Open Education Working Group Members

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, I’m 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 don’t really have enough knowledge to write an article about what’s going on in North America. Perhaps someone who knows the global scene could write up a global overview to fill in the gaps that haven’t 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 “new” posts, despite not being a member. Sorry for the interruption!

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Isn’t this part of OKFN’s open design?
Though there might be a specific membership for the Open Education Working Group, exposing other OKFN members to what’s going on in the education sphere might be quite beneficial.
Besides, don’t know about Javiera but your reaction did help me think about important issues. So, thanks for the “interruption”.

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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I’m 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, I’m Josie Fraser. I’m 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. Finland’s 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 @otisyves

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Hello Javiera and all,

I am Chrissi and I work at Manchester Metropolitan in the UK as a playful open experimenter… or officially an academic developer :wink: I am a PhD student in open education for the last 3 years and 3 months… 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 :slight_smile:

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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), I’m Italian (Sardinian, to be precise :wink:) but I live in Scotland. I work at Dundee Medical School as an educationalist and educational technologist (whatever this means…) and, likewise @leohavemann, my work involves supporting academics’ and students’ use of emerging technologies for learning. I’m very interested in Open Education, especially of course within medical education but also more widely… My current research interests are at a crossroads with OERs, emotions in medicine, the ‘refugees emergency’ and inter-professional learning.
I’m the ambassador for the Italian Open Education Working Group, and I’m 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:

  1. OER for Less Commonly Taught Languages (i.e. openly licensed online textbooks, activities, lessons, and videos for languages like Czech & K’iche’),
  2. OER for teacher Professional Development (includes PD events, badges, and online resources),
  3. OER/OEP research (specific to the field of foreign language teaching), and
  4. 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 :slight_smile:

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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 :wink: 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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Hi all! I am Viviane Vladimirschi from São Paulo, Brazil. I am a doctoral candidate at Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada. My research study is geared towards undertaking an intervention in a Brazilian K-12 public school to plan, design, and implement a pilot blended-learning OER Development Course (ODC) for the teachers who participate in the study, and measure its effectiveness in terms of awareness-raising strategies, content taught, and instructional approaches utilized so as to extract OER learning design principles. Brazil really needs to get on board with open education as it holds the potential to fill the gap of a deficient public school system and promote access to knowledge to more citizens. I look very much forward to sharing, learning and collaboratively working with this rich intercultural open community. I am particularly interested in models for TPD in OER and models or frameworks (pedagogical) for OER. I am familiar with Hegarty’s model already. :smile:

Hello there, my name is Daniel Villar-Onrubia and I am interested in the use of digital technologies for teaching and learning purposes in the Higher Education sector, with a special interest in Open Educational Practices (OEP) as well as Internet-based Internationalisation of the Curriculum (IoC).

In 2014 I completed my DPhil (PhD) at the University of Oxford, where I also worked as Research Assistant in the EU-funded OportUnidad Project – Open Educational Practices: a bottom up approach in Latin America and Europe to develop a common area of HE. Adopting a socio-technical perspective, my doctoral research addressed the manifold tensions and paradoxes that may emerge out of the interplay between a highly predefined model of provision of Open Educational Resources (OER) and the everyday realities and institutional contexts of different universities.

After finishing my thesis I joined Coventry University as Online International Learning Programme Manager. Now I combine this work in the field of virtual mobility and internationalisation of the curriculum with another role at the Disruptive Media Learning Lab, where I work as Innovation Lead.

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Hi,

I’m Tim Coughlan (@t1mc on Twitter), a lecturer in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK. I’m interested in a number of areas connected with open education. I began studying processes around remixing and reuse through the Bridge to Success project where the OU worked with US colleges and MIT to reversion course content for a US audience. I’m now conducting further research grounded in new case studies to understand factors that actually support remixing and reuse to have value, and barriers of course.

More recently I’ve started to explore how participatory and constructive educational activities can be built with Open Data as a material, and contributed a chapter to Javiera and Leo’s book on
Open Data as OER
from my own experiences of doing this when teaching programming.

I’m also interested in inclusive education and related challenges for open education, such as making / keeping OER and open courses accessible, and supporting OER to be used by those in contexts with limited resources.

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Greetings OKers!
I’m Jamison Miller (@millerjamison) a PhD candidate in education at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, USA and a member of the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN). I am interested in theoretical grounding in open education, open education practices, open access, and open policy. My work is informed by critical social theory, and I am most interested in the emancipatory potentials of open in education.

Happy to be posting along with several fellow GO-GN members who I met at the Open Education Consortium meeting in Kraków last month. Very pleased to find this group, and looking forward to engaging with the OK International Network!

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Hi all,

I am Paco Iniesto a PhD research student in the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) at the Open University in Milton Keynes, under the program Leverhulme Open World Learning (OWL) researching accessibility and MOOCs. I am member of the Global OER Graduate Network, a worldwide network of PhD researchers and their supervisors in the field of Open Educational Resources (OERs), MOOCs and open learning.

Looking forward to connecting with you !

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Hi all I’m Deb Baff and I’m currently working as a Senior Academic Developer at Swansea University.


I was the project manager for OER Wales and ran the OER15 I’m secretary for the ALT OE SIG and a HEA fellow. I’m an Open Digital Badges fan and am hoping to start my PhD in January. I’m also a new member of theGO-GN Global Graduate Network. ! I love working collaboratively and helping to promote openness and looking forward to connecting with you all. :grin:

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Hi everyone,

I am Kshitiz Khanal. I am a co-founder of Open Knowledge Nepal. I am interested in Open Science, Open Hardware, and Open Education.
Recently, I started a project combining all three:
Aerogami: An open educational project to teach basics of how things fly by making paper planes.
I am still learning about developing open content and helping people to practice and use the course materials. This project is a work in progress. I want to welcome participation in this open project for anyone interested.

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