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June was Cape Town Book Fair month. Mark Horner participated in a poster session where he presented some of our ideas on print aggregation. The presentation was very well received, with some saying the poster ’stood out for its sheer gumption’. We’ll keep you posted on how this plan unfolds.
Philipp Schmidt (Rip-Mix-Learn, UWC), Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Eve Gray (OpeningScholarship, UCT) have been sharing their findings and learnings from Rip-Mix-Learn and OpeningScholarship with the broader education community.
On 24 June Philipp and Cheryl (UCT) offered a pre-conference workshop on OER at the International Conference of e-Learning (ICEL) 2008. The workshop wiki will be on-going for at least a month after the conference.
On 27 June Cheryl presented a paper, Paradox, Promise and Problem: A Social Realist View of the Potential of Open Educational Resources at the University of Cape Town, at ICEL 2008. This paper was based on findings from the OpeningScholarship project.
Also on 27 June, in a different continent, Eve presented a paper on African Universities and the knowledge economy at ELPUB 2008 in Toronto.
Philipp attended the MIT Open Courseware Consortium (OCWC) meeting in April in China with our support. At this meeting Philipp was elected to the board of the OCWC. As part of our desire to share as much information and ideas as possible, Philipp wrote a blogged about his experience there and ideas for the future.
The Foundation along with partner OSI just launched Open Education News, a group blog, lead by David Wiley, which gathers, sorts, analyses, synthesises and disseminates news related to open education, much like Peter Suber’s Open Access News does for open access.
Peter describes Open Education News as a “welcome development. The Open Ed movement has needed this for a long time.” David’s introductory blog on Open Education News and Peter’s blog on the launch highlight the growing momentum in this area.
We attended eLearning Africa in Accra, Ghana. The event creates a space for those interested in, working on or touched by ICT for development, specifically in Africa, to come together and share ideas, experiences and resources.
The first public presentation of Siyavula took place here and was featured in the eLearning Africa newsletter. The project was well received and a number of partners were identified, specifically some award-winning South African teachers who were very supportive and keen to get involved.
Our engagement with other initiatives prompted us to ask who should make OERs and think more about the context in which these OERs are created.
We were happy to hear a number of our projects mentioned by independent presenters as key initiatives in the OER and Open Access space, including OpeningScholarship and Rip-Mix-Learn. We are pleased that news about these initiatives are virally making their way through this space and we look forward to making the formal results available as the initial phases come to and end in July.
While in Accra we also participated in the University of Michigan OER Health Workshop. It was very interesting to be in a room with academics from across the world who had on the one hand immense experience in developing and disseminating OERs and open course ware (OCW), and on the other hand is just starting to explore this area. It was great to see how experiences and learning and visions were shared. We’re looking forward to the next stage of firming up next steps for collaboration.
An opinion piece co-written by Mark Horner, Siyavula project manager and FHSST founder, was published in Physics World, the official magazine of the Institute of Physics. The initiative gained the interest of the Physics community as it was started by a group of Physicist in training and initially focused on Natural Sciences. The article has already triggered a number of very positive responses, varying from people wishing the project well to others volunteering to help. The idea clearly resonates with academics and scientists alike.
