Helping Each Other

Like all of you, Open Education Global (OEG) has been feeling the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic. We feel the depletion of social and emotional energy. We feel the distress and concern over health, safety, and financial stability.

Around the world, the impact of the pandemic has been compounded by violence, curtailed freedoms, and racial injustices. We find these actions disturbing and distressing. They leave us with a heavy heart. We oppose violence, oppression, and discrimination.

The very basis and underlying principles of open education are around inclusion and equity. These are core to OEG as an organization, too. As an organization, OEG proactively works at having diverse global staff, members, and Board. With that diversity comes different world views, beliefs, understandings, and experiences. We embrace this diversity. We learn from it and draw on it as a strength.

All of OEG’s efforts are focused on making education an accessible, essential, shared, and collaborative social good. This is our role, our mandate, our vision.

OEG believes in the power of education as a means of enhancing understanding, compassion and empathy. We believe education has a critical role to play in helping us all cope and deal with these difficult times.

As a global, member-based organization, OEG believes in the power of collective action. While this is our normal mode of operation it is even more important in times like these. The best response to times of crisis is coming together and helping each other.

Toward that end, we invite all our members and the global open education community to share with us and each other the resources, practices, policies and means by which you are dealing with the pandemic and social injustices related to absence of diversity, equity and inclusion.
In support of this sharing and dialogue OEG is launching OEG Connect.

Over the past couple of months we’ve been working on developing OEG Connect and preparing it for launch. Our aim is for OEG Connect to serve as a global forum for discussion of matters related to open education. It provides a space where OEG members and the open education community from around the world can share expertise and learn from each other.

The current global crises around the pandemic and social injustices are matters that directly affect all of us in open education. Giving the pressing need to act, OEG has moved forward plans to launch OEG Connect. We’ve set up an area in OEG Connect for facilitated dialogue on these crises and the ways open education can help resolve them. We invite you to post, listen, and learn as we collectively work to generate a shared understanding and course of action.

Working together to make the world better through open education.

Paul

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OEG Voices – Latest Podcasts

OE Global Voices

Welcome to the home of podcasts produced by Open Education Global. These shows bring you insight and connection to the application of open education practices from around the world. Listen at podcast.oeglobal.org

We are pleased to return to our series that introducse you to members of OEGlobal Board of Directors. In this episode, we take you to Nagoya, Japan, for a conversation with Takaya Yamazato, who joined the board in 2024. Listen in to learn more about Takaya’s background, motivations, and vision for open education. You will also hear right in the opening music a fascinating insight into his many talents and his research into the micro details of one of the most iconic paintings.

As professor and Deputy Director at the Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Nagoya University, Takaya’s specializes in wireless and visual light communication and also leads Nagoya University’s OpenCourseWare initiative, working with faculty to publish and enhance course content. He describes how their OCW effort are much more than uploading content aimed at supporting materials to “preserve a legacy of teaching excellence.”

We offered Takaya the option to reply to our questions in his natural language, but he went beyond that in replying in both English and Japanese. He shared his responses in notes as a PDF we are sharing as a download, which is well worth looking at because Takaya added photos to show key locations near his location in Nagoya, a beautiful photo of him as a child, and examples of his open education achievements.

Side by side photos of Takaya Yamazota sitting in his office and Alan Levine in his home library. — In the OEGlobal Voices studio with Takaya Yamazota (left) and Alan Levine (right).

You find many inspiring and global level viewpoints from Takaya:

We believe that this is a message that will bring back the way of education from the bottom up. The education that a person needs now is to grow people who are able to do the right thing. We must grow people who are not just for efficiency, profit, or national gain, but also for the good of the world.
Open education has the potential to provide a space for that reflection. It can create opportunities for ethical reasoning, global dialogue, and personal transformation, not just academic advancement.
Takaya Yamazota

Episode 84 Transcript Download

Notes on This Episode

We are pleased to offer this conversation with Takaya’s voice heard in both English and Japanese and offer a transcript of the English portions. Unfortunately the Descript editing tool we use was unable to process the dual languages, so we lack the usual listen option with the transcript and its GenAI summary.

The episode required additional editing in Audacity to add Takaya’s audio and we used MacWhisper to obtain a transcript of his responses in English. But we do offer as a bonus the full musical track that Takaya shared so we could we use in the episode’s introduction and closing. You should listen to the full episode to appreciate the story behind the music.

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 84

diverse regions and disciplines, all united by the belief that education should be freely available and socially meaningful.
It’s not just about strategy, it’s about values. And it’s given me hope that open education can help build bridges where politics cannot.
Takaya Yamazota

Nagoya University https://en.nagoya-u.ac.jp/
- Nagoya University Motto 勇気ある知識人 — courageous intellectual via Wikipedia
Takaya Yamazota (OE Global Board profile)
- Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Nagoya University)
- Nagoya University OpenCourseWare (NUOCW)
- YLAB – Yamazota Laboratory (Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Nagoya University)
The Secret of the Eyes of Mona Lisa (2024, The Review Policy and Current Status of the IEICE Transactions)

Italian researchers discovered the letters “LV” hidden in the Mona Lisa’s pupil, unseen for centuries, and only revealed thanks to modern technology with very precise microscope lenses.
Similarly, in telecommunications, the LDPC code was overlooked for decades before being rediscovered and becoming fundamental to today’s wireless standards.
And these examples remind us if we evaluate ideas only by today’s capabilities, we may miss tomorrow’s breakthrough.
That’s why our OCW is designed not just to present knowledge, but to inspire, reinterpretation, and rediscovering. I believe open education should be an invitation not just to learn, but to look again with new eyes.
Takaya Yamazota

Our open licensed music for this episode is “Ceramic Feeling” recorded from a live performance by Takaya’s band “Rough Diamonds” and is shared under a Creative Commons By Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.