Alec Couros from the University of Regina will keynote ECE11 on open pedagogy, MOOCs, and personal learning networks. He's spent a decade exploring the open movement and will discuss digital citizenship in a searchable, networked world.
Hi, everybody. My name is Alec Kouros and I'm at the Faculty of Education, University of Regina in not so sunny Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, where I'm here to talk briefly about a conference coming up. The conference is called Education in a Changing Environment. It's sponsored by the University of Salford, and I've been very lucky to have been invited as a key speaker at the conference. I'm just going to get comfortable here on this very wet bench and explain my role and what I'll be speaking about quickly. So for the past decade or so I've been a scholar of the open source movement and really that began probably 10 years ago looking at things like open source software and certainly things like network learning. But it's really expanded, I think, in the last few years to things like open publishing, open courses, and really this whole notion of open pedagogy. So I've been lucky personally to have run a number of open courses or open courses. And this mean, doesn't mean just in this sense, doesn't mean just, you know, providing content for free, but also providing experiences for free. It also, if you think about open pedagogy, it also takes those people who can't, typically normal, typically access an online course and gets them to actually work a little bit to help facilitate experiences, to become mentors, to actually make the most of this open access into a rich new pedagogical sort of prospect. So I think that's really quite exciting. So I will talk about my open courses, give you a sense of what these things are, also give you great examples from people like George Siemens and David Cormier and Steven Downs, who have run these massive open online courses, which are really quite exciting. I also want to talk about personal learning networks and personal learning environments. This is something that's been something that I've been passionate about over the last few years and certainly have developed what I would say is a personal learning network over the last few years where really myself and thousands of educators work and learn and publish together in the open in a really rich experience. It's been absolutely wonderful. So I'll definitely address that and perhaps some of the implications we have for not only informal learning, but certainly formal learning. I also want to talk generally about with all this connectivity and with our access to, you know, in the rise of social networks like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and the like, what are the number of important issues that are rising here? Certainly I've been studying the notion of digital citizenship. It's something that we certainly can ignore. We're kind of we're leaning towards this near future where everyone and everything is Google able and what does that mean towards our notions of identity and I think that's a key process in all of this and a key area of study so I'm going to share some of these I hope to call them insights certainly my studies and the type of work that I've done in areas of openness I'm excited to go to the conference it's coming up very soon I'm hoping the weather is a little bit better than this for sure I can't wait to meet people, old friends and new ones that I'll meet and I'm really looking excited to go to it so if you're registered I'll see you there and if you're not I encourage you to check out if you're in the area certainly ECE 11 sponsored by the University of Salford and it's going to be a great conference so I'll see you there Take care.
Episode 14 - Dr. Alec Couros: The EdTech Explorer – Rethinking Education with AI
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