I usually have a topic in my courses on competitive intelligence and how the Internet can be used as a tool for environmental scanning. Imagine my embarrassment when, shortly after I had the thought of hosting a conference on open education/open textbooks, I found out that there has been such conference for the last TEN YEARS! Cathy and Vic from the Hewlett Foundation were the source of that nugget of information and I thank them for that.
So, I attended the conference and it was absolutely wonderful. Most of the players in the Open Educational Resources (OER) space were there. The sessions were terrific and everyone was friendly. I got to meet and talk with some interesting folks from all over the world, some of who I'd already chatted with over the phone. The website for the conference has more information and, sooner or later will have presentations, etc from the conference available. There were lots of takeaways, but three of the most important were:
- Much of the attention of attendees was on developing open "chunks" of content, with the idea being that instructors could visit a repository and string content together in a customized manner.
- Still, there was a lot of interest and progress on the development of open traditional textbooks and that textbooks are likely to be appropriate for developing economies for the next five or ten years.
- Global Text's focus on developing economies seems to be a differentiator for us.
