Phil and I had a wonderful time co-keynoting the OpenEd 2015 conference. It was a hoot.
Here is the spectacular graphic depiction of the keynote done by Tracy Kelly from BC Campus:
And here is the post-keynote conversation that we had with the Virtually Connecting gang:
There have also been some other interesting virtual conversations growing around the conference, first over Twitter and now in the blogosphere. Some of the ones worth reading that I have seen so far include those from Maha Bali, Clint Lalonde (parts one and two), Robert Farrow (who also captures some of the tweets), and Robin DeRosa.
Phil and I approached our keynote as analysts because we figured that’s probably the main value that we have to offer. We wouldn’t presume to tell people what open education “should” be about, but given any particular “should,” we’re pretty good at thinking through how to achieve it. For my part of the talk I used the analogy of building the climate action movement because the open education community often speaks of itself in the language of a movement and because I happen to have some experience in that area. And if you read some of the posts I mentioned above, you will indeed see varying degrees of movement language.
But there is an underlying question that really should be addressed explicitly: To what extent is it accurate or useful to think of open education as a movement?