Bios on #UnboundEq founding members – Maha, Catherine, & Mia:

Maha Bali, @Bali_Maha: I am an open and connected educator. I am an associate professor of Practice at the American University in Cairo’s Center for Learning and Teaching and have been working in faculty development since 2003.

I co-founded and co-direct Virtually Connecting, a global grassroots open connected movement that is centered around equity and inclusion (opening up access to conference conversations to people who cannot travel to conferences, such as myself as an Egyptian mother of a young child) which now has a team of over 50 volunteers worldwide.

I believe in openness as process and worldview and have worked on the idea of “open self” (#SelfOER) with Suzan Koseoglu, and I do all kinds of open educational practices in my classes including open web annotation, use of OERs, student blogging and using social networking. I’ve also co-facilitated several connectivist online learning experiences (#DigiWriMo, #ccourses, #moocmooc, #OpenLearning17, #OpenLearning18) in inclusive ways, inviting people around the world to take leading roles.

I teach a course on digital literacies and intercultural learning, and would like to incorporate more open and connected learning experiences in it. The course is a liberal arts requirement for undergraduate 2nd and 2rd year students at AUC. My course website is at http://diglit.creativitycourse.org

I have written and presented several critical and postcolonial critiques of open education and educational technology (see https://blog.mahabali.me/portfolio/research-scholarship/).

Catherine Cronin, @catherinecronin: I am an open educator, open researcher, and Strategic Education Developer at the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching & Learning in Higher Education in Ireland. My work focuses on open education, critical approaches to openness, digital identity practices, and exploring the interplay between formal and informal learning. I bring a diverse set of perspectives to my work — I am a New Yorker who has made my home in Ireland; an engineering graduate with an MA in Women’s Studies and a PhD in the area of open educational practices (OEP); a mother, an activist, a teacher, and always a learner. Recent work includes the joy of collaborating with Mia and Maha to create this Equity Unbound curriculum, creating and sharing open education resources for faculty and staff (e.g. an Open Education guide), engagement in the global #icollab network, and facilitating workshops on open education, digital identity, and digital wellbeing for educators and learners in different settings.

Mia Zamora, @MiaZamoraPhD: Recently I have returned back home from a wonderful year as the Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. Here at Kean University in NJ, I am Associate Professor in the School of English Studies, and I direct our MA in Writing Studies program and the Kean University Writing Project. As a scholar of Electronic Literature (literary works that originate in a digital environment and require digital computation to read), I am a digital humanist and educator who advocates for #ConnectedLearning and open networked education. I have also co-created (with Alan Levine aka @cogdog) “Networked Narratives” @NetNarr. #NetNarr is a journey into the worlds of digital art, video games, and electronic literature – seeking to understand the transformative magic that resides in collaborative making, composing, and writing on the open web. I have also co-facilitated connected learning collaborations such as Connected Courses and #CLMOOC.

Image: Mia, Maha, & Catherine (left to right) at the OER18 Conference, Bristol, UK (April 2018)