What am I reading in ScholarWorks, March 2026

March 2–6 is Open Education Week! Last week I attended the conference, OpenEd Live 2026 and heard SPARC’s Director of Open Education, Nicole Allen ask “What kind of a relationship do we want to have with knowledge?” Real knowledge does not come from facts, information or pre-digested summaries. It comes from grappling with ideas, building upon the ideas of others, and testing those ideas with rigor. For this month’s What am I Reading in ScholarWorks? I want to celebrate the mission of the open access and open educational movements.

Let’s start with a wide aperture: This year Wikipedia is celebrating its 25th anniversary. This resource in and by the commons is a success story like none other. Who would have predicted that a crowd-sourced encyclopedia would become such an important keeper of knowledge on the internet? That the participation of nearly a quarter million people writing, editing, and fact checking each article would result in 65 million articles in more than 300 languages?! Well, those of us that are advocates of open access and open education might have had a clue.

Open education is iterative, it’s transparent and attributable, accessible, dynamic, and participatory. It resists and rejects the commercialization and platformization of knowledge and instead asks each of us to engage, contribute, and share our collective human knowledge without barriers. A lofty, but, more than ever, essential project.

Narrowing the scope to our own Smith community we have, ScholarWorks—Smith College’s open access institutional repository. We have thousands of works produced by our community that we share out into the global commons. We have OER collections of Smith-authored textbooks, but also other open learning materials: labs, courses, lectures, co-faculty/student-authored open pedagogy projects. Smith College Libraries offers grants to faculty to review, adapt, adopt, or create OER.

Just in time for OpenEd week, let’s congratulate our latest grant awardee: Data and Statistical Sciences lecturer, Javier Burilla for their OER review. One open step at a time we will build the world we want to live in—by, for, and of the people. Happy Open Education Week!

Open Textbook Library (review)

OER collection in Smith ScholarWorks

OER Grant Opportunities (Smith's OER research guide) 
 

Smith ScholarWorks is Smith’s institutional repository of digital scholarship and research materials created and curated by faculty, students, and staff at Smith College. Browse by collections, disciplines, and authors.