It was lovely to see you all at #OER16 in Edinburgh. It was a great personal pleasure to host the conference and to listen to the papers and speakers. For me it provided an excellent excuse to have so many friends and colleagues here.
When Lorna and I passed across to next year’s chairs it was a relief to know that the conference will survive and thrive for another year.
I gave the last keynote, the one usually punctuated by the poorly stifled sound of wheely suitcases escaping from the back of the room. Jim, Catherine, Emma and John are hard acts to follow.
You can watch all the keynotes ( and many of the sessions) on MediaHopper, they are all excellent.
One of the benefits of being the last keynote is that the many flavors of openness had already been rehearsed and debated by other people in the room. And that many of my excellent Edinburgh colleagues had already covered the detail of our services and projects. The keynote offered me a chance to reflect on the themes of the conference and why it made sense to have it in Edinburgh.
I spoke about the Edinburgh vision for OER and the journey that brought us here. I spoke about technical and copyright debt and the importance of doing your bit when we live in shared space.
If you get a chance to watch all the keynotes, which I hope you will, you will see 5 very different people in very different jobs/contexts taking different approaches to identifying the value proposition for open. But none of them are doing it alone. That’s the beauty of the thing.
After you watch Emma’s talk know this: as well as her excellent Shakespeare credentials, Emma is also the woman who helped one of Oxford’s oldest colleges to rethink the power of the portraits on its walls -‘Dead white men’ make way for women at Oxford (Guardian, Sept 14)- and as such , one of my inspirations for The Playfair Steps.
