[Presentation] Taking on the dogmatic approach to education with a bit of ‘reclaim open digital connectedness’

It seems that the only blog posts I write recently are about presentations … My latest outing is to the Jisc RSC Scotland ‘Open Education’ event which was a joint meeting of SMUG, SCOT-BUG, Learning Technologists’, Scottish e-Assessment and Open Badges Forums. Originally I was billed to talk with my former colleague and ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Sheila MacNeill but she’s found somewhere warmer to go. Hopefully the RSC Scotland Live Stream will be behaving for her to tune in. It’s quite a line-up with Lorna Campbell and Joe Wilson giving an Open Scotland update, Sarah Currier and Jackie Graham talking about Open Repositories (no doubt including Jorum and Re:Source) and Julie Usher talking about Blackboard’s Xplor (full programme here).
I’m billed to be talking about ‘MOOCs’ but given the term has largely lost it’s original intent hopefully I’ll leave people thinking more about reclaiming open education than MOOCs. I’ve embedded the slides below and as you’ll see I want to try and do this by riffling off of Bret Victor’s ‘The Future of Programming’ presentation given at Dropbox’s DBX conference on July 9, 2013. For this Bret presented the world view of programming à la 1973, highlighting projects like Sketchpad, massively parallel processor array and Doug Englebart’s ‘mother of all demos’.
The punchline to all this is given such rich creativity and exploration of ideas are we now in danger of promoting a dogmatic approach to programming. When I originally saw Bret’s talk it wasn’t hard to see similar parallels to education. This is something Sir Ken Robinson has famously talked about in the RSA Animate Changing Paradigms talk. As an alternative way I want to highlight how open education based on digitisation of resources and our connectedness can be used, for this referencing the work done in ocTEL and true ‘reclaim open’ heroes Jonathan Worth and the #phonar team.

[I should say I feel like I’m pushing myself out of my comfort zone on this so feedback is particularly welcome]
Update: Whilst this event was streamed I’m not sure if there is going to be a recording a recording of the presentation is here. Below is an embedded timeline of tweets from the event

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  • Jim Groom

    The last slide is my favorite 🙂 More seriously, this is exactly the direction I want to start pushing more forcefully down. Now that MOOCs as a hysterical cultural moment is beginning to lift, what do we still want—a powerful layer that helps us filter, aggregate, and juxtapose things we share so that a community can emerge around a specific topic. If we can fine tune that for a community of learners around a particular topic for 15 weeks, that’s a class of sorts that is far more porous with all kinds of possibilities. Reclaim the idea of course in some more open, holistic, and profound sense of wrestling with a series of topics, themes, and ideas.

    • Martin Hawksey

      😉
      Surfs up – this year we ride the mooc wave, next it’ll be data, after that AR/Glass, after that … with each wave we move a bit closer

  • Jisc RSC Scotland Open Education Joint Forum – OPEN SCOTLAND

    […] Martin highlighted some of the tools, services, platforms and applications that can be employed to deliver MOOCs.  He also reminded us that every letter of MOOC is negotiable and suggested that the issue of MOOC completion rates is irrelevant.  Open or closed is not a binary thing, but there are huge benefits to moving towards more openness.  Martin concluded by telling is all that “openness is about feeling warm inside” and that we should all “ride the waves of innovation to a more open, more relevant style of education’.  Martin has written a an excellent blog post about his presentation which you can read here: Taking on the dogmatic approach to education with a bit of ‘reclaim open digital connectedness’. […]

  • Jisc RSC Scotland Open Education Joint Forum | Open World

    […] Martin highlighted some of the tools, services, platforms and applications that can be employed to deliver MOOCs.  He also reminded us that every letter of MOOC is negotiable and suggested that the issue of MOOC completion rates is irrelevant.  Open or closed is not a binary thing, but there are huge benefits to moving towards more openness.  Martin concluded by telling is all that “openness is about feeling warm inside” and that we should all “ride the waves of innovation to a more open, more relevant style of education’.  Martin has written a an excellent blog post about his presentation which you can read here: Taking on the dogmatic approach to education with a bit of ‘reclaim open digital connectedness’. […]

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