It seems that the only blog posts I write recently are about presentations … My latest outing is to the Jisc RSC Scotland ‘Open Education’ event which was a joint meeting of SMUG, SCOT-BUG, Learning Technologists’, Scottish e-Assessment and Open Badges Forums. Originally I was billed to talk with my former colleague and ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Sheila MacNeill but she’s found somewhere warmer to go. Hopefully the RSC Scotland Live Stream will be behaving for her to tune in. It’s quite a line-up with Lorna Campbell and Joe Wilson giving an Open Scotland update, Sarah Currier and Jackie Graham talking about Open Repositories (no doubt including Jorum and Re:Source) and Julie Usher talking about Blackboard’s Xplor (full programme here).
I’m billed to be talking about ‘MOOCs’ but given the term has largely lost it’s original intent hopefully I’ll leave people thinking more about reclaiming open education than MOOCs. I’ve embedded the slides below and as you’ll see I want to try and do this by riffling off of Bret Victor’s ‘The Future of Programming’ presentation given at Dropbox’s DBX conference on July 9, 2013. For this Bret presented the world view of programming à la 1973, highlighting projects like Sketchpad, massively parallel processor array and Doug Englebart’s ‘mother of all demos’.
The punchline to all this is given such rich creativity and exploration of ideas are we now in danger of promoting a dogmatic approach to programming. When I originally saw Bret’s talk it wasn’t hard to see similar parallels to education. This is something Sir Ken Robinson has famously talked about in the RSA Animate Changing Paradigms talk. As an alternative way I want to highlight how open education based on digitisation of resources and our connectedness can be used, for this referencing the work done in ocTEL and true ‘reclaim open’ heroes Jonathan Worth and the #phonar team.
[I should say I feel like I’m pushing myself out of my comfort zone on this so feedback is particularly welcome]
Update: Whilst this event was streamed I’m not sure if there is going to be a recording a recording of the presentation is here. Below is an embedded timeline of tweets from the event