Amost-Educon Open Content Creation and Remix Fest - Thursday, January 24, 2013 at Science Leadership Academy
4 min read
You (yes, you!) are invited to a full day of open content creation, curation, remixing, and distribution with a group of content, technology, and open learning geeks.
The event will be held Thursday, January 24th, from 10 to 4, in the library of Science Leadership Academy, the day before Educon begins. The event is free; please sign up to give us a sense of who will be coming. While the event is free, we are also asking participants to make a donation to Science Leadership Academy's Home and School Association. SLA's generosity in allowing us to use this space is pretty awesome.
As is probably obvious from the title of this post, we've been struggling with what to call this day, largely because the process of creating open content is part hackfest, part content authoring, part content curation, part old-fashioned work day. We'll be combining these elements, covering how to use Creative Commons licenses, and how to prepare and distribute resources in reusable formats. At the end of the day, we should all have sets of resources we can use and share whenever we want, and connections with people who want to continue to do this work.
If you are a teacher who is developing curriculum or class resources, come and work with us.
If you work at a school that wants to reduce the costs and inflexibility of traditional textbooks, come and work with us.
If you have been interested in learning more about open content, but didn't know where to start, come and work with us.
If you want to make sure that your students can have access to course materials over the web, on an iPad, on a Kindle, or on any mobile device, come work with us.
If you have been creating open content for the last 20 years, and want to keep on doing what you know works, come work with us.
The day will be spent creating and remixing open content; as we have been planning the event, there are four general goals:
- At the end of the day, participants will walk out with resources they can use the next time they are teaching;
- Create and extend connections between teachers who want to do more work with open content in the future;
- Begin to create and curate a library of high quality, easily reusable openly licensed content;
- Plan additional open content remixathons throughout the year; these can be virtual events, face to face events, or any combination thereof.
In the last year, we have seen some great community initiatives around open content. In particular, the work from Finland where a group of math instructors crowdsourced a textbook over a weekend provides a good example to emulate. A key takeaway - and an element that often goes overlooked in coverage of successful crowdsourcing events - is the planning and organization required before the event. This planning helps ensure that when the crowdsourcing begins, people already have a sense of what needs to be done, and who they will be working with. We are glad to help organize and coordinate introductions between people working on similar projects, and if people want to get working before the event, we'd be glad to help coordinate that as well.
So, what are you waiting for? Sign up, and get to Science Leadership Academy on January 24th!
If you have any questions about the event, or how to get involved, please leave them in the comments or email me at bill (at) funnymonkey (dot) com.
Image Credit: "Three Leaves and a Berry" taken by Donnie Nunley, published under an Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license.
