Open Learning Conference in Dalian 2008: Lessons for future events

I have been planning to blog about the Open Education conference in Dalian for a while, but I have been travelling, and also still digesting my experiences there. I will begin by discussing the organization of the conference itself, and things that future conferences, like the Open Learning conference hosted by COSL in Utah in September, might learn from it. I will write another post about the intercultural experience of a conference with so many Chinese and foreign participants, and then hopefully in a few days I will write more about some of the projects and presentations that were actually given at the conference.

The good stuff
I am going to mention a lot of things that could have been done differently, or better, but I don’t want that to detract from how great the conference was. For me, who has been following the OER movement for quite some time, and recently also began participating online through for example blogging, this was the first time that I actually met most of the actors in person. The general atmosphere at the conference was incredibly positive and welcoming, and without a fail participants - senior administrators and professors at the world’s leading universities - treated a beginning MA student as an equal participant and interlocutor. I learnt a great deal from the many long conversations over the lunch and dinner tables, and I got to know several projects that I will hopefully collaborate with in the future.

All the people responsible for the conference - the international OpenCourseWare Consortium, China Open Resources for Education (CORE), Dalian University of Technology (and their enthusiastic student volunteers), and everyone else - did a great job and I certainly believe that the conference has made a significant contribution to the progress, and especially international collaboration, within the OER movement.

The purpose
To ask how a conference could have been organized better, it’s necessary to know what it is trying to achieve. This is no simple task, because very often large events mean different things to different people. When I participated in the CIES in New York, the purpose was to gather almost 2,000 academics who do research on comparative education, and to allow them to present their papers on (usually) research in progress, to receive feedback from peers. In addition, of course it is a place to network with people who do similar research to you, catch up on the latest books, show yourself off to potential university employers, etc. In that way, the conference itself is more of a platform for a hundred different individual purposes to manifest themselves. In addition, the conference, together with hundreds of other conferences, peer reviewed journals and academic publishers is a part of the academic ecosystem, which aims to stimulate the production, quality control and dissemination of academic knowledge in general (and often forms part of the academic reward system as well).

The Open Translation Conference in Zagreb was very different. It had a clear vision about bringing together users and creators of open source translation software for open content projects, and envisaged some clear deliverables. The conference was built around these deliverables - a mapping exercise of the open translation software space, as well as different translation tool use cases, unconference-style sessions that were designed according to what was needed at each step of the process, with note takers using the Wiki to record information, as well as for example a short film being made with interviews of participants. In this conference, there were no presentations given, papers read, or powerpoints displayed. There was not the usual separation between “the people who present”, and “the people who attend” (except for the one key facilitator that drove the process).

So what is the purpose of the Open Education conference in Dalian? On the one hand it was a general convention of Open CourseWare Consortium members, including elections and legal formalities. On the other hand it was both an academic forum to highlight research on OER and OCW, and a “community of practice”, gathering practioners of OER to share their practices and projects (and tools), come up with common plans, definitions and strategies, and network on future collaboration. The importance of the last aspect is seen clearly from the fact that almost every single person who presented a paper was intimately involved in “doing OER”, there was scarcely a single “disinterested researcher” who did research on the phenomenon because it was an interesting phenomenon and was not simultaneously an advocate.

Layout of the conference
The conference lasted for three days, from the 24th to the 26th. The 24th was the Open CourseWare Consortium day. It started with a great newcomer’s breakfast to introduce some of the vocabulary and definitions that would be useful later in the day. It continues with introductory speeches, and a number of people who did three minute presentations of their challenges to the OCWC community (I spoke about the need for greater focus on learners, and on stimulating more research). Based on these, three strategy breakout sessions were organized. I came late to mine, but I must admit that it did not look to productive, because even by splitting 200 people into three groups, you are still left with groups that are far too large to handle, and with the chairs still in a conference layout, it was just very difficult to get a good discussion going.

The two next days were the actual Open Education conference, and they consisted of roughly four sessions per day, with lunch in the middle, and each session containing perhaps four or five presenters. Perhaps half of the presentations were given by Chinese researchers, in Chinese. There was simultaneous interpretation of the entire conference, and I will talk more about language issues in a later post.

No discussion
One of the most striking parts of the program was that there was absolutely no time set off for discussion after any of the papers presented in the Open Education conference. The only exception is the very last session, where we split into two. Our smaller group had a tiny bit of time at the end, but I think that is because we skipped the official closing ceremony (unintentionally). I’ve rarely ever been to talks that don’t have at least some time for questions, and while in large political talks there are often random annoying people with their own axes to grind, in these kind of specialized communities it is very common that the Q&As are a lot more interesting than the actual papers (and often more applied, and less theoretical as well).

Of course, orchestrating this in a group of two hundred people (although often far from all were present) is also quite difficult. It might have been a lot easier if we split up in two or three sessions for the entire conference. The downside is that you don’t get to hear all the talks (although hopefully they will all be well represented in the proceedings), but you get smaller groups and much more time for discussion. I think this is doubly important in such an international conference, where you have people from all kinds of national and institutional contexts with their different things that are “given”, but might be a lot less than obvious for outsiders. (An example is Fun-Den Wang’s quick and impromptu explanation of the “China Quality OCW” or 精品课程, a topic that is well known to all Chinese present, but not to many of the foreigners. Unfortunately this explanation, given in Chinese, was not translated by the interpreters who just got the feed from the speaker’s microphone, and thus did not help a whole lot.)

The China Quality OCW is also a project that it would be very interesting to be able to discuss - not just listen to presentations about. While it represents an incredible commitment from the Chinese Department of Education and has made available a large amount of very useful resources, it is not placed under open licenses, and it cannot thus really be called OCW. I know that several of the non-Chinese researchers I talked to were curious about this, and would like to know whether this was being worked on, etc, but didn’t have a chance to ask.

Radically changing the format?
So far I mentioned some ways the presentation of papers could have been improved - perhaps several sessions concurrently, certainly more time for presentation, etc. However, a pertinent question is whether organizing a conference as a series of papers to be read and commented upon is really the ideal format. This question is becoming more and more relevant in this age of digital collaboration and sharing. With flying being so expensive and environmentally damaging, physical time spent together ought to be optimized by doing things that can best be done when physically in the same room - and other things ought to be done for example through online communication. Some presenters might have such a presence that witnessing their speech live feels like a great event - yet this is rare, and luckily researchers are not selected based on their stage presence, but on their analytical capabilities.

Thus, I feel that I would have lost very little by reading the papers in the proceedings before the conference started - or even watching some of the presentations online. If this was the case, we would have been able to use the time together on discussion, questions and answers, and structured interaction. A particular reason why this is important in the OCWC case is the fact that the participants are so international, and come from very different backgrounds. In this case, the informal networking over lunch and dinner that is often the lifeblood of conferences might not be enough, because the different networks too easily sit together - which could be easily observed - whether grouped by country or common language. The American researchers that share a common framework, read each other’s blogs, and have met each other at previous conferences have an easy tone, and the Chinese professors might feel much more comfortable with their peers. Thus there is an important need for structured opportunities for cross-community interaction and networking.

This could include time for an unconference aspect, where people who want to run a session write it up, and people who want to participate come (this of course requires the use of more breakout spaces, although there were ample common spaces that could have been used). The iSummit in Dubrovnik did something similar during the pre-conference for the learning track, where two other participants and I identified a common interest in the future of universities, and did a two hour session on the p2p university - which has informed my thinking until today, and might lead to papers and projects in the future. This was never on the conference program before coming to Dubrovnik. Similarily there might be real topics of interest between different groups that occur during the conference, and it would be great to have a semi-structured space to deal with that.

Another activity, which I was introduced to in Dubrovnik as well, is speed geeking. AspirationTech describes it like this:

A tongue-in-cheek rip off of the speed dating concept, SpeedGeeking offers a fully immersive, invigorating and hilarious approach to meeting people … and learning about the cool projects, software tools and crazy ideas that they have been working on. At a SpeedGeek, one group of participants sets up at stations around a room to give 5 minute presentations while the rest of the group migrates in a circle around the room to hear these high-speed raps. The result is an obscene amount of fun, all tied up with a good dose of learning about how technology is being used for social change.

This would be brilliant because so many of the papers were about innovative services, tools, videos, websites etc that projects had developed - but we want to see them! Don’t tell me about Connexions, show me. This is doubly relevant for projects that are in other languages - it might be hard for me to play around with the semantic search tool from Japan, but if someone showed it to me, I might begin to appreciate how I could use this in my own project.

(Note that this would have required better internet access, which was a problem throughout the conference).

Final thoughts
These are just some thoughts about how the conference could have been reworked to yield even better outcomes. I also think some kind of a collaborative activity to yield some kind of common output would have been great. Wouldn’t have to be a manifesto, but perhaps a Wikipage listing all our different projects, or a Connexions course on how to research OpenCourseWare or… And this leads into my final thought: documentation. I received on the first day of the conference a book with the proceedings, which is great - but I sincerely hope this will be made available online, and well visible. I also wish that all the proceedings had been CC licenses, as it is, I saw no references to open licenses in the book. This is the case for the Open Learning conference in Utah, which is great.

Most of what I wrote above talks about the conference in general terms, as an international conference with participants from around the world, but does not deal much with the divide between the Chinese participants and the others - these are integrated topics, but this post is long enough, so I had to divide it. I hope to write another post on that soon, but first I have to catch a 16 hour hardseat train to Chongqing.

It was a great conference, and the above is intended as positive and constructive critique or ideas for how to make the next conference even better, more useful, and more productive to the entire OER movement.

Stian

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 1:48 and is filed under china, education/academia, events, open-education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.