March 10-15 2014 was a significant week for me. It is the only week of the year where
I don’t have to keep promoting Open Education.
This may seem odd, particularly because that week was Open Education Week, but i spend most of the year promoting open education and this is the week where I get to watch others promoting it too!!
For this years activities I decided to join up with other open enthusiasts through the nwoer group. Although I am not strictly in the North West I am only just the otherside of the Pennines so consider that to just about being eligible!
The group decided to support learners in the non facilitated P2PU Intro to Openness course developed by David Wiley:
https://p2pu.org/en/courses/140/intro-to-openness-in-education/
Original P2P Course
This course is designed as a “self” facilitated learning experience where you support yourself through the learning journey. (image above) The intention of the NWOER group was to offer facilitation of this learning via OER experts and enthusiasts during Open Education Week. (image below)
NWOER Facilitated Course
The suggested resources were made available form the NWOER site and activities identified for a particular day of the 5 day experience. This was then facilitated through a range of network activity, including a Facebook Group, a Google Communityand twitter chats using #nwoerchat as the hashtag.
Text from the NWOER site reads:
“From Monday 10th to Friday 14th March, 2014, our team will provide daily facilitated sessions, expert advice, video lectures, resources and questions to debate. Each evening between 8-9pm London time we will be hosting Tweet chats and webinars. We will also be on Facebook and Google around the clock, so please feel free to get involved, comment, join the community and learn with us. All the links to the resources and each days class can be found in the menu on the right.”
So, what happened? Well it’s difficult to capture all of the activity but it was clear that the highly active text chats were a resounding hit. Very fulfilling and clearly a great way to engage with a broad range of people who are new and established OER users. The facilitators led the conversations by posing questions. The discussions were very rich, but rarely referenced the P2P course material (not that it was meant to but it was just an observation I made).
The important thing is that it got people talking about OER & connecting. Also strange things can happen in twitter chats, not least the emergence of food & education related analogies which has culminated in a collated set of education/food related analogies which you can add to here: http://padlet.com/wall/oer-food
The week was bookended with 2 Google Hangouts, the latter was a Hangout on Air and I was keen to join the hangout but would be on my evening cycle commute home. However I realised that I had all the tools needed to join the Hangout whilst mobile and this was the result:
So that was my brief perspective on the weeks events, but I highly recommend the reading of these related blog posts too:
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