There were some really juicy topics discussed at the 5th Working Group Call held yesterday!

Unfortunately we had some issues with the video and the sound quality of the later part of the video isn’t very good. If anyone has any Audacity skills and would be willing to improve the audio it would be much appreciated!

During the meeting we used an Etherpad for the agenda and notes.

The main discussion topics were:

Community: Marieke will be moving on to other projects later on in the year and is keen to spread the co-ordination of the group out a little. Javiera has offered to spend more time supporting the working group in the new year! There followed a discussion over the challenges of ‘building a Community’ and overlapping communities. Quite a few related open education communities were identified including: Open education graduate community, UNESCo group, OER discuss, P2PU, GO-GN (Global Open Educational Resources Gradute Network), ALT’s OER SIG committee. It was suggested that the Open Education Working Group hold a ‘meta community day’ or ‘open open day’ and try to bring some of these communities together.

Open data use in schools: Marco Fioretti gave talk on the possibilities of open data use in schools for teaching. He suggested collecting and using open data as part of normal school work – using open data in school for raw materials eg. figures from open corporates. Marco explained that currently schools teach with data but it is old data or made up data out of text books, possibly on a scanned PDF. It is not reuseable data, it rarely raises the interests of children – and is doing nothing to improve interest of young people in politics or future government. This means that many young people don’t care about activism. Marco argued that this was different from expecting teachers to learn programming, teaching stats is something they are already doing. Marco has explored these ideas in a workshop at GD Camp in Warsaw (see slides below). He has now started to collect practical examples on the topic – how teachers can begin to use open data through example lesson plans etc.

Some of the suggestions from the attendees included: support for universities to start releasing data so academics can reuse that as real data for students understanding complex problems; School of data using open data as examples, for example on understanding budgeting; having learners work on real world problems by contributing – citizen science activities. Note that Mozilla carry out interest based learning, so the learners define what is important to them and then learn web literacy competencies and skills from that lens. Issues identified include teachers being too busy and feeling incompetent in this area. There was a discussion on possible project proposal ideas related to supoorting teachers.

Unfortunately Rayna Stamboliyska couldn’t make it to tell us how plans are coming along with her ‘data expedition for children’. Hopefully she we be able to join us at the next meeting.

Translating CC: Javiera Atenas explained her concerns over Creative Commons resources being predominantly available only in English. She would like to see co-ordinated translation of resources and user friendly content – “switch flags and have the page available in other languages”. It was discussed if some of the translations are already available but need to be surfaced e.g. Transifex CC or CC Chose. Duolingo has learners translate the web while learning a new language – so people are effectively contributing to open translation efforts. Javiera will be leading a campaign in this area. [blog post to follow!]

Lyon Declaration: Bernard Nkuyubwatsi talked about Lyon Declaration and its implication on the post 2015 education. The Lyon Declaration is an advocacy document that will be used to positively influence the content of the United Nations post-2015 development agenda. It was drafted by IFLA and a number of strategic partners in the library and development communities between January and May 2014. Bernard also shared that the Government of Rwanda is considering an open education policy [blog post to follow!]

Our next meeting will be in approximately 2 months. Details to follow.