The Open Education Working Group was represented virtually (via Google hangouts) at the Open Data Ireland event held at the University College Cork yesterday. The meet up brought together those interested in open education and in joining a booksprint to take place on International Open Data Hackathon, Saturday, 22nd February.

The evening began with an introduction to Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland from Denis Parfenov, OKF Ambassador for Ireland. Unfortunately the wonder of technology didn’t extend as far as I would have liked and I was unable to hear Denis’s presentation. His slides are available on Google docs though.

There then followed a really interesting talk from Joonas Mäkinen on Finland’s Open Education achievements. They have been battling the high cost of textbooks and ran a booksprint to create an openly licensed maths textbook. Like me Joonas was presenting from his home via Google Hangouts and managed to easily out stage me by having his pet bird sat on his shoulder during most of his talk!

Joonas Mäkinen presenting in Google Hangouts with bird on shoulder, photo courtesy of Denis Parfenov

My brief was to give a presentation that would inspire participants to be a part of ‘open education’ in Ireland and beyond. I gave a board overview of the LinkedUp Project and the working group, focussing on the role we feel open data has to play in education. My slides are available on Slideshare and below.

The evening concluded with a talk from Darius Whelan, Creative Commons Ireland, on current Creative Commons trends both in Ireland and further afield.

My view of the Open Data Ireland event

I’m sure after the talks there was time for further discussion and planning for the booksprint. You can sign up online to participate in the booksprint, which will take place in Dublin.

Thanks to Denis Parfenov for inviting me along.