Please introduce yourself! Who are you? What do you do? Why are you taking this course?
Hi everyone, I am Maha Bali, I am a faculty developer and teacher educator at the American University in Cairo. I am a big time open edu advocate and have just blogged a bit more about my reasons for taking this course - basically, it’s always great to improve one’s understanding of the nuances of openness and the challenges we face as open educators in a world where many of our f2f colleagues do not have the same stance. Lookin forward to learning with you all
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Greetings from Phnom Penh! This is Vantharith from Cambodia. Currently, I’m working as an administrative staff at a local private university, but I’m also challenging myself to teach one course per semester.
After my involvement with WIkimedia Foundation in its free knowledge movement by building our local Wikipedia in Khmer language, I came across the Creative Commons, an open license option that I would like to learn more about it, esp. in the field of education.
I’m very new and less experienced, but I’m committed to learn something new. Thank you.
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Hello, my name is Nick St Clare.
You can find me on facebook with that name, also at www.EcoTort.blogspot.co.uk where there is an argument based upon Natural and Universal Law, that it is unlawful to pay taxes in every country of the World, unless or until a global “state of emergency” is declared for the environment, such that we are all working together on this beautiful Planet, using all of our splendid and amazing resources for the benefit of Humanity, as intended by the inventors, instead of damaging and destroying our shared environment in the name of “economic profit”
It is my intention to teach this knowledge through the media of interactive theatre and film, to be distributed free, or by donations, on the internet.
I am looking for techniques to express this information in entertaining, informative, and empowering ways.
There is also an EcoTort Theatre channel on youtube:
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Welcome, Maha! I’d love to see your blog post on why you’re taking this course. Can you link to it here? Looking forward to learning with you!
I’m Christina Hendricks, and I teach philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada. I’m one of the co-facilitators for this course.
I wrote a blog post introducing myself for the last time we did this course, a year ago, and most of it is still true (though I’ve gone a bit further in openness in some respects than I had before). So if you want to know a little more about me, you can see the blog post here: http://blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks/2013/07/21/hello-why-open-course/
Hello, I’m Firoj Ghimire from Kathmandu, Nepal. I am an undergraduate Computer Science student willing to know about open source and open knowledge!
Hi all,
I’m Brittney. I’m Canadian but currently living in Ireland completing an MLIS degree. The Open issue has been a constant theme in coursework, networking events, and even my work as a research assistant. I’ve noticed that there tends to be a fairly blind assumption running around that Openness is inherently good and inherently profitable, though support for these notions is fairly thin on the ground and mostly anecdotal. I don’t have much practical experience in the area so I am taking this course in the hope that it will help me to better understand the benefits and motivations behind Openness and to understand how we can measure our successes (and failures) in providing open materials.
Hello everyone,
My name is Apostolos, but most people call me by my initials (AK). I have many roles at my school, both official and unofficial. Officially I am the manager of an online MA program (helping students from before they become students until the point they graduate). Side jobs include being Editor-in-Chief of a campus peer review journal (http://scholarworks.umb.edu/ciee/vol1/iss1/) and being an adjunct faculty member in the Instructional Design MEd. Program.
I’ve been interested in open for a while. I was in David Wiley’s Intro to Open Ed 2012 which I found interesting. I am joining for a few reasons. I want to keep pondering and discussing “open” so this seems like a good spot to find others interested in the same thing. I am also a perpetual MOOCer so this gives me an opportunity to try out P2PU again.
Hello, I am Alessandro Iadarola and I am an italian product designer / maker based in Amsterdam.
During the last year I have been working at Fablab Amsterdam. Fablab is a project started by Neil Gershenfeld , professor at MIT and the director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, a sister lab to the MIT Media Lab.
My role was mainly facilitate the use of the machines provided by the lab following the projects on every step of the process; that could be ideation of the concept, design tools, references, feasibility, technical datas.
I basically shared everything I know or got known from peers and this is how I see the next generation of the educational models as well of production of goods. My personal practice/research is strongly oriented to sustainability applied to CNC manufacturing and mass production.
I am taking this course because I would like to improve my openness-skills and understand how to protect our work keeping it open source and how to contribute to open the datas for a collective growth rather then a personal growth.
Hope we can answer together to this questions as i guess more will come during the course.
ciao
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Hi Vantharith! Great work to build Wikipedia in Khmer! We will definitely be talking about CC licenses and giving you some resources to learn more about them, so you’ve come to the right place! I expect you’ll have a good deal to say in our other conversations about openness too. Good to “meet” you, even if only virtually.
Hi Nick–welcome! thanks for the information on your work–I’ll definitely check it out. I hope you’ll find at least some of what we’re doing in the course interesting and useful for your work in open sharing.
Aloha! My name is Leanne Riseley and I am the Educational Media Center Coordinator at Leeward Community College in Pearl City, Hawaii. The University of Hawaii system is just starting to look into Open Education Resources as a way to reduce costs for students and innovating by using more/different resources. I’m looking forward to learning as much as I can about OER and specifically the process other institutions have adopted to incorporate it into the curriculum.
Is #whyopen the hashtag for this course? I want to make sure I am using the generally accepted tag on my blog 
Hello, I am Rizwan Sandhu, an artist and am starting an adult education organization. I have joined to meet new people, get ideas about how to startup the organization, and get the manpower to run the organization, and get things done.
Yep, the hashtag is #WhyOpen, though we’ll mostly be using that for Twitter for anyone who is on Twitter (not required for the course if you aren’t already on Twitter and don’t want to be, though we will have at least one Twitter chat for those who want to join in).
@Firoj Welcome! Great to have someone from Nepal…I love how we are from various parts of the world!
@Brittney I agree that openness tends to just be talked about as if it’s necessarily always a good thing and there are no downsides. That’s part of why we’re looking at both in this course. I still believe the upsides outweigh the possible problems, but it’s important to talk about all possibilities. Hopefully our discussions here will help you get a sense of at least some of those.
@akoutropoulos Welcome, AK! I agree that this is a good place to talk with others interested in openness; hopefully our discussions will be useful to you. I am also a perpetual MOOCer; I wasn’t in David Wiley’s Intro to Open Ed course, but I was in one run by Martin Weller at the Open University in the UK in 2013. That was one of my first forays into learning about openness, and now I’m excited to keep talking about it and learning more myself.
@Alessandro_Iadarola I like the point about learning so much from peers; I think this happens more often than we might recognize, so that really, something like Peer 2 Peer University is just an extension of everyday life, one might say. I hope that what we talk about in the course may be helpful for your questions about opening work for collective growth rather than individual growth, though mostly we’ll be talking about what openness is, and its benefits/possible drawbacks. Still, there are lots of interesting people in this course who may have good ideas about your questions. Peer to peer learning, once again!
@leannech Good to hear the U of Hawaii system is looking into OERs! I wish my institution were taking a leading role on incorporating them into curricula, but so far, not so much. There are a number of people using them on an ad hoc basis, but so far nothing systematic. I hope that changes soon, and I hope to be part of that change. But for now, I’m looking for ideas on how to do so myself.
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Hi, I want to find out some more about “Open”. Concept, in practice and how that relates to me (not as a educationalist) via this community, how that is changing and the current debates. David