#teachmeet Five Years of Teachmeets

Subheading could be five years of teachmeets and the world is a better place but it has not changed.

Five years ago some folks working in Scottish Education discovered a model for something called an "unconference  " - a more spontaneous and crowd sourced way of organising and hosting a gathering of like minds. With a little light branding (see logo above)  and a set of "rules" what started as an an annual event  has almost become a movement.

But there are a few bits that need ironed out -

• Organisers need to keep looking at ways that the unconference model has progressed - the model and rules need to continually evolve.
• A model has not really been worked out around  the custodianship of the teachmeet model .
• There is not a place or guidelines on how you might archive or share the goodies that are uncovered at your teachmeet
• Some purists stiill struggle in balancing the spontaneity of the model with any form of sponsorship or a sponsored slot

With these caveats anyone organising a gathering of educators in any sector - should try and incorporate a teachmeet section in the proceedings - would be a perfect session to include in any staff development day too.

The Case for Open Educational Resources and Open Books

I would like to see Scottish Colleges and Schools plugged in more actively to the growing open educational resource movement. I have made the case a few times before. This info graphic says a lot more than words.
Article is great too.

Talking Dog

This week we've watched this clip every night - it cracks my kids up.
We want to know where we can buy a talking dog ?
We'd like to send him some bacon too !

#open4ed Open for Education and RSC North and East Last Post

Attribution:

Image: 'One more from the Storr'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/59562171@N00/88904665 and with thanks to Carol Walker for tour of http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net

Spent a useful day at Open for Education in Edinburgh . Presented with a smorgasbord of practical ideas for delivering in the classroom.  From the selection I attended I was as ever impressed by Craig Mill's work on opening up access for IT ,  Colin Maxwell's enthusiasm  and Carol Walker's ideas on digital story telling . The keynotes featured Google Aps , an over view of open source solutions from Miles Berry and a view on OER from Frank Rennie of Lews Castle College.

The audience lapped it up and it was good to see  folk from schools , colleges and Higher Education in audience. Good too to see SQA E-Learning and Assessment folk joining in too. Twitter stream #open4ed
picks up lots of goodies from a rewarding day

Sad that this is last event to be organised by the team at RSC North and East Scotland. Over the last ten years they have proven an innovative bunch and delivered for the North East , Scotland and for UK and beyond.

• Providing support for national training needs analysis
• The E-Learning Olympics - a superb delivery model 
• Edu Apps and great work particularly around access
• An excellent term time fortnightly  news feed on all things ICT in partnership with the South and West RSC 

Lots of achievements for the team to be proud of and a lot for RSC Scotland,  the successor organisation,  to take forward . Still some distance to go before teaching profession in HE, FE and Schools get all of this but great legacy to build on.

 Standing on the shoulders of giants indeed !

Technologies for Learning Strategy #ediff #TforL

Now the election is over it is great to see some things starting to move quite quickly again. One area is that of technologies for learning and the whole possible reprocurement of GLOW. Spotted today that the Technologies for Learning Website sprang back into life. All three of the new papers are worthy of discussion. I spotted too that Lesley Riddoch is asking well intentioned questions about what is needed in this space.

The debate starting here is worth a look - here is Lesley crowd sourcing her next Hootsman feature.