February 23, 2013, [MD]
I was asked last minute to fill in for Nick Shockey of The Right to Research Coalition to give a talk about Open Access at IgniteAlberta in Edmonton. I spoke at a session about Open Access and OER, shared with Cable Green from Creative Commons who participated remotely.
The conference was put together by the three student associations in Alberta to bring together student leaders, faculty, administrators and people from the province to discuss the future of Alberta's higher education system. The sessions were a mix of large plenary presentations and smaller break-outs where everyone were seated around small round tables, and were much of the time was spent discussing in groups, and then summarizing back to the larger group. I really liked this way of organizing, and learnt a lot from the professors and students that I sat next to.
I also realized how little I know about the higher education context outside of Ontario. In Toronto, it's easy to assume that Alberta has lot's of money and few problems, but I heard about provincial cuts, and also the challenge of low high school and post-secondary completion rates.
I've given many talks about Open Access, and when I am asked to speak, I usually remix slides from older slide decks, but it's always a challenge to organize it in a few that will make sense to the audience, fit within the timeframe etc. This time, I only had about 20 minutes, and I wanted to convey both a basic understanding of what Open Access is, and some of the excitement that I feel for it. I came up with a basic framework of "what, why, how", and think I was able to cover a lot of basics in the 20+ minutes, together with some neat examples, and updated news, such as
(slides)
Stian
Stian Håklev February 23, 2013 Toronto, Canada comments powered by Disqus