Where is the open education movement going?

cc licensed flickr photo shared by vaXzine

I promised myself that when I broke this weeks-long absence from my blog it would be with a post that was neither a) about myself, nor b) about the Open Education Conference. So, I’m starting off with two strikes against me.

But today I had the pleasure of co-presenting an installment of EDUCAUSE Live! with Chris Lott entitled Where is the open education movement going? And with all that talk about sharing we did, it seems kind of weird not to pass this on…

When this opportunity came my way, it occurred to me that one of my biggest motivations for being involved with this conference was the chance to spend time talking with co-organizers like Chris, David Wiley and Scott Leslie (well, that and manufacturing the chance to meet Ken Freedman). So it seemed natural to structure the session as a series of fairly loose conversations about what motivates each of these passionate open educators to do what they are doing. I had a blast last week doing interviews with each of them, and the biggest challenge I ended up having was either containing or editing the discussions into pre-recorded segments of about ten minutes each. (Special thanks to the producers of EDUCAUSE Live! for being willing to adapt their structure for this experimental approach.)

The archive is here. I have to add, as the session progressed I was grateful to have pre-recorded most of my presentation, as the sheer density of the ongoing text-chat (transcript in a .doc file), some of it from my favorite bloggers, was almost dizzying. And special kudos are due to Chris Lott jumping in as live co-presenter on one hour’s notice and doing an excellent job.

I wasn’t sure how this would go, but this session has me feeling even more energized about the conference. Along those lines I should note that the call for proposals has just closed, and I am very confident we are going to put forward a smashing program with some amazing speakers. Registration is now open, and I would advise you not to wait too long to get in on it…

PS: Attribution of the image above made easy thanks to Alan Levine’s Flickr CC Attribution Helper Greasemonkey Script.