• Online interactive Open Education Timeline – captures events, projects and activities related to open education all around the globe. Can be edited by any interested party! It has also been linked to the OER Map.
• OER Timeline – Interactive Open Educational Resources timeline from CETIS.
• WikiEducator OER Timeline – Page started at a Learning4Content workshop as a resource to mark significant events in the Open Educational Resources(OER) movement.
• Distance Learning Timeline – Interactive timeline charting the history of this educational movement from Brighton School of Business & Management.
• Timeline of the Open Access Movement – Comprehensive timeline from Peter Suber, overs Open Access, Open Education and Open Data.
• History of virtual learning environments – Wikipedia page on VLEs – system that creates an environment designed to facilitate teachers’ management of educational courses for their students, especially a system using computer hardware and software, which involves distance learning.
• The OU Story – History of Open University.
• OER – a historical perspective – by David Kernohan and Amber Thomas. Paper delivered at ALTC2012 and OpenEd2012.
• Open Education in the 1990s: Revisiting the History of the Open Education Movement by Valerie Irvine, Janet Symmons, and Rich McCue – Plans to make a video about the Open Education Movement.

To finish I’d like to mention a fantastic tool that could be useful for anyone wanting to create a timeline of anything. Histropedia builds on existing information on Wikipedia through Wikidata, a Wikimedia project creating a structured database to support Wikipedia and its sister projects. They use an advanced filter and query system that allow the creation of custom timelines to be created in seconds.

If you know of anymore timelines do suggest them in the comments!

The results are available on the OER Research hub site.

If you’d like to add projects or event to the timeline here is an explanation of how to get started.

The OER Research hub team would now like to hear suggestions or ways they might enhance the services offered by the map site.

They currently offer

• OER Projects Map – A directory of OER projects and initiatives

• OER Policy Map – A comprehensive collection of OER policies

• OER Evidence Map  – Display & query OERRH evidence

• OER Impact Map – An aggregation of the previous three maps

• Influence Maps – Recording activity around specific Twitter hashtags (#oerrhub; #oermap) and other social media metrics

• Hypothesis Reports

• Reports by Country

Get in touch with the OER Research Hub team if you’d like to find out more.

We’ve now placed all those suggestions into a Google Spreadsheet that links to TimeMapper.

[TimeMapper is a project of Open Knowledge Foundation through OKFNLabs and the Source Code is available to use. TimeMapper is open-source. You can find details on Copyright and License.]

Most of the dates need checking (I can’t even remember the date of birth of my children let alone important open education events!) and they also need fleshing out (so urls, locations, text, images etc.) to turn them into the most comprehensive Open Education Timeline to date! But this is a collaborative community project so we thought we’d get you all to help!

The main Google Doc is available for everyone to edit.

Each column has specific requirements:

• Title – the name of the event, this is required
• Start – start date, this needs to be in American format, so for the 1st June 2013 use 06/01/2013, this is required. You will spot that many dates currently have 01/01 as their day and month – these haven’t been checked.
• End – end date, only relevant if this a period rather than single point in time, this needs to be in American format, so for the 1st June 2013 use 06/01/2013
• Description – textual description, not too long
• Web Page – web page for this event – URL
• Media – URL to an image or media (e.g. video)
• Media Caption – Caption for the media item (optional even if you have a media item)
• Media Credit – Credit for the media (optional even if you have the media)
• Tags – separate with commas
• Place – Human readable name for place (if any) e.g. any one of London, Europe, Paris, Texas
• Location – Machine readable form of Place. Must be either GeoJSON or in following format: latitude, longitude e.g. 37.5, -122. You can use the Universimmedia site to do this – it is these co-ordinates that place the event on the map.
• Source – Source name/title
• Source URL – Source url

Once you have made changes to the spreadsheet you need to publish to the web for your edits to be seen (File>Publish to the Web>Republish now) on the Open Education Timeline.

To avoid mishaps we recommend making small changes and republishing often – so you can work out if there is a problem.

Contact us if you need any help.

We were there primarily to make new friends but did manage to participate in the Science Fair and facilitate the Hit the Road Map: A Human Timeline of the Open Education Space event. [More to follow soon on what we plan to do next with the timeline data!].

Education at MozFest

Note that most of the above pictures are mine, though some are part of the MozFest Flickr set.

MozFest is the Mozilla Foundation’s annual party and this year they had 1,500 web experts, journalists, artists, educators and hackers along for the ride. The emphasis is very much on creating things and working together with a demo show at the end giving people the opportunity to show what they’ve made. The hope is that initiatives will get started at the festival and can carry on being developed over the year. As a newbie the event takes a little getting used to. The schedule is only available online and changes by the minute (it often disappears before your eyes!) and there is a feeling of organised chaos all around. That said the constant stream of coffee, the array of brightly coloured pens and the enthusiasm of all involved make for a full-on, but constructive couple of days!

Education had a strong presence at MozFest with a whole floor dedicated ‘Build and Teach the Web’. The aim being to ‘teach the web as a community’ and through web literacy people would ‘know more and do more’.

“From remixing public archives to mashing hip hop with politics, and from hacking on web-native storytelling tools to knitting projects that teach digital literacies, we’ll inspire, share and empower. Get your feet wet by programming your first webpage, browse our art galleries, play with the Green Screen and help others with their making “to dos” on the Massive Scrum Board.” The backbone of much of this is the Web Literacy Standard, an open learning standard currently in version 1.0 comprising the skills and competencies people need to read, write and participate effectively on the web, and Mozilla’s Webmaker work. It’s also supported by couple of number of Mozilla’s Webmaker tools such as Thimble and Popcorn.

Some of the most relevant sessions I came across were:

• Hive Learning Network NYC – a New York-based Mozilla learning lab that engages youth around innovation, digital media and web-making. They work with kids on ideas such as Hackasaurus, Open Badges, Mozilla Popcorn and the School of Webcraft.
• Webmaker – A global community dedicated to teaching digital skills and web literacy. Creative ways to help anyone teach web literacy, digital skills and making. They offer free tools, activities and lesson plans and meet ups for teachers and techies.
• Open Education Data Detective – Session in which we got to handle data that has come out of the OER Research Hub project which is looking at ‘What is the impact of Open Educational Resources (OER) on learning and teaching practices?’ They have already collected a fair amount of UK data through working in collaboration with projects across four education sectors (K12, college, higher education and informal) extending a network of research with shared methods and shared results. We used tools like easel.ly to create infographics and data visualisations.
• Safety and Privacy on the Web – A session looking at how the Mozilla tools Thimble (helps you write html), Xray Goggles (grab tool that allows you to hide elements of a web page) and Popcorn Maker (allows editing of video). Someone also pointed out the Me and My Shadow project which helps you learn about your digital shadow – a great resource for teaching.
• Makes for Cultural Archives – This discussion session had us think about how we can open up cultural heritage data and for education. It’s the precursor for work on the Helsinki Learning Festival which will take place in April next year. A few useful links from the session: Commons Machinery which is a way to automate open standards for metadata and medium.com – collaborative peer reviewing of blog posts and writing.
• A huge amount of sessions on getting kids into technology, from using Minecraft for teaching, to code clubs, and teaching computing offline (with logic puzzles and games that use oranges to show code locking).
• Building collaboration across the open space – Unfortunately I missed this session but my colleagues from Open Knowledge Foundation along with friends from along with representatives from WikimediaUK, OpenStreetMap, MozillaWiki and Creative Commons ran a discussion-based session to examine how to improve collaboration and sharing among communities working in the areas of open access, open source and open data.

Working on OER data

As well as a floor of learning there was also a floor dedicated to Mozilla Open Badges. There were design sessions ranging from the physical (getting kids to draw ideas for badges) and the the online (deigning badges with DigitalMe) and opportunities to add badges to your at the Badge MozFest Station. I enjoyed chatting to the JISC / OBSEG and We are Snook who were helping people chart where their Open Badge projects and interests fit within the Open Badge eco-system. They have used the Open Badges in Scottish Education Group (#OBSEG) as an example of how making connections can enable badge developments in a national context.

Open badges

MozFest was an very inclusive event. Despite being a fairly technical event it was well-attended by an equal split of male and females, and there was also a really good mix of ages, with a number of children getting in on the making! Most people were from the UK and the US, it would have been good to see a more global audience – but this is something they can work on for next time! MozFest’s real focus was on finding ways on bringing people to the web. The opening speaker, Anil Dash, writer of the Web we Lost, pointed out that we are likely to spend 3-4 years of our lives with thumbs pressed to our smartphones and yet there are still 5 billion people who have yet to get online. He explained that we need to find justification for the time that we spend on the web – we need it to be a positive, collaborative experience. I think this rings true for open education.

The event Hit the Road Map: A Human Timeline of the Open Education Space was organised by School of Open (Creative Commons & P2PU), the Open Knowledge Foundation (with its Open Education Working Group hat on), and FLOSS Manuals Foundation.

After introductions and some warm up activities we got cracking with creating the timeline on butcher paper using multicoloured pens and post-it notes. Although there was a little bit of ‘cheating’ (looking stuff up on the web – hey, that’s what it’s for!) most of the important open education event came from memory and personal experience.

Here’s a few tasters:

• 1969: Formation of Open University
• 1989: The start of the Web!
• 2000: David Wiley wrote ‘Reusability’
• 2001: Creative Commons begins
• 2002: MIT Open Courseware launched
• 2003: Berlin Declaration on Open Access
• 2005: Open Courseware Consortium set up
• 2007: First MOOC
• 2007: Cape Town Declaration
• 2009: P2PU started

We have hundreds more – they just all happen to be scrawled on rolled-up paper at the moment! So the plan is to digitise what we have by moving all the ideas in to Google Docs and then create a TimeMapper of them. This may form part of the Open Education handbook. At that point we will be able to share the document with you so you can add more information, correct the date and add in your own ideas. We may even try to run more open education timeline events. Watch this space!

More photos of the event are available on Flickr.

For many of us this event marked the start of MozFest – the Mozilla Foundation’s huge festival that brings together makers, innovators, teachers and learners. There will be lots of open education related activities taking place and the Open Education Working Group will be about and up for conversations! Many other members of the Open Knowledge Foundation team will be about and running sessions too. Hope to see you there!