OER 14: building communities of open practice took place at the Centre for Life a science village in Newcastle
upon Tyne. The conference has been going
since 2010 and I actually presented at the first one where the focus was on Open Educational Resources. Since the first conference there
have been many developments in the open education world with the increase of open
access repositories,
institutional and national policies, international movements such as OER
Africa and of course
the growth in MOOCs . As well as these themes the
conference also focused on research and open practice communities. What I particularly like about this
conference are the unexpected gems that illustrate practice in the field, for
example Leeds Metropolitan’s work on promoting OERs to improve
digital literacy and Alistair Clark’s presentation on the Skills Funding
Agency’s Innovative Community Learning project to share resources, via its Project
in a Box .
I presented
on day 2. My paper was in a session of
three, the first paper focused on the work of the CODARN learning portal, which will showcase
online resources from across Wales. The second paper provided an overview of an
open practice Masters unit at the University
of Arts. The theme of my paper was embedding open
practice using the open knowledge framework, which had been developed by the
Universities of Salamanca and Alicante in Spain to conceptualise open practice
activities at the universities. I used this framework to benchmark our own
institutional open practice activities, proposing that we could call
Staffordshire an “Open Knowledge University” suggesting that this could be a
new unique selling point for our institution. The presentation was well
received and the audience seemed particularly interested that I had not focused
solely on content sharing and creation but I included opening up physical
spaces too.
All the
conference resources are available on the OER14 web site including my presentation http://www.medev.ac.uk/oer14/115/view/. You will also see a link to a tag
cloud of tweets by conference delegates; you can just about see my name and activity
- 43 tweets, 6 replies and 18 mentions.
I would like to thank the conference organisers for putting together a varied and thought provoking programme in an excellent location. It was good to see that delegates represented technical, teaching and information professions. Comparing this to the first conference where the focus was on innovative practice it is fascinating to see how open practice activities continue to develop and be embedded in institutions far and wide. I suppose in the only threat to a conference like this is that open practice becomes so much part of the regular practice it might not been necessary to promote separately.
