Open Ed. 2008

The open education conference was different in some ways to other conferences that I have attended.  One was that I had to attend some sessions as a student, which was ok.  And the other was that I was part of Conference Services that had helped plan and run the conference.  So I was doing double duty by being there. 

 

The sessions that I got to go to was the session by Teresa Malango on “VP of Music licensing and Business Partnerships”
I was wondering how she would intertwine Instructional Technology with music licensing and partnerships?  All of the information that she gave in the first 2/3’s of the session I thought was ok, but it was not until the end of the session that I got the IT part of it.  Like open Education, open music is looking to grow and help others learn better and faster with out having to pay enormous amount of money that would go to others.   They are able to do this by using an open business model.

The other session that I attended was interesting and the speaker was very layed back.  The session was on SocialLearn and was, or is, a project out of Open University.  Which I take is an online University.   What I was able to gather from the speaker was that they are aiming at the social aspects and social interactions of students.  The platform that OU used was mainly face book. 

He said that in face book widgets could hold most of the information with course profiles, course details and such while being able to find other study buddies and invite other into the courses.  He said that it worked well in the start and most users liked it.  By doing it on face book it they were able to gather 12-16 months of information.  Information that was gained from the social networking and opened information that could not be gained from the university itself. 

I thought that his closing statement was very good and would agree with him.  It was this “Tomorrow’s learner is already here, we are building the platform for them to use so they could smoothly exchange important learner-centric data.”