Lisa Harris Marketing

Now that I’m back in the UK after Opened09 in Vancouver, here are some of the things that have stuck in my mind, in fairly random order…

• “it’s not about content” Providing open educational content is just the starting point…people are what make the difference
• “Cute kitten syndrome” – or “if it’s open it must be good”…this attitude can lead to a lack of critical evaluation of what really works and what doesn’t
• The enthusiasm of back channel (morning sessions were even followed by some attendees from their hotel rooms, but no names will be mentioned…) There were more than 3000 tweets using the OpenEd hashtag over the duration of the event
• The efforts of tech team were awesome – running 3 live streams concurrently, between 10am and 4pm every day, with 95% uptime. If you check out the daily conference programme on http://openedconference.org/ and select any session title, you can link to a synopsis of the talk, the presentation slides, trackbacks to blogposts that have mentioned the session, comments on the session and the full video of the presentation…wow!
• I heard the word ‘awesome’ a lot…J
• Great breakfasts, with enormous cakes and pastries, comfy chairs, wifi and access to powerpoints J
• Relaxed presenters with a lot of humorous interaction with the audience
• There were lots of mentions of Clayton Christensen, applying his principles of ‘disruptive innovation’ to education. This theory centres on the notion that established industries are not best placed to adapt to change, and may not even notice the need for change. They will eventually lose out to newcomers who start off outside the system with a basic product aimed at a different audience that can acquire critical mass under the nose of the incumbent (think of the first PCs on the desk providing simple consumption of computing vs the complexity of usage of a minicomputer….)
• Even this audience of enthusiasts seemed to baulk at the model where content is created by the students themselves, but such a system is already up and running in the USA (see the learning model adopted by Brigham Young University, Idaho)
• Gardner Campbell of Baylor University warned against “digital facelifts” (a term coined by Clay Shirky). This means ”we will do what we did before but we will put it on the web” …you can check out his entertaining presentation here
• A number of participants who are far more efficient than me have already blogged about their OpenEd experiences, see for example the reflections of Cole Camplese and Dave Cormier

Many questions emerged from the discussions, for example:

Sustainability – how to grow and manage online communities beyond the initial funded phase?

Where is the student feedback, as users what do they think of open education resources?

For open education to become mainstream, do we need a new education system or is it possible to amend the old one?

Are new elites of the “hyper-connected” emerging? (for example we heard a story of Wikipedia editors forming an exclusive club)

As early adopters are well and truly on board, how can open education now appeal to the next wave of more mainstream tutors? Is a new language required?

How many of these OpenEd initiatives reflect their broader institutional culture, and how many merely operate as isolated pockets of openness within a sceptical traditional system?

In summary…the best event I have attended, well done to all the organisers and volunteers. I’m looking forward to Barcelona next summer J