Archive for the ‘Conference’ Category

University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre is announcing its upcoming online symposium, Copyright/Copyleft: Issues for Education, on September 24th. This is a discussion that will include many particulars from the Canadian context, and should also be quite useful to those interested in more general copyleft issues as well. Unfortunately for me, this coincides with the upcoming OpenCourseWare Consortium meeting just prior to the Open Education 2007 conference, but I’ll try to check in once or twice and see what’s under discussion. (via elearnspace)

For the past two years, the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University in Logan has hosted its annual OpenEducation conference, which has fast become an important stop on the open education community circuit. The 2007 edition, coming up September 26-29, promises to be more of the same; in the past, conference themes have largely addressed issues of OER licensing and production, but the focus this time on end user issues of how open educational resources and localized and used in learning.

Current list of keynote speakers includes:

• Fred Mednick, a principal for almost 20 years, founded Teachers Without Borders in order to address a pressing need for durable educational change and solutions, worldwide, at the secondary level.
• Manohar Bhattarai. Serving currently as a full-time Member of High Level Commission for Information Technology, an ICT policy and strategy body formed under the Chairmanship of the Prime Minister of Nepal, Manohar has been actively involved in developing strategies for social appropriation of ICTs in Nepal.
• Ramita Shrestha. Since 2004, Ramita has managed a small technology center for rural villagers to gain access to critical content for development
• Brian Lamb, the Emerging Technologies Discoordinator at the Office of Learning Technology at The University of British Columbia. He has spoken and written extensively on cool stuff!

The OpenCourseWare Consortium will be holding it’s semiannual meeting in conjunction with OpenEducaiton again, so it’s also a great opportunity to connect with folks in OCW circles as well.

The Open University UK’s OpenLearn project is hosting its first conference, OpenLearn 2007: Researching Open Content in Education, October 30-31st in Milton Keynes, United kingdom. Here’s how they describe the event:

New opportunities to learn at a distance are broadening the ways in which people can engage in learning, whilst new technologies mean that learning can increasingly take place within a global community. Open and free educational resources are an important component in this expanded world of learning and major initiatives are now underway to provide them.

If you are interested in the research and business challenges involved in providing, using and sustaining free and open resources then OpenLearn 2007 invites you to participate and contribute to an event that will open up the findings of those working in this challenging area and consider how we can develop research in open content.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the people at OpenLearn and they have a top shelf group of researchers there, working to understand the OER world. This promises to be the most rigorous look yet at how open materials are being produced, used, and sustained. Should be well worth the price of admission.