This year’s OKFestival is taking place in Berlin at the Kulturbrauerei from 15th – 17th July. The programme is now online and there’s lots of Open Education stuff to get excited about!

The Open Education Working Group have pulled together a session called Open Education Smörgåsbord led by Marieke Guy, Alek Tarkowski, Tom Salmon, Kristina Anderson, Miska Knapek, Darya Tarasowa and Irina Radchenko.

Open Education is about breaking down barriers to learning. This may be through changing teaching practice, shifting policy, releasing data or sharing resources. In the Open Education Smörgåsbord we want to get people interacting, collaborating, sharing, making and ultimately learning about what the future of education could be. This interactive workshop session will Involve five ‘table’ leaders who will introduce themselves, their projects and explain the activity they will be facilitating. The tables are: The Open Teacher Kit, OER Policy made crystal clear, Mobile use of open data for education, Make an Open Education Handbook Q&A and open courseware collaboration with Slidewiki. Attendees can join any of the 5 maker tables and make and learn!

Creative Commons will be leading a session on Open Educational Resources and Policy: Overview and Connections to Others.

There are also sessions on open data, open science, open access, open coalition, open development and openness of other flavours!! Here’s a few potentials:

• How to Teach Open Data – Milena Marin (Open Knowledge School of Data) & more
• Low-Tech Data: Story-Finding and Storytelling – Rahul Bhargava (MIT Center for Civic Media), Gabi Sobliye (Tactical Technology Collective)
• Maintaining a healthy and thriving Public Domain – exploring the notion of originality and copyright when digitising analogue works – Joris Pekel (Europeana), Paul Keller (Kennisland), Lieke Ploeger (Open Knowledge Foundation), Thomas Margoni (University of Amsterdam) & OpenGLAM Open Knowledge Working Group
• Open licenses for a free press – Hauke Gierow (Reporter ohne Grenzen)
  Open Movements – Alek Tarkowski (Centrum Cyfrowe), Nicole Allen (SPARC), Delia Browne (P2PU), Melissa Hagemann (OSF)
• Openness Divide? — How Openness Can Help the Unfinished Arab Spring – Salwa AbdelTawab (Al-Jazeera), Bilal Randeree, Rawan Damen
• Building the open coalition – developing a wider community of open – Stevie Benton (Wikimedia UK), Bekka Kahn (P2PU)
• Opening up ‘open’: how do we strengthen the base of people who care about open? – Elliott Bledsoe
• Tracking development in the open – Mark Brough, Shreya Basu (Publish What You Fund)
• Skills and tools for web native open science – Kaitlin Thaney (Mozilla Science Lab), Karthik Ram (rOpenSci)

OKFestival are also encouraging people to plan and run fringe events which will complement the Festival, both before and after the official programming, so potentially even more exciting stuff.

Early bird tickets are on sale now at a cost of only €120 – hope to see you there!