, from cura (care) is clearly linked. We curate objects we care about, arranging them so that they are perhaps displayed effectively to please you or the others you share them with. Above is a display of my son's work put together (curated, even) by Glasshouse College and showing the skills he acquired during one year of his college life. The above is a digital curation of this curation, displayed by a proud mum on my flickr channel. 

Today I'm thinking about what I curate, why and where and by returning to the origin of the word I have realised some things I do which I had not really thought of as curation before. At one level I digitally curate resources for my research and my areas of interest. This started with bookmarking websites many years ago, but I realise that I rarely do that any longer. Bookmarks soon become unreliable and lost in their folders. Simply no longer practical. I moved on to Diigo where I can co-curate with others publicly and Delicious where again the social aspect helped me find new connections. A further change then arose as my online presence increased, I started using Pearltrees finding the easy interface practical as it is easy to share and to create teams but I am almost at the limit of my free account already. Scoop.it is another tool I rely on for connecting through curation. This shift from the personal to the public has been helpful in my work especially as it enables me to join like-minded collections from around the world. Currently I am putting together a curation linked to my paper for #OER17 because I know that those listening can browse and see a range of perspectives on my topic of the sustainability of teaching. We will thus be able to have a useful conversation and meanwhile I can keep evolving my ideas prior to the session. 

At another level, I realise that my most useful tool for curation is my google account. I've never thought of this as curation, it's more like the central pot from which I can draw material to curate and reflect on. So perhaps it is curation once removed. By default the contents are private, I make my conference notes, slides forms and docs there, my phone photos back up directly to it, instantly available to share and use whenever needed.  My blogs are also forms of curation for a specific purpose, bringing resources together and giving me space to think more deeply about them. The ALTC blog (which I work on as a co-editor) provides a way of curating the many voices of the community, helping to highlight themes which are timely and relevant. There is so much out there and not enough time to trawl through it all so finding trustworthy curators really helps. 

Curation is how I capture the things I care about and how I find others with similar interests and values. 

Setting sail together.

Yesterday I presented a keynote to the LLAS #elearnllas symposium which charted the course of my professional development as a learning technologist over recent years. I did not set out to become a learning technologist, this was rather a necessary set of skills I needed to acquire in order to develop our blended learning provision. My objective had been to implement a platform to enable our tutors and students to share resources and connect beyond the classroom, given that we have just 2 or 3 hours a week contact time. 

The journey has not been without its challenges but I didn't want to dwell on these. What I wanted to share with my peers was the nature of the digital landscape and how we can be best prepared for embarking on such journeys from our own institutional contexts. I chose to map the territory using the thinglink above. This is offered as a tool which can be shared with others to encourage them to explore the digital environment and find affordances which are useful to their practice. The multimodal path through my presentation is available here and those who share the messages can collect a digital badge by submitting an evidence URL (blog post link, tweet etc) to this open badge claim. 

Inspirational talk by @WarwickLanguage at #elearnllas Language teachers need to get out more into the digital space! pic.twitter.com/2T8neCo3ix

— elearning symposium (@elearnLLAS) January 22, 2016

Content - a deposed king

Choosing my regular blog for this response to #rhizo15 week 3. Dave's post raised questions around  content in learning. I have several different angles to bring to this. 

Firstly a discovery I made shortly after I started to work in an HE teaching context. I discovered that my colleagues teaching language undergraduates consider themselves to be content experts. This is distinct from those of us who are language teachers on Institution-wide language programmes teaching undregrads of subjects other than language (maths, politics etc). This really confused me. Surely they, like I and my colleagues were teaching language - just with a slightly different focus. I was certainly unaware of this distinction when I was an undergraduate studying French. I was clear I was learning the language whilst using sociological or literary sources. I completely accept that they are more up to date on the detail of social trends or literary criticism according to their research focus, whereas we focus on approaches to learning and metacognition - skills acquisition. 

Secondly, the saying when commercialisation of web first came about was content is king. Marketting was all about creating interest in your brand, finding interesting content to integrate in your website that would attract visitors. Companies paid big money to buy from content producers and associate it with their brand. This was "click bait". This was described by Steve Wheeler on his blog post ...context is king

Steve always has a knack for getting to the root of the issue. This post  was the pointer to making content open - he says "In education, if all learners receive is content, content, content, then they will be... well, discontent."  If content matters in education, what matters most I believe is that it is open. Open educational resources can lead to all sorts of unexpected (and usually positive) things. Those who find it can repurpose, remix, share and build new learning, contributing to the constant evolution of their Community of Practice. Creatve Commons licensing will be crucial to this. The rhizome in action...

Finally for the reason for me that content is the deposed king and context rules, again I am returning to another post from Steve. As educators we can find content, we can select and curate the best of that content but what really matters is the context we provide for learning. This is where great teaching happens. Get that wrong and essentially learners are finding their own way (or not, you may have lost them). 

I am grateful to Steve that he is an Open Educational practitioner, all his posts are available CC BY or CC BY SA. If you are an educator and that means nothing to you take a look at Education Creative Commons You need to know. Don't let content to be bought and sold, learning, like the web must be available to all. 

"Content is people" says Dave. Content in the contexts above is just stuff - a document, a book, a video, a "learning object". Used by managers as this is something they can measure. Does a course have content? Yup, 3 book chapters, 12 videos and a set of quizes. Lets not assume that access to content = great learning experience. That is clearly style over substance. The interactions we have - the context - is clearly more important.