We do talk a lot of jargon and acronyms in education.
Please have a read at this. I hope it makes sense. I live in a bubble of enthusiasts who want to make the world a better and fairer place. You can still be an idealist and be very grounded. When I say that with my Glasgow accent, believe me, you will be convinced.
Great too that WonkeHE picked up on the conference.
Depressingly , open education is not a feature of the policies of any of the political parties in Scotland in next week's national elections. That's a great pity and shows that UNESCO policy and many years of lobbying still has to find traction in our venerable and perhaps too self righteous Scottish education system.
My head was buzzing with ideas , links , contacts and as ever the global #OER community re-energised and reinvigorated me. Open should really be the way we do education and the final key note picking out open education as being the route to justice and empowerment was a great note to end on. If you are a policy maker perhaps find time to tune into that one session. If you work in any bit of the education system you will find some useful gems in the sessions all recorded and openly available. Here is direct link to Rajiv's session.
It was great that this years #oer21 was delivered in partnership with the domains conference and became #OERxDomains21 . It meant that we had sessions on policy, practice and the platforms that can be used to deliver open voices and open education. I've a long list of open and cloud based software that I now need to have another look at.
Special thanks to Maren Deepwell, Emma-Jane Brazier, Fiona Jones, and now Christina Vines and the ALT posse for keeping the open education fire burning.
In a UK context, more Colleges than ever before engaged with an open education conference. That is an important landmark. A special shout out too to Nicolas Garcia, Student President at City of Glasgow College , who was not in the least daunted and made a superb contribution to the opening plenary of an international education conference. I still hope we can bring this conference to City of Glasgow College in the future.
The technology was simply inspiring and set a very high benchmark around how on-line conferences should be run. I am sure there will be a blog post that I will link to here . The short hand is that the team from Reclaim Hosting wove together Streamyard, YouTube and Discord to create a magical experience - you can capture some of it in the recorded proceedings .
Yes, I am a people person and I miss meeting everyone face to face - I don't miss conference travel and cold chicken buffets though, but I do miss conference bonhomie and meeting old friends and new.
So down to earth with a bump - back to planning where City of Glasgow College goes next for a virtual learning environment in August 21 and still explaining why positioning content in the VLE or even on the College intranet is not open education - in fact the discussions are actually pre that , it's explaining that encouraging staff to publish anything outside of the College in an accessible way is actually a very good thing for them and the College and most of all for learners , and an email arrived on Friday asking for support on staff and student digital literacies at a national level, an old chestnut , groundhog day.. the open education journey is a long and challenging one.
The technology was simply inspiring and set a very high benchmark around how on-line conferences should be run. I am sure there will be a blog post that I will link to here . The short hand is that the team from Reclaim Hosting wove together Streamyard, YouTube and Discord to create a magical experience - you can capture some of it in the recorded proceedings .
Yes, I am a people person and I miss meeting everyone face to face - I don't miss conference travel and cold chicken buffets though, but I do miss conference bonhomie and meeting old friends and new.
So down to earth with a bump - back to planning where City of Glasgow College goes next for a virtual learning environment in August 21 and still explaining why positioning content in the VLE or even on the College intranet is not open education - in fact the discussions are actually pre that , it's explaining that encouraging staff to publish anything outside of the College in an accessible way is actually a very good thing for them and the College and most of all for learners , and an email arrived on Friday asking for support on staff and student digital literacies at a national level, an old chestnut , groundhog day.. the open education journey is a long and challenging one.
For the ALT Scottish Community it's a more modest pow wow next Friday , where we will share two stars and a wish.
Think it is fitting I open and close this post with the great art work of Bryan Mathers it was a critical element in pulling proceedings together.
I tweeted my way through the conference while chairing some brilliant sessions, I've curated a selection here. I can't name everyone here but respect and love to all who presented and participated in #oerxdomains21 and I am certain we will meet up further down the trail. It was a pleasure to be involved.
I even bought the t-shirt
Joe - many thanks for this reflective post and links to the recorded proceedings of #OER21. Much appreciated for those who were otherwise occupied on the day(s)! And thanks too for all those in-conference tweets.
ReplyDeleteI can only admire your committment to persuading education policy makers of the value and importance of OER to their efforts to improve Scottish education at all levels. Hopefully any SF Cabinet reshuffle following the election will offer a fresh opportunity to find a listening ear! The #OER21 conference should provide a fesh impetus for all such efforts - putting some 'wind in the sails'!
Well done - and more power to your efforts!