9 May 2012, Welsh Economics Colloquium, Gregynog Hall
Opening up Economics
As part of an Economics Network session, I spoke about the open educational resource revolution and the projects I’ve been involved in for Economics.
5 October 2011, Bathcamp #26 “The Spirit of Openness”, University of Bath Innovation Centre
Common Pitfalls in engaging with Wikipedia, and how to avoid them
Storify of Twitter reactions to this session
6 September 2011, Developments in Economics Education conference 2011, London
Open Educational Resources: DeSTRESS and TRUE
This was an abbreviated update of the “Bringing remix culture to Economics” talk given in other contexts (see below)
Wednesday 11 May 2011, Open Educational Resources 2011, Manchester
Wikipedia and Higher Education: Beat them or Join them?
The Wikimedia community and the UK Open Educational Resource community are each making educational material available to the world under free licences. So far, they are working in ignorance of each other and perhaps not taking each other seriously enough. I argued that the UK OER community can learn some vital lessons from the Wikipedia community, including its ethos of individual empowerment and risk-tolerance. I also argued that the UK OER community should take a conscious decision about how and to what extent to engage with the Wikimedia projects.
Saturday 16 April 2011, WikiConference UK 2011, The Watershed Media Centre, Bristol
Psychology on English Wikipedia: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Tuesday 5 April 2011, Scottish Economic Society Conference
Bringing Remix Culture to Economics
Monday 31 January 2011, Cancer Research UK (the Angel Building, London) Common pitfalls in engaging with Wikipedia. Part of a session with four colleagues from Wikimedia UK. I was the last on, and since we were running behind schedule, I cut down my talk quite a bit to make way for questions.
9 September 2010, Economics Network eLearning Symposium
Bringing Remix Culture to Economics
This was a 40-minute slot at the start of a day event for lecturers. I gave an overview of how the proliferation of free educational materials was changing the landscape of higher education and talked about the cultural changes that are necessary for the academic community to get the most benefit. I’m particularly proud of this talk and wish the video camera had been running.
13 July 2010: Barcamp session at Institutional Web Managers Workshop 2010
The audience was mainly people who maintain the web sites of UK Universities. I asked if any had edited the Wikipedia page about their institution, and nearly everybody had. I advised that Wikipedia has a Conflict Of Interest policy, and that putting promotional text into an article was a waste of time, as an editor (maybe me) will eventually find and delete it. I urged them to think of more imaginative and productive ways to engage, for example sharing images and media related to their alumni or honourary graduates to improve those articles.
12 March 2010: SCORE event on Open Educational Resources
A wiki approach to Open Educational Resources
This was a day event at the Open University’s building in Bristol, where I was one of two guest speakers.
Bias and Belief 