Whirl Wind by Jonathan Trumbull used under CC-BY license
There are a slew of Open Education events on my radar/ToDo list right now.
Open Education Week
Next week is the global Open Education Week from the Open Education Consortium. There are events happening around the world for this week, both live and online (full schedule of global events). BCcampus is participating by sponsoring a week of Open Webinars on Open Education. These are (as you might have guessed) free and open for anyone to attend, and I am very grateful to all of the presenters who have agreed to participate, from Camousn College, UBC, TRU, UVic, KPU and the OER Research Hub, as well as my colleagues from BCcampus.
Full schedule & connection details for our Open Webinars on Open Education next week (March 9-13).
The BC Open textbook Summit
The 3rd annual Open Textbook Summit is happening May 28 & 29 in Vancouver. My colleague Amanda Coolidge is putting this event together & we are looking for presentation proposals. We’ve had a number of great proposals already submitted that have me excited. If you have been working on an open textbook project, the call for proposals runs until March 23rd. Consider submitting and joining us.
BCcampus Faculty Fellow and open textbook advocate Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani from KPU (fresh back from his dream vacation to New Zealand for the Cricket World Cup) is our opening keynote. Rajiv has become a real force in the open textbook world and has made incredible progress in both his discipline Psychology and at his institution advocating for wider use of open textbooks. He was our first “free range” adapter (leading me to do a happy dance) and has been actively using open textbooks as an instructor in a number of courses.
The second keynote for the summit is one that I think is a stroke of brilliance from Amanda as it is being done by three students who have been leaders in the open textbook movement in Western Canada. Chardaye Bueckert from Simon Fraser University, Max Fineday from University of Saskatchewan, and Erik Queenan from Mount Royal University. Max is a wonderful speaker, Chardaye has been a long time supporter and advocate, and Erik has been doing some very interesting work on the ground. I am really looking forward to their talk.
OpenEd 2015
Working with David Wiley from Lumen Learning on this one. The annual OpenEd conference is happening November 18-20 in Vancouver, and David has just released the call for proposals for that. Last year was my first OpenEd in Washington. I did attend briefly in 2012 when it was in Vancouver, but was sequestered away shortly after Gardner Campbell’s excellent morning keynote (go watch it) for a BC specific open education meeting hot on the heels of the announcement of the BC Open Textbook Project, so didn’t really experience OpenEd as I had hoped.
My first task was securing a location for the event in Vancouver – no easy task considering the event has grown and last year was over 500 attendees. We’re used to doing events at BCcampus, but nothing at that scale (although David assures me that it will likely be a more modest affair this time around). At any rate, trying to find a venue in Vancouver was a challenge, but we think we have found a good one in the historic Fairmont Hotel Vancouver that will give the conference a very west coast feel.
OEC’s Open Education Global
Finally, in April there is the OEC’s Open Education Global Conference in Banff. I’ll be attending and meeting others from the global open community. Being peripherally involved with the Mozilla community here in Victoria (never as much as I would like these days), I am especially jazzed to see & hopefully meet Mark Surman from Mozilla. Mark is doing one of the conference keynotes. Mozilla is heavily invested in lifelong learning with initiatives like Webmaker and OpenBadges, and everyday I appreciate more and more the work Mozilla does advocating for an open web and empowering people – especially kids – to tinker, make and (most critically) understand how the open web works and why the open bit is fundamentally important to the future digital world they are/will live in.
* apologies Lou