All things open, all things fun!

This week is Open Education Week and I am super excited to join in the fun, celebrating all things open in education. If you want to catch me live, I am joining a whole host of special guests on air hosted by the one and only Alan Levine on Wednesday:

P.S. It was a lot of fun to join Alan online, and here is a screenshot of a moment that made me smile: all of us talking about online, digital, AI and so forth, surrounded by books.

Open practice is central to all the work I do and for the past ten years my interest in and commitment to open has only increased. So it’s been a special pleasure to take part in a series of conversations in the run up to this week:

Building Community with guest Martin Hawksey!, Reclaim TV, 9th February 2024 was the first of these. I was lucky to join my Reclaim colleagues Amanda and Taylor and our special guest Martin Hawksey, who for me is both a friend and long-term collaborator. Community building is really at the heart of open practice for me, and we chatted about how to engage with people, how to reach new communities and networks, the impact of the pandemic and the changes in the social media landscape. Martin has more experience in this space than most, having built, curated and supported communities from the local to the global scale over the past fifteen years or more. There is little he isn’t expert in when it comes to making technology serve communities, and in this session he shares some of his reflections as well as tips 🙂

Building on that conversation, Reclaim & OER #4Ever, with Meredith Huffman, Reclaim TV, 16 February 2024 took the community building one step further as we previewed a talk we are planning for OER24. The theme of the talk is putting community together with capabilities and CPD, sharing approaches for gaining skills and expertise in open educational technology. Plus, we share a lot of fun memories of what we got up to at open education conferences over the years.. (friendly warning: shoe tweets are mentioned in this episode). I love how Meredith explains how building on hosting and infrastructure the community piece can help empower staff to have a better relationship with tools and technology which benefits not only the institution, but students as well. I can’t wait for OER24!

For me the conversation that brought all the elements together was Using Open Source tools as key infrastructure, with Anne-Marie Scott, Reclaim TV, 1 March 2024. This is the one where we talk big picture, global policy and institutional change. I love listening to Anne-Marie share her rich, reflective perspective and admire her ability to explain even the most complex dynamic in open source and open tech with such clarity, that you always leave inspired and empowered in equal measure.

And to add another piece of blogging goodness, I have shared a bit more over on the Reclaim blog.

Image credit: CC-BY Bryan M Mathers