Of course I couldn’t go to Dundee without visiting RRS Discovery and HMS Unicorn…
RSS Discovery
Great cabin, HMS Unicorn
Wardroom, HMS Unicorn
Carpenter’s walk, HMS Unicorn
Open Scotland at CILIP Scotland Conference
Earlier this week I was invited to present about Open Scotland at the CILIP Scotland Conference in Dundee. This is the first time I’ve attended the CILIPS conference and it was a really lively and engaging event with over 300 participants and an inspiring keynote on “Challenges, Choices and Opportunities” from Martyn Evans, Chief Executive of the Carnegie Trust. My Open Scotland presentations seemed to be well received and I was very encouraged to have a couple of questions about the potential role of public libraries in opening access to educational resources, particularly for the school sector. When we held the first Open Scotland Summit in Edinburgh in 2013 it occurred to me that the education sector potentially has much to learn from the public library sector in terms of open practice. My presentation session was ably chaired by Heather Marshall, Senior Librarian at Glasgow Caledonian University Library and in conversation with her afterwards I was struck yet again by GCU Library’s commitment to promoting open educational resources and encouraging open educational practice among their staff.
Open Education, Open Scotland Event
The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) Scotland Special Interest Group (SIG), in collaboration with Jisc RSC Scotland, SQA and Cetis will host Open Education, Open Scotland at the Informatics Forum at the University of Edinburgh on Tuesday, 3rd June 2014.
This free one-day event will provide an opportunity for ALT Scotland SIG members and the wider community to come together and share ideas and experiences of adopting and promoting open educational practices across all sectors of Scottish education.
“Open education can promote knowledge transfer while at the same time enhancing quality and sustainability, supporting social inclusion, and creating a culture of inter-institutional collaboration and sharing. In addition, open education can expand access to education, widen participation, create new opportunities for the next generation of teachers and learners and prepare them to become fully engaged digital citizens.”
– Scottish Open Education Declaration
Early last year, these four supporting institutions launched Open Scotland, a voluntary, cross-sector initiative that aims to raise awareness of open education, encourage the sharing of open educational resources, and promote the development of open policy and practice. A number of awareness raising activities have taken place including:
- The Open Scotland Summit, which brought together senior managers, policy makers and key thinkers to explore the development of open education policy and practice in Scotland.
- The Open Scotland blog was launched to disseminate news relating to all aspects of openness in education and to act as a focal point for discussion and debate.
- The first draft of the Scottish Open Education Declaration was released. This open draft is based on the UNESCO Paris OER Declaration, but extends its scope to focus on open education in general, rather than OER in particular.
Invited Speakers and Topics:
- Maren Deepwell, ALT: Update from ALT
- Colin Cook, Scottish Government: Scottish Government perspectives
- David Beards, SFC: SFC Update
- Ronald MacIntyre, Open University: OU Scotland’s Open Education Project
- Suzanne Scott, Borders College: Open Badges, Open Borders
- Jonathan Worth, Coventry University: Open Courses
- Natalie Lafferty, University of Dundee: Students as consumers and producers of open educational resources
- Ian Stewart and John Johnstone, GLOW
- Lorna M Campbell, Cetis: Scottish Open Education Declaration
There are still a few places available for this free event. Registration and further information is available here: https://www.alt.ac.uk/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=106
Threave and Dundrennan
Open Practice and Open Policy at the Cetis Conference
The theme of this years annual Cetis Conference at the University of Bolton is Building the Digital Institution, and once again there is a strong focus on openness. In addition to Audrey Watters keynote, and parallel sessions on open knowledge (Open Knowledge: Wikipedia and Beyond) and open source (Web Services or Cloud, Open Source or outsourced?), there are two open education sessions:
Open Education: a New World Order? facilitated by Li Yuan and Stephen Powell
Open Education: From Open Practice to Open Policy by Lorna M.Campbell and Li Yuan.
Open Education: From Open Practice to Open Policy is very much a natural progression from open education parallels we’ve run at previous Cetis Conferences. The first open education session we ran at the Cetis Conference was the UK OER Scoping Session way back in 2008 and since then we’ve progressed through the OER Technical Roundtable, Building Collections of OERs, to Open Practice and OER Sustainability, so it seemed natural that this year’s session should focus on moving from open practice to open policy.
In addition to looking at the emergence of open policy and practice across the UK and further afield, we’ll be exploring questions relating to the potential benefits of these developments. What, if any, is the value of open education policy? Do countries, regions and institutions really need open education policies? Should government agencies play a role in the development of open education policy? Are there conflicts between commercial interests and market forces, and open education policy and practice? How can open education initiatives be nurtured and sustained?
We’ve also decided to throw a little theoretical exercise in to the mix, we’re challenging session participants to develop (or not) open education policy for a hypothetical country (we’ll come up with a name later!). We’ve lined up an eclectic range of speakers who will be presenting their experience of open education practice and policy and arguing for a particular way forward for our new country. Session participants will be able to discuss and debate the merits (or not) of the proposed approaches and decide on a way forward. Participants are free to appoint themselves as government ministers, lobbyists, militants, military dictators, etc and speakers may be encouraged to wear national dress. Li and I will be assuming the roles of Kirsty Wark and Jeremy Paxman 😉
Speakers include:
Paul Booth, North-West OER Network and Manchester Metropolitan University
Suzanne Hardy, Newcastle University
Tore Hoel, Nordic OER and Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences
David Kernohan, Jisc
Paul Richardson, Jisc RSC Cymru
Joe Wilson, ALT Scotland SIG and SQA
You can register for the Cetis Conference here and I hope we can look forward to seeing you in Bolton in June!
Tonight! Open Scotland on Radio Edutalk
I’m delighted to have been invited by John Johnson and David Noble to join them on Radio Edutalk tonight to talk about the Open Scotland initiative and open education more generally. I’ll be talking to John and David at 20.00 GMT tonight, so why not tune in and join us here: Radio Edutalk Live Stream.
You can also contribute to Radio Edutalk by:
-
Emailing comments or questions before, during or after a show to edutalkr@hotmail.co.uk
-
Sending a tweet to @EDUtalkr and/or use the hashtags#edutalk
OER14
I’m just back from OER14 in Newcastle and it was another fabulous conference. I know that many people sadly predicted the demise of the OER conference after the Jisc / HEA UKOER Programmes ended in 2012, but two years after the end of UKOER the conference really is going from strength to strength. The quality of the papers this year was excellent, and if I have one criticism of the event, it’s that there were so many great presentations that I only got to hear a fraction of the ones I was really interested in! The venue worked well, the conference organisers did a splendid job, there was a really positive feeling of community, it was great to see people from all over the world and, last but not least, it was a lot of fun!
During the conference dinner we were all given little packets of Lego and asked to build something that represented what open education means to us. The results were as imaginative, eclectic (and occasionally rude) as you might imagine. Here’s mine, it’s supposed to be Open Scotland and Creative Commons :} Many thanks Darya Tarasowa for letting me borrow her skirt!
Huge thanks to all those involved in organising OER14 and in particular to conference chairs Simon Thomson and Megan Quentin-Baxter.
OCWC Global Twitter Highlights
I’ve made a storify of a few of my twitter highlights from the recent OCWC Global Conference in Lubljana here: OCWC Global Conference Storify.
Without a doubt my twitter highlight of the entire event has to be from Peter Bryant….
I am now quite certain that the term MOOC is as well defined and understood as the 'Boogie Monster'. #OCWCGlobal
— Peter Bryant (@PeterBryantHE) April 24, 2014
Inspiration from OpeningUpSlovenia
OpeningUpSlovenia at OCWC Global
I’ve spent most of this week in Ljubljana, Slovenia for the Open Course Ware Consortium Global Conference where I was interested to hear about a project that has much to inspire Open Scotland. Ljubljana was chosen to host the conference to highlight an ambitious new national initiative, OpeningUpSlovenia. The initiative was launched at the conference by Jernej Pikalo, Slovenian Minister for Education, and Mitja Jermol, Head of Center for Knowledge Transfer at the Jožef Stefan Institute.
OpeningUpSlovenia takes its inspiration from the European Commission’s 2013 Opening Up Education communication. OpeningUpSlovenia is a collaborative cross sector initiative involving all Slovenian universities, compulsory and vocational education institutions together with technical, research and industry partners. The aim of this ambitious initiative is to:
“create an open educational system parallel to the formal one to exploit all aspects of open education, allowing rigorous, transparent, and replicable testing of open learning environments, open education theories, new business models, open organisational forms, open education computational tools, and new and emerging technologies for the educational technologies market place.”
During the fist stage of the initiative, three sub-projects will be launched focusing on different educational sectors;
1. Compulsory pre-school, primary and secondary education,
2. OER in higher education,
3. Vocational education, on-the-job training and life-long learning.
These projects will create advanced technologies, open learning environments and open educational resources and will foster open connectivity and innovation. Supporting multilingualism in open education is also a corner stone of the OpeningUpSlovenia.
Through this initiative, Slovenia aims to become a role model for open education in a knowledge based Europe. In response to the question ‘Why Slovenia?’ Mitja Jermol responded, ‘Because Slovenia is a “little big country”’. Due to its size and scale, Slovenia is in an ideal position to support the EU’s aim of opening up education across Europe and globally. In order to do this, Slovenian Minister for Education Jernej Pikalo stressed unequivocally the need for legislative measures and explicit government policies to support innovation in open education.
It will be very interesting to see how the OpeningUpSlovenia initiative progresses and what Scotland, as another “little big country”, can learn from their experiences. In drawing the launch of OpeningUpSlovenia to a close, Fred Mulder, UNESCO Chair in Open Educational Resources called for more countries to follow Slovenia’s example and open up education. Wouldn’t it be nice if Scotland was next?
You can find out more about OpeningUpSlovenia here: http://www.k4all.org/openingupslovenia/
Here be dragons!
This week I’m at the Open Course Ware Consortium Conference in Ljubljana. They have some absolutely splendid dragons here!
