The conference site is here. The conference tag is OCWCglobal2009.
For those wishing to take part in the business meeting remotely, here is the dial-in info:
Dial-in number for Tuesday Business Meeting (see schedule for times):
Reservationless-Plus Toll Free Dial-In Number (US & Canada): (888) 830-8920
Reservationless-Plus International Dial-In Number:(770) 657-9185
Code: 510 267 9409
Finally, we encourage people not in Monterrey to join in the conversation around subjects by using the conference cloudscape and to browse our SlideShare site.
As we update our web presence throughout the day I’ll post more here.
You can call in to participate live in our business meeting by dialing
Reservationless-Plus Toll Free Dial-In Number (US & Canada): (888) 830-8920
Reservationless-Plus International Dial-In Number:(770) 657-9185
Conference Code: 510-267-9409
Between 10:30am and 12:30pm CDST (GMT/UTC -5) today (April 21).
We’ve tried various ways of building conference communities online in the past, and most have relied on a third party site. And usually these sites have followed a sort of bizarro Pareto rule — for the 20% of the product that integrated a twitter feed or flickr gallery the other 80% forced and encouraged the typical walled garden approach. Whatever integration was just sweetener to get another signup.
This time we’ve done it a bit differently. Clay Whipkey, our technical director, took the open source conference system we are using to post schedules, sponsors and paper lists, and after a week of little sleep, created a plugin for the system that allows the front page to aggregate all #ocwcglobal2009 material from all blogs indexed by Google, all flickr pages, tweets, etc. And as an added bonus it is lightly integrated with the Cloudworks system (though right now that integration is limited by the lack of a lower-level RSS).
You can check it out here. Be gentle with us, there are still some holes on the site, we put it up in the course of one of the longest weeks in my recent memory (while trying to assemble everything from the program to the keynote). There are some holes. There is some missing content.
But all the code that Clay has put into that front page is designed as a plug-in (and will be released after some tweaking), and the base software (which is designed primarily to run registration and the submission review process) is available open source from OCS. Hopefully this is a start to getting people off of Crowdvine and the like, and out of the walled gardens.
(Ignore the login link at the top which is really only for people who are uploading schedules and conference materials).
Anyway, let us know what you thing. And tag related content OCWCglobal2009.
T4E, a conference we are co-sponsoring, has extended their paper submission deadline to June 15th. The conference will be in Bangalore, India, on August 4-6, 2009. More information about the conference and submission process can be found here.
http://www.iiitb.ac.in/t4e/
As most of you know, we are gearing up for the Monterrey Conference next week. We realize we are very late in announcing our keynote speaker, but I think it was worth the wait.
I’m happy to annouce we have been lucky enough to get Jon Udell to keynote the conference. Jon is one of the pioneers of social software, and continues to be a thought leader in how open networks will revolutionize learning, work, and community life. From his bio:
Jon Udell is an author, information architect, software developer, and new media innovator. His 1999 book, Practical Internet Groupware, helped lay the foundation for what we now call social software. Udell was formerly a software developer at Lotus, BYTE Magazine’s executive editor and Web maven, and an independent consultant.
A hands-on thinker, Udell’s analysis of industry trends has always been informed by his own ongoing experiments with software, information architecture, and new media.
From 2002 to 2006 he was InfoWorld’s lead analyst, author of the weekly Strategic Developer column, and blogger-in-chief. During his InfoWorld tenure he also produced a series of screencasts and an audio show that continues as Interviews with Innovators on the Conversations Network.
In 2007 Udell joined Microsoft as a writer, interviewer, speaker, and experimental software developer. His portfolio includes an interview series, Perspectives, which explores how Microsoft works with partners — universities, governments, NGOs — to develop new and socially impactful uses of its technologies. Currently he is building and documenting a community information hub that’s based on open standards and runs in the Azure cloud.
His keynote is titled “MINDS, HANDS, AND HEARTS — LIFELONG TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE DIGITAL AGE” .
We’re getting some coverage in Vietnam on our decision to host OCWC Global 2010 there. This morning, I noticed that the Voice of Vietnam had picked it up.
It’s a little harder, I suppose, to get coverage of the decision in the U.S., but for any reporter reading this I think the main takeaway is that nations all over the world, many with much fewer resources than ours, are experimenting at a national level with open education.
There are some people in the public policy arena who still think that OCW is primarily a philanthropic endeavor — a gift from the haves to the have-nots — and in this model the U.S. is often seen as leading the way, with major U.S. universities producing materials used all over the world. What we’re finding in other countries, however, is that open education is increasingly being seen more along the lines of things like national health care — a project whose raison d’etre is to eliminate wasteful redundancies, spread best practices quickly and efficiently, and spur innovation in areas of national priority. The variations in implementation between say, China and the U.K., are huge, and certainly could form the grounds of a vigorous debate. But whether the approach involves a full-blown OER organization or a more light-weight block-grant program, countries like these share in common a belief that open educational resources are part of the new national infrastrcuture.
I guess that is pretty long for a takeaway. The shorter version is this: not long ago, Vietnam and many other countries came to the US to see how we “did OCW”. Increasingly, however, we are turning to these countries to see what happens when the movement is integrated with national educational policy.
We’re hoping that both the location and the agenda of OCWC Global 2010 will make that a fruitful discussion.
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