conference
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Proctorio sponsor OEB, so it’s a no from me
via GIPHY Online Educa in Berlin is one of the biggest ed tech conference in Europe. I’ve been a couple of times and was going to attend this year, mainly for the gluhwein. But I see on their website that proctoring company Proctorio is now their platinum sponsor. I genuinely appreciate that running conferences is a difficult balancing act, made even more precarious in post-pandemic times when travel is still uncertain for many. Getting sponsors for a conference is often the difference between it being feasible and not. But equally, one must ask, what would it take for a sponsor to be deemed unsuitable? And for me, Proctorio are some…
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Let’s go to the ocean – April review
Highlight: The OERxDomains21 conference was a big highlight this month. When we’ve all become accustomed to online conferences, it is difficult to make any of them feel different. They are in the same platforms (Zoom/Team), they have the same structure, and they don’t feel different from your everyday work. What I admired about OERxDomains21 was the thought, and successful implementation, of an overall aesthetic. Beyond a logo, not many conferences do this. The Community TV theme was carried through in the programme (like a TV guide), the platform (StreamYard and YouTube), the intro and end credits to each talk, and the old adverts shown in breaks. In addition Discord came…
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For the last time
via GIPHY I was considering the other day, that after a complete year of lockdown with no travel or conferences, I wonder who I have met for the last time? Over the past year I’ve seen a number of people I know take on different roles, or find the pandemic traumatic or withdraw from the worlds I occupy professionally. You get in a routine of attending the same conferences and meetings, often seeing the same people across some of these. And of course, at some point you will meet them for the last time, although you rarely know it then. But we’ve never had a global Ctrl-Alt-Delete before and when…
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Honorarium etiquette
via GIPHY During the online pivot I have been asked to give a few keynotes, talks, workshops, etc. I usually say yes if a) I can do it without much preparation (the day job is kinda busy), b) I don’t have too much else on that day c) it seems like a helpful event. I don’t need the money from these gigs as I have a full time job, so I often don’t ask. I’ve mentioned before that I need to get used to making the ask though, and this is not really for me, but rather for people who do need to get paid for these gigs. I shouldn’t…
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The meticulous informality of ALT-C
I was at the annual ALT conference in Edinburgh last week. I’m often slow to appreciate things, so I accept this is not a revelation to many, but one of the aspects of ALTC that has struck me over the years is the informality of it as an event. I go to many conferences which have very formal opening ceremonies, dignitaries speaking and a carefully represented hierarchy. This is often what people want, so I don’t knock it, but I appreciate the contrast that ALTC offers. This informality is manifest in many ways. The keynotes included one of our own in Sue Beckingham, Jesse Stommel sitting casually on the stage…
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Liminal spaces, folklore and networks
At OER19 Kate Bowles’s keynote set me thinking, as she always does. She made the point that if we value things we should recognise them, so for example valuing ethical behaviour by institutions is encouraged by tables such as the Times Higher’s recent one linked to sustainable development goals. This chimed with recent thoughts on the invisibility of certain forms of academic labour. We don’t value much of the work that is done in social media, ephemeral spaces, networks, etc because we don’t recognise it in the same way as, say, books and articles. Straight after Kate’s talk was a session by David White in which he was encouraging us…
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GO-GN, UK OpenTextbooks and OER19
[Repost from the ALT blog] In this post I am going to attempt to weave together three aspects: the UK Open Textbooks Project, the GO-GN network and the evolving nature of the OER conference. This year, we sponsored the OET19 project through the UK Open Textbooks project. This project investigated whether the successful North American model of open textbook adoption would transfer to the UK. We partnered with OpenStax and the Open Textbook Network, who provided different models of textbook adoption. We have a fabulous shiny report on the project coming out next week, so look out for it on the website and twitter. The conclusion, was ‘sorta’. I was…
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Feel the l-OER-ve
(The sun always shines for OER) OER18 was held in Bristol this year, superbly chaired by David Kernohan & Viv Rolfe, and once again organised and managed with care, efficiency and joy by the team at ALT. I found it stimulating, challenging and enjoyable as always, but I’m not going to comment on the content so much here, (Sheila and Maren have some excellent posts amongst many others) but rather on what are the characteristics of it as an event that make it probably my favourite regular conference. These are entirely personal, so I don’t offer them up as a ‘how to’ but just what I like. Size – it…
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Every decoding is another encoding
I was invited by the Virtually Connecting team to present with them at OER17, and I of course, jumped at the opportunity. I’m a VC advisory buddy and have done a few VC sessions at conference but the work Maha, Autumm, Rebecca and others put in to making it work is tiring just to observe. For those of you who don’t know VC, it started as away of those not present at conferences to feel part of the experience. This is often realised through an hour session with a keynote or two after their talk, with someone onsite facilitating and a group of online people joining a Google hangout (which…
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Edtechie review
After books and films, here is my look back at my year of blogging. As with last year, I set out to average one blog post a week. This post makes 51, so only one short. This year also saw 10 years of blogging for Edtechie, and so still blogging at a reasonable rate is testament to how much blogging forms part of my work and social environment. And one thing that has been shown this year is that it is as vibrant a community as ever, despite all the recurring pronouncements of the death of blogging. On a couple of occasions my blog became host to what Maha Bali…
