We’ve decided to extend the deadline for our Call for Papers for the Houston OCWC/Connexions conference to Monday, November 24.
Paper proposals only need to be a paragraph or two, and should be on some aspect of OCW. The focus this year is on collaboration, but if you have an idea that is not strictly about collaboration, talk to us (you can email me at mike @ ocwconsortium dot org) and we will see if we can help you find a collaboration angle to your presentation.
This OCWC regional meeting will be part of the annual Connexions conference, and will be held in Houston February 5-6, with an optional Saturday event. The agenda for the regional meeting is here, we will link to the full conference agenda when available.
To submit, please read the Call for Papers, and consider using our online form to submit a proposal (linked from the submission instructions in the Call).
There’s been a bit of ennui about institutional approaches to open content in the blogosphere lately, so it was interesting to see this preliminary data regarding OCW production come in last Thursday. The data set generating this graph is not completely clean yet, but it’s pretty close. The graph represents the number of courses published by OCWC members, as a cumulative total, month by month. Some of the smoothing over the last twelve months is the result of not being able to place all releases of the individual courses in a particular month, in which case they were dispersed over the known release time frame — but, even given that, I think the trends are unmistakable:
The most striking thing to me about this is how quickly other members’ contributions are dwarfing MIT’s piece of this. People sometimes still refer to the OCWC mistakenly as an “extension of MIT’s OpenCourseWare project”. Organizationally, that became history when the Consortium was founded as a separate organization, operating under its own governance, in July of this year. But the data above shows that even before the organizational change was formalized our members’ efforts were the driving force behind the OCWC.
The second thing of interest is the larger significance. There’s a way in which this is graphing the height of an iceberg from sea level. That peak there represents nearly 8,000 courses — but associated with those courses are thousands of professors who have now participated in an open education project, ten of thousands of professors that have been exposed to the concept of sharing these materials, and hundreds of thousands of students in these classes who have learned through the example of their institution that knowledge is a thing to be shared, not hoarded. Add to that the millions of people outside these institutions who have hit these courses from all over the world, and who have even come to expect such materials will be available, and we are talking a massive tectonic-scale shift in the expectations we are creating about knowledge.
We’ve been pretty busy here recently — or rather, we’re always busy, but recently we’ve been so in a way that has got in the way of blog posting.
So it seems as good a time as any to remind everyone that even when this space is dead, the ocwnews twitter feed is hopping.
The ocwnews twitter feed contains all the significant things we run across that deal with OCW that are timely or new.
I can’t stress enough that it’s not merely news about the OCWC, and it’s not even a list of articles we’re somehow endorsing — it’s really just news that pertains to OCW efforts — court cases, recent whitepapers, announcements of new initiatives, success stories, critiques of the movement — or even press coverage that gets it all horrendously wrong, but that you should be aware of. So to the twitter army out there not yet following us — follow us!
And please, if you know of anything that should go on the feed, let me know via email: mike at ocwconsortium.org.
We are now taking registrations for the Connexions/OCWC Regional Meeting. Here’s what it is — a two day conference, the first day focusing on collaboration in the Connexions community and related initiatives such as OER Health, and the second day focusing on collaboration in the Americas in the OCW community. It’s an extraordinary opportunity to learn about evolving best practices in two very successful Open Education initiatives, and to network with a wide variety of people who may have a different perspective to offer.
The conference will be held in Houston, Texas on February 5-6, 2009. There is an optional dinner on Wednesday the 4th, and participants are invited to join a NASA tour with other conference attendees on Saturday the 7th. All participants will be charged a flat registration fee of of $495. This fee includes:
- attendance at all conference sessions, Thursday and Friday
- light Continental breakfast, Thursday and Friday
- lunch on Thursday and Friday
- dinner on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, at 6 p.m.
You can learn more about the conference and sign up here.
As you may be aware, the Consortium will be conducting a search in the next six to eight months for a new executive director.  I am chairing the search committee and am pleased to be joined by two other members of our board of directors, Yoshimi Fukuhara of Keio University/JOCW and Anka Mulder of TU Delft.
We would also like to include three members of the community at large on the search committee, and are inviting employees of member organizations to submit their names for consideration. Â Final selection of the three at-large members of the committee will be made by recommendation of Anka, Yoshimi and myself to the board of directors, and selections will be made to ensure a balance of perspectives from across the membership.
We look forward to rounding out our search committee and beginning the process of identifying a new executive director to propel the Consortium forward in the coming years. Â If you are interested in serving on the search committee, please send me an email at scarson@mit.edu.
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