If you are an open educator, please introduce yourself here so we can create a directory of teachers, academics, researchers and advocates to make sure we can connect and share ideas, projects, research and experiences and if you want to share your projects from around the world, please let us know so you want add your country to our Around the World series
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Hello - Iām David Kernohan (@dkernohan on the twitters). A long time ago I led on #ukoer for JISC - these days I try to stay active and useful in the open education community via conferences, mailing lists and social media. I also run the @UKOER twitter account which tries to provide a manageable digest of OER activity pertaining to the UK.
I often work in collaboration with @vivienrolfe, we have an ongoing interest in the academic literature around open education, and conceptualisations of sharing and reuse.
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Hi all. Iām Leo Havemann and I am a learning technologist at Birkbeck, University of London (@leohavemann on Twitter). The focus of my work involves supporting and developing academicsā use of learning technologies. My research tends to be focused more specifically on open education topics. Open education to me is a very interesting space because it is about both opening up the educational material and discussions that normally take place in institutions and engaging a wider public, and also about considering the impacts and benefits that āopennessā can bring into our daily practice. Iām particularly interested in what I call the slippery concept of āopen educational practicesā.
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That āAround the Worldā page is totally bizarre. Is there really no open education at all in the entirety of North America? Is āopen educationā defined in such as way that edX, Coursera, Udacity, Stanfordās famous AI courses, etc are excluded? MITās OpenCourseWare project (the predecessor to edX) began in 2002.
Tom
Hi, it is not bizarre at all, we have posted what our members from different countries have shared with us so far, and as you can see in Around the World | Open Education Working Group there are no post from North or South America because nobody has sent us a post or a proposal, so you can either write one or instead, share around so you or someone else will write something about USA, Canada or Mexico.
These around the world posts have been written by practitioners and advocates from different countries and we are looking forward to add more and more, we have not deliberately excluded anyone, we post them when someone from a country shares their stories with us, so if you think you can do a good job sharing a post for open education in the USA, please send it to us.
Best wishes
J
PS: It would be great if you join us and introduce yourself to the group and share your interests with the fellow members
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Hello from Ottawa, ON, Canada!
Alex Enkerli, Learning Technology Advisor at Vitrine technologie-Ć©ducation, a non-profit supporting technopedagogical appropriation in Quebecās college system (especially āCegepsā). Our approach to Open Education revolves around both OERs (with our Ceres Catalogue built through Linked Open Data) and innovative open practices such as in our lab on Open Badges.
Personally, been teaching ethnographic disciplines and post-development at a variety of post-secondary institutions in the United States and Canada (especially Concordia University).
Recently co-organised Open Knowledge Festival Montreal (#OKFestMtl) in collaboration with @okfnca_bot, @dianemercier (@carnetsDM), @joplam, and @InLibro. Been particularly interested in building bridges between diverse āopen thingsā (and āfree thingsā), from Free Software and Open Data to Open Development and, obviously, Open Education.
My personal approach tends to revolve around the ādoingā of Open Education. For instance, been particularly interested (and involved) in getting people to create and adapt resources together. In this sense, OERs have less to do with the rising cost of textbooks than with the learning potential of appropriating resources through communities of practice.
These days, part of my work has to do with an informal event weāre organising for June 2, in Montreal, in partnership with people from universities (Concordia, McGill, and Laval) along with BookCamp and PressbooksEDU. Hugh McGuire heads the latter and he started the REBUS Webbooks project, which also connects to his Librivox community of public domain audiobooks.
Will also be helping in the organisation of next yearās Colloque libre with Adte, with recent developments leading them to OERs along with their focus on Free Software.
In response to Tomā¦
There are obviously many Open Education practitioners and enthusiasts, here in Canada. Among crowd favourites are BC Campusās OpenEd project and Contact Northās Teach Online guides. (Not to mention Athabascaās CIDER, Tony Batesās open textbook on teaching, and Rory McGrealās Commonwealth of Learning.) After all, the term āMOOCā and the openness implied in connectivism come from @davecormier, @gsiemens, and @downes. Just this week, attended workshops about neat developments surrounding Open edX at Dawson College.
Itās just that it might be more challenging to get those people to participate in OKFNās groups.
Would/will be neat, though.
Cheers!
ā
Alex
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Thanks for the quick reply. From the title, I assumed it was a worldwide registry, as opposed to a self-selected set of stories.
As for me, Iām an occasional OKFN Labs collaborator based in Cambridge, home of edX. Other than knowing some of the edX team, my only open education involvement is as a consumer, so I donāt really have enough knowledge to write an article about whatās going on in North America. Perhaps someone who knows the global scene could write up a global overview to fill in the gaps that havenāt been self-reported.
p.s. The only reason I noticed this at all is because the discussion forum software lumps everything together and told me that this was one of my ānewā posts, despite not being a member. Sorry for the interruption!
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Isnāt this part of OKFNās open design?
Though there might be a specific membership for the Open Education Working Group, exposing other OKFN members to whatās going on in the education sphere might be quite beneficial.
Besides, donāt know about Javiera but your reaction did help me think about important issues. So, thanks for the āinterruptionā.
As you can see, Alexandre (@aenkerli) is an important resource person in Open Education in Canada, particularly in Ontario and Quebec. Thank you!
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Iām also happy of your irruption, it raised a very interesting issue and made me think on quickly creating a map of posts to see if by not seeing their countries listed people can get interested in sharing their posts, so here is the map, please help us sharing it with the USA community and maybe we are lucky and can get a post soon or even luckier and we can have posts from different states
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Hello all,
My name is Pedro, I am Brazilian and I live in Oulu, Finland. I am a postdoctoral researcher in the field of electrical engineering, but I am very disappointed with the whole academic experience. In a nutshell, the work is much more about self-reproduction than social applicability. I have also many concerns about the way teaching is seen, how the industries drive the research, how universities are changing their focus to GDP growth, how non-critical are the curriculum, privatization of public money (i.e. the university works to strengthen the industry and individual, but the overall society not) etc etc.
In this context, I started a project called Commons University Association where I try to build something that see university as a commons (both a common good and a social relation built in non-monetary terms). At this point, I am still building some activities and searching for people that are up to help.
One of my ideas is to build OER in different basis than the mainstream; I would like to see something targeting critical thinking and using approaches of critical pedagogy.
I would be very happy to contact people in this group that may help me.
Many thanks and I hope to get in touch soon.
Pedro
ps. This is my work homepage. I have taught a course and the material is available to everyone to download and modify it (IPyhton notebook). I also make my research work after 2013 available. Nevertheless, I am nowadays searching for new opportunities to work in something meaningful and I would not think twice to give up my job if/when I get my chance.
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Hi, Iām Josie Fraser. Iām interested in and work to promote and embed open education practice in a number off ways - I am a trustee of Wikimedia UK, and have recently been working on open education policy and practice for schools. I am also very happy to be co-chairing OER17 next year.
Great to see people here!
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@pedro.nardelli, sounds like your work may align well with Team Academy. Finlandās already well-known for allowing some broader social agency in education, but Tiimi Akatemia may be even more exemplary of a direction into learning from the Commons. Especially through contacts like @otisyvesā¦
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Hello Javiera and all,
I am Chrissi and I work at Manchester Metropolitan in the UK as a playful open experimenterā¦ or officially an academic developer 
I am a PhD student in open education for the last 3 years and 3 monthsā¦ with an interest in finding ways to make collaborative learning work in such settings. Using phenomenography exploring such experiences.
Really looking forward to connecting with you.
Chrissi
@chrissinerantzi
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Thank you very much for the suggestions! I will check them out 
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Hi, I am Markus Deimann (@mdeimann on twitter) and I have been involved in Open Education Research for quite some time. My background is in educational science and I have a strong interest in theory and philosophy. I try to push forward OER in Germany as a consultant for politics and academia.
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Hi all, my name is Annalisa Manca (@annalisamanca), Iām Italian (Sardinian, to be precise ) but I live in Scotland. I work at Dundee Medical School as an educationalist and educational technologist (whatever this meansā¦) and, likewise @leohavemann, my work involves supporting academicsā and studentsā use of emerging technologies for learning. Iām very interested in Open Education, especially of course within medical education but also more widelyā¦ My current research interests are at a crossroads with OERs, emotions in medicine, the ārefugees emergencyā and inter-professional learning.
Iām the ambassador for the Italian Open Education Working Group, and Iām going to create a separate thread for this very soon!
Looking forward to connect with you all!
Annalisa
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Hello! I work at the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) at the University of Texas. We are one of 16 federally funded language resource centers in the US, and our particular focus is on OER for language learning.
Our projects fall into four categories:
- OER for Less Commonly Taught Languages (i.e. openly licensed online textbooks, activities, lessons, and videos for languages like Czech & Kāicheā),
- OER for teacher Professional Development (includes PD events, badges, and online resources),
- OER/OEP research (specific to the field of foreign language teaching), and
- open platforms for foreign language teaching and learning (ex social reading tools).
We have recently been trying to shift our focus to OEP and the potential for innovative pedagogy that goes along with openness. Rather than just handing people ready-to-use OER, we want to help them plan how to fit the materials into their curriculum and motivate them to remix, share, and create their own materials as part of a community. It sounds like a lot of you would probably have great insight into these concepts
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Dear colleagues,
My name is Paula Morais. I know already some of the colleagues from other interactions/settings and I look forward to meeting the rest.
I am currently working/trying to finish my PhD on openness and equity, with Rwanda as a case study, through Lisbon Technical University.
I am working with the British Council, setting up open education (MOOC, OER, Open Access, Open Textbooks and Open Badges) and online Accredited courses for Syrian Refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and those still living in Syria.
I am also a researcher and reviewer for the Open Data Barometer. By the way the 2015 edition just came out a few days and only 10% of data from governments is published as open data. Still a lot of work to be done! You can have access to the full report here http://opendatabarometer.org/
All the best.
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