- Attended & presented at BCNet in Vancouver this week (slides). BCNet is a large regional conference aimed at higher ed IT folks. I wasn’t sure how a presentation about open textbooks would go over considering the audience is mostly sys admins, IT helpdesk and CIO types, but a few showed up and seemed to be engaged with the presentation.
- My attendance at BCNet prompted a blog post that wasn’t a week in review post, but an observation that the new “notice and notice” requirement of the Canadian Copyright Act that kicked into effect in January of this year is a bloody hassle for higher ed to deal with.
- Also some excellent conversations in the backchannel around lack of diversity on stage at the conference exactly (1 of the 8 keynotes was a woman), and an off colour off the cuff remark made by the first day keynoter about Bruce Jenner. To his credit, he quickly realized how inappropriate his comment was and publicly apologized.
- Love this random act of YouTube comment karma initiated by Tom Woodward after he stumbled upon a video I made 6 years ago to help show a student in my Masters program how to add a hanging indent to a WordPress blog post.
- Started coordinating some work with U of Minnesota and Lumen on getting existing open textbook collections that are in the commons (like) into Pressbooks.
- Work on OpenEd with David on proposals. Also started putting together list of potential roles for local organizing committee. Some of you may be hearing from me soon 🙂
- On the OpenEd front, had a great lunch with Scott and Brian where I hijacked the convo asking them about the lessons they learned from previous Vancouver OpenEd conferences (2009/2012). Everytime I speak to these two I am again struck by how important they have been, and continue to be, to not only the local BC OpenEd community, but the larger OpenEd community. They have been in this a lot longer than I have and I always benefit from their perspective and advice.
- A great, simple little initiative coming from Kwantlen librarian Caroline Daniels. Kwantlen students use a lot of open textbooks, and some do like to order print copies from our print partner SFU just up the road from Kwantlen. Well, the books (while inexpensive) can be costly to ship via standard mail (around $10). There is already an existing courier system between higher ed institutions to facilitate inter-library loans where material can be requested by one library and shipped to another. Caroline contacted a librarian at SFU, who then contacted me about seeing if there was a way to leverage this existing courier service to remove shipping costs for physical versions of the books. Document Solutions at SFU (who do our printing) came on board and it looks like a process is now in place to ship books from SFU to Kwantlen via the inter-library loan system for free. Wonderful initiative from Caroline and Kwantlen to recognize this opportunity and act on it, and to SFU for being willing to facilitate the request.
- Spoke with Alex Berland about his OER nurse educator project in Bangladesh.
- Reading this week:
- Â The Invented History of ‘The Factory Model of Education by Audrey Watters and follow-up The Industrial Education System Myth by Martin Weller (in his blog category “calling bullshit” – awesome)
- Supporting Open by Colin Madland. Nice kitchen metaphor.
- Liberating Structures and The Open Education Consortium Global Conference from my colleagues Tracy Kelly and Mary Burgess
- Am I Switching my CC license back to -BY again? by Alan Levine.
- A Thankful Wikipedia by Mike Caulfield. Have you edited Wikipedia this week?
- Not your average book fair. I love how this local school is partnering with a local used bookstore instead of the multinational corp Scholastic to power their school bookfair. A win-win model for everyone…except Scholastic.
- According to that stupid app I’m 68. Stupid app.
- Kids school musical this week. The drama geek in me sure gets a kick out of watching them perform on stage.
What the person sitting behind the choir conductor sees. Clint Lalonde