Our Faculty Fellows Jessie, Christina and Rajiv
- Monday was the first meeting of our Faculty Fellows Christina Hendricks (UBC Philosophy), Jessie Key (VIU Chemistry) and . All three will be working with us over the course of the next year working on three themes within their institutions and disciplines: research, advocacy and providing feedback to our team as we move forward in the next year. The fog almost grounded our face to face meeting as flights from Vancouver were cancelled, but Rajiv and Christina showed a great deal of persistence getting here to meet. Rajiv has more.
- Left comment on the NPR Planet Money piece on the high cost of textbooks podcast.
- Amanda released a brand new open textbook this week, authored by Dr. James Sexton English Literature: Victorians and Moderns.
- Lined up a virtual presentation with CARL (Canadian Association of Research Libraries) on open textbooks for Open Access week (10am PST on Wednesday, Oct 22). Leva Lee, who has been working with the BCOER Librarians group, is joining me.
- Finalized the contract wording for my Health OTB project
- Hmmmm…can I figure out a way to go to this?
- Attended CCCOER webinar where I watched the wonderful Kim Thanos of Lumen Learning talk about their course development process, which involved her showing some slides of Candela, Lumen’s LMS agnostic authoring platform. This tickled me to no end because Candela is a fork of Brad’s Pressbooks Textbooks plugin work revised by Lumen to meet their specific needs. That sounds familiar :).
- Open Embeddable Assessments. Another thing I discovered during the CCCOER webinar.
- Thanks to a tweet from Heather Ross, we heard of an adoption of an open textbook from the BCcampus collection by Assistant Professor Eric Micheels at the University of Saskatchewan.
- Arranged an office shuffle in our Victoria office that will see all the OTB team (Amanda, Lauri, Brad and myself) in the same physical space. We only work together in the office 2 days a week, Tuesday and Thursday, but our offices were apart and down the hall. We were feeling that there was value in having us all in the same open space on those 2 days, so there has been some coordination and negotiations with co-workers for spaces.
- Came across 4 new open Geography textbooks, thanks to a connection facilitated by Paul Stacey at Creative Commons.
- Interview with another student newspaper, The Gauntlet, at D’arcy Norman’s home institution UCalgary.
- Met with the ITA (Industry Trade Authority here in BC) to talk more about trades training materials.
- Met with Janet Welch fro the University of Alberta. Janet is involved in an open project in Alberta, and is working to get it off the ground. We’re hoping to take this open thing beyond BC and into Alberta and Saskatchewan, and Janet is eager to see how we can all work together to make that happen.
- Met with Hugh at Pressbooks to talk about the possibilities of adding an export to Word or Open Document Type (ODT) to Pressbooks. Also in early stages of thinking of other Pressbooks projects that we might go external with.
- Brewed a batch of beer with Brad and a few others (although due to a scheduling snafu, I ended up arriving at the end, just in time to toss in the finishing hops). We bottle in 2 weeks.
Come to Cardiff!
If my Welsh grandfather were still alive he’d be smiling at the thought of it, I’m sure.