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OPENED CULTURE COLLECTIONS

Breaking Ground

Lived Experiences of AI in Research and Instructional Design

In the daily work of teaching and learning, practitioners and researchers are navigating AI in real time: experimenting, questioning, revising, and passing what they learn through the soil they share. This collection gathers their voices the way rhizomes spread beneath a forest floor, laterally, in every direction at once, and mostly unseen until new growth reaches the light. Works surface in waves, so what you find here today is only the beginning of what’s taking root.

What’s Taking Root

The works below are the first to break ground, and more are already in the soil.

This collection grew from the digital ethnography of emergent AI practices in research and learning design that we presented at ICDE, and from the community of educators, researchers, and designers who have kept sharing what they are learning since. Each work is published open access, licensed at the collection level under CC BY-SA 4.0, and carries a DOI so it stays citable wherever scholarship travels.

The first work is live now, the rest are moving through review and will open here as they are ready.
Read the Research Behind the Collection

Works in This Collection

Each work below surfaced from the same soil, in the order it reached the light. Published works open in full with their citation and license, and works marked coming soon are moving through review and will link here as they go live.

AI-Supported Career Sensemaking and Storytelling in Instructional Design Education

An exploratory study of the AI Blueprint, an AI-supported guide paired with human mentorship and reflective prompts, and how it helped instructional design students make sense of roles and tell their professional stories.
Read the Work

Nicole Weber

Angela Gunder

Control, Shift, Return

A reflection on AI, literacies, and the questions worth keeping, written in answer to the series’ invitation to share evolving practice in real time, before the research-to-practice gap leaves it behind.

Coming Soon

Punya Mishra

Demystifying AI: Human-Centered Design and Digital Literacy in Practice

Ian O’Byrne, Associate Professor of Literacy Education at the College of Charleston, in conversation with Josh Herron on making AI hands-on and human, from local models running on a Raspberry Pi to computational thinking in early childhood classrooms.

Coming Soon

Ian O’Byrne

Josh Herron

Rethinking Computing Education for an AI-Driven Era

AI and immersive technology are reshaping computing education, and the UK’s Curriculum and Assessment Review has little to say about the ethics that should guide them.

Coming Soon

Genevieve Smith-Nunes

AI as Pace Setter? What Working with AI Is Teaching Us About the Pace of Digital Productivity

A reflection on what working alongside AI reveals about the pace of digital productivity, and what that pace asks of the people and organizations trying to keep up with it.

Coming Soon

Maren Deepwell

AI Looks Like Tech

AI might look like a technology challenge, but the real work is pedagogical, and educational developers are the ones already building what comes next.

Coming Soon

Nathan Pritts

New Era, Same Problem: AI and the Architecture of Cultural Imperialism

Ask two leading AI assistants for ten philosophers in English and again in Mandarin, and the same hierarchy comes back. An essay on the structural biases generative AI carries about whose knowledge counts, whose language matters, and whose culture is centered.

Coming Soon

Robert MacAuslan

Building Better AI Feedback

After a commercial AI writing tool fell short, one educator built his own. The story of designing, piloting, and researching an AI writing coach that teaches.

Coming Soon

Nathan Pritts

What Will We Keep Open? Findings and Reflections from Research on AI and Open Education

From MyFest 2025: findings from a global study of more than 50 educators on six continents, and a participatory look at what remains open in collaboration, creation, and connection as AI reshapes education.

Coming Soon

Angela Gunder

Josh Herron

The Dream That Writes With You: On Creativity and Imagination in the Age of AI

From MyFest 2025: a storytelling session on creativity and imagination as protected, personal territory, and on what it means to keep creating with AI without surrendering either.

Coming Soon

Angela Gunder

OECC-Artboard 4-100

Tell Us What You’re Growing

This collection is still breaking ground, and there is room in the soil.
If you have a story of AI in your research, teaching, or learning design that wants more room than a case example gives it, tell us a little about it in whatever state it’s in. A finished draft is welcome. So is an idea. One of us will be in touch about how it might take root here.
Share Your Idea
About the Collections