Open Education Working Group Open Education Timeline Building
Last night around 15 open education enthusiasts got together at Goodenough House in Mecklenburgh Square, London to drink beer, chat and begin to build a timeline of the open education space.
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!
[…] In addition to networking and sharing our common open education interests, participants of the Open Ed Meetup at the William Goodenough house collectively built a timeline of events that they felt marked important (and personal) milestones in the open education space, from the beginning of the Open University in 1969 to Lessig’s countersuit against Liberation Music this year. The timeline was a great collaborative exercise for the group, and one that we hope is only beginning. As Marieke from the OKFN writes in her post, […]