Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 39 seconds
This morning, I had the honor of being a guest with the warm and welcoming Teresa Mackinnon on an #OpenEdSIG webinar that’s part of Open Education Week and also a pre #OER17 session.
I will embed the slides once I get to a computer, but for now, here’s a link.
I will post the recording as soon as it’s up also.
I am so grateful for this session. It was such a useful opportunity for me to meet with a sample of the OER17 conference participants, not to have a fully equitable conversation, but to still get to interact with them a little.
Teresa’s Introduction made a huge difference. It was very personal and very warm. I wanted to cry because i was so touched. I remember my keynote announcement making me feel like I had been hugged. Teresa’s intro did that today. And it’s a reminder when we introduce someone, how much of a difference it makes if we personalize our intro rather than just read a bio. It automatically affected the atmosphere and I think warmed people towards me also.
(immediately before we started, btw, I had squeaky voice syndrome related to mic issues – this happens to me occasionally and Martin had helped me troubleshoot it before for hangouts – and today I followed the same steps before figuring out where the audio wizard was on the Bb Collaborate).
It was lovely to see some people I know well (like Frances Bell and Christian Friedrich) and new friends (like Debbie Baff and Sheila MacNeill) and several folks I am just getting to know on Twitter as well.
I felt that the impostor syndrome slide resonated a lot. Which is hilarious coz I removed it from my keynote. But I guess it will come out in some form or another as I speak. How could it not, right?
I talked about my process of thinking about my keynote and how difficult it is for me to give a one-way keynote and all the ways I hope to make it interactive both in the room/live and virtually/asynchronously.
For example, I will ask some questions of the audience. Some are prepped to participate and some will be surprise questions (not too many). I also plan to have my slides open to comments and to have a link for feedback at the end. All the links are scheduled to go live on my website April 5 just before I start keynoting at this link: www.mahabali.me/oer17
I also talked quite a bit about Virtually Connecting and shared the link to our signup form: http://bit.ly/OER17VC – hopefully some people now know more about it – also we published today a blogpost on the OER17 blog about vconnecting.
I loved how Teresa stepped in and talked about how she felt about vconnecting and that it clicked for me that Simon Ensor (who had introduced me to Teresa originally) was doing virtual buddying for OER17 inshallah next week.
I tried to respond to questions on the slides as I spoke and I occasionally lost my audio while trying to do that 🙂
One other thing that seemed to resonate a lot with participants was my ending quote from Sarah Ahmed on how we need space outside our institutions to be able to speak about issues we cannot speak about within our institutions. And that’s what open has given me and it seems many others.
We all need Open Spaces virtual and physical #OER17 @Bali_Maha #OpenEdSIG @VivienRolfe @WarwickLanguage @EdInnovationHAS pic.twitter.com/rQ12hWWVwG
— “LowSkilledChildOfAQueueJumper” 💙 She Her 🌏 (@Ghizzi_d) March 29, 2017
Frances asked a really good question about when sometimes those spaces need to be private rather than open. And that is absolutely the case, of course, and some things are too risky to talk about in the open. Some things are better done privately. And it reminded me of a post of Kate Green’s where she talked about open not being the opposite of private. I don’t remember the details. Will try to link it here later.
I also like that people seemed to like my ending Oscars type slide where I have photos of all the people I learn from about open (and I am sure I have forgotten someone important).
Again, this was a really helpful session to me personally because it gave me a warmup that was low-stakes prep for the keynote and gave me a sense of what to expect from the audience f2f inshallah.