This Open Access Week, I’m not scheduled to give any major presentations (although I will be participating in a panel next week), so I thought it would be a fun opportunity to go back and revisit the presentations I’ve given in past years, and do a little overview. I try to list all of my presentations and publications on my blog, but from that list, it’s hard to tell which presentations are worth watching, and which topics have been covered.
I gave my very first presentation about openness at the University Al Azhar in Indonesia as part of the Linux Week there in 2006. The slides are in Indonesian, but are included for historical value. I gave a presentation about open learning and the future of universities for a class I was TAing in 2007, but the first real public presentation I gave about these topics was for a group of high-level bureaucrats at the Indian Institute of Public Administration in Delhi, in 2008.
The talk “Open Research, Open Educational Resources, and Open Learning – Experiments and Ideas” was my first chance to begin to organize my ideas about open licenses, different kinds of OER and open learning, and it’s also the first presentation that I have the audio for as well. It’s also a presentation that I’ve often referred to in subsequent presentations about the value of posting presentations online. Since it was a major presentation that I was giving for the first time, it might have taken me 10-15 hours to prepare the lecture, and about 20 people were in the room when I gave it. However, before starting the presentation, I simply clicked “record” in Audacity, an open-source cross-platform audio application, on my MacBook, and recorded the whole lecture. After the presentation, I uploaded the slides to Slideshare, and spent a bit of time syncing the slides to the audio. In the four years that the presentation has been available, it has been viewed by more than 6,400 people, favorited by 11 people, and downloaded 130 times.
(Note, I have turned all the following Slideshare embeds into links, to make sure the blog post loads faster. You can see the post with all the presentations embedded on my blog.)
The Open Scholar, as I’m defining this person, is not simply someone who agrees to allow free access and reuse of his or her traditional scholarly articles and books; no, the Open Scholar is someone who makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible and who invites and encourages ongoing criticism of their work and secondary uses of any or all parts of it–at any stage of its development.
I have given a number of smaller presentations on OA, mostly mirroring the content in the presentations above. There are two final presentations worth mentioning, relevant to OA, although on quite different topics. The first is a presentation I gave to CIDER on the Top Level Courses Project in China, the topic of my MA thesis, available as an Elluminate recording, and a PDF link to the slides.
I was also generously invited by George Siemens to give a lecture in a MOOC, and I choose this opportunity to explore ideas around visualization and interaction with ideas individually, in small groups, and in large networks. The final presentation was probably quite scattered, but I think had a lot of interesting ideas. I wrote up very detailed notes, and later also wrote a paper based on some of these ideas. Also see the slides on Slideshare.
My own work on Open Access during the last one and a half year has been focused on developing an academic workflow for PhD students that enables sharing of notes, and through this work, I’ve thought a lot about the need for a more open infrastructure for scholarly publishing, which I hope to blog more about later. I began writing a long document about a possible social portal for sharing publication notes, which I never finished. However, you can visit my PhD wiki, read about the Researchr system, and you can also check out the blog posts, and screencasts about the system below:
Blog posts
Have a great Open Access Week!
Stian
