Simon.BuckinghamShum.net

Thanks to our Hewlett Foundation funded Open Learning Network Project, I was in Barcelona last week for the co-located Open Education Conference and Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, which was an interesting mix of people and ideas. OpenEd is an annual international gathering of OER movement sharing primarily around the strategy and practice of “doing OER”. Drumbeat was in the spirit of an unconference/hackfest/activist event, with tech and edu-geeks meeting around laptops and in discussion groups, within the marvellous Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona complex around the Plaça dels Àngels. Here’s a Q&A I did building up to Drumbeat, which really met my expectations.

So, we had the chance to air some thoughts on Resilience Thinking as it applies to open social learning, and demo associated technologies.

We gave a demo of Cohere at the opening night’s Drumbeat Science Fair, and at OpenEd presented it as part of our thinking on what a Collective Intelligence infrastructure might be not only for social learners, but also as a resilience platform for stakeholders in the open educational resources movement (or indeed, any knowledge-intensive community):

Buckingham Shum, S. and De Liddo, A. (2010). Collective intelligence for OER sustainability. OpenEd 2010: Seventh Annual Open Education Conference, 2-4 Nov 2010, Barcelona. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/23352

YouTube replay

I’ve put up an open google doc which further develops these thoughts. Do take a look, and add your own comments and links, or just drop me a note 🙂  It was exciting to see this connect with a strand of work I hadn’t known about, Technology, open education and a resilient higher education, a paper by Richard Hall and Joss Winn, part of the revolutionary University of Utopia collective.

Resilience thinking places significant emphasis on the importance of social capital. As part of our work on conceiving a social learning space tuned for open, social learning, I gave this paper on SocialLearn at OpenEd, reviewing some of its design rationale:

Towards a social learning space for open educational resources. Buckingham Shum, S. and Ferguson, R. (2010). OpenEd 2010: Seventh Annual Open Education Conference, 2-4 Nov 2010, Barcelona. Eprint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/23351

Categories: Events, Future Schools, Theory
Tags: learning web2, resilience, social learning, sustainability