Open Education News

Philipp in his blog, Sharing Nicely, featured his reflections on the iSummit 2008 open education track.  Excerpts of his feedback are highlighted below.

It was great that the facilitators (Delia and Ahrash) used an open spaces approach to create opportunities for participants to take the conversation into directions they were most interested in.

…there were so many new faces and projects that hadn’t been on our radar before, and that the enthusiasm around opening education seems to keep growing and growing.

Cape Town Declaration T-Shirts … was a great way to make people aware of the declaration…

…it was a bit of a stretch to make the track fit within the objectives of the overall iSummit. This is more related to the challenge within iCommons to bring together so many different communities who all belong within this broader world of free culture / free knowledge. Yet, the communities are so different that it isn’t easy to find tangible results that make sense for all of them.

The open education track always brings together people who connect into many different networks….It would be worth spending more time trying to link what these different initiatives and networks are doing already.

We need to start involving students (I am using the term broadly, these could be within institutions or lifelong learners or anyone else who finds engaging with OER useful).

… rather than trying to document everything that is going on during the event, we create a rich list of contact details, URLs, and links to everything that comes up during the discussions. Every time someone mentions a project, it needs to be added to a list of resources on the wiki.

…more emphasis on blogging about the contents of the track so that people who are not there can engage with the bloggers about their opinions.