This week, I have had the good fortune of joining the the OpenCourseWare Consortium Global Meeting co-hosted by MIT, Tufts University, and UMass-Boston at the Boston Marriott-Cambridge. It's been an exciting journey as part of the planning committee (through my association with Tufts), and it was even more exciting to see it all come together so beautifully.
It's the gorgeous Marriott right next to Kendall Square - chill lobby, Starbucks, the works! Not to mention, their conference and event staff are second to none. They were extremely accomodating (and perhaps psychic?) the entire conference. The committee was super impressed.
If you are unfamiliar with what OpenCourseWare is all about, it began with a vision at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (a.k.a. MIT) ten years ago. Their vision was to use the internet as a vehicle to share almost all of their courses online with the global community. This caught on and well over 250 institutions now share courses online through the OpenCourseWare initiative. Self-learners and educators all over the world can visit these institutional websites to glean content, take courses, and learn. It was a powerful idea to begin with ten years ago, but seeing it working through so many talented and passionate individuals this week has been extremely rewarding.
I was honored to be asked by the committee to photograph the conference's main opening activities and to continue participating throughout the rest of the week. Leading up to the conference, I was thrilled to help with a variety of tasks and enjoyed helping design the Tufts OpenCourseWare and Open.Tufts banners.
Tim O'Reilly got the conference underway with a brilliantly inspiring keynote speech. He is a large supporter of open education and his company O'Reilly Media is well known for its disbursement of technology books. One of the favorite things I heard him mention was a quote by William Gibson who said, "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet."
The conference continued with some remarkable presentations by the early adopters of the OCW movement, including Dr. Sukon Kanchanaraksa of Johns Hopkins University.
Sukon was gracious enough to photograph me whilst I was photographing! So, apparently this is what I look like when I take photos. (Eek!)
Poster sessions, break-out groups, and a fabulous banquet (oh-my-goodness... the desserts!) and award ceremony helped round out the week. An award to Dr. Walter Lewin (video) was perhaps the highlight of the banquet evening, as the OCW Consortium bestowed upon him an award honoring his early contributions to OCW and his remarkable ability to teach physics to people around the world. If you're looking for a good read, you may want to pick up "For the Love of Physics".
The consortium conference continued even further with some phenomenal presentations by a variety of international participants. It was truly a remarkable experience. I love being surrounded by people who are just as passionate about education (and trying new ideas in reforming education globally) as I am.
Thank you to all of the conference participants and the rest of the committee especially for a truly remarkable experience. I was thrilled to have been a part of it and look forward to another 10 years of OCW!
For more photos from the event, check out the following video. I was honored to have the help of Willem Van Valkenburg of Delfts University (Netherlands) with the photos, and so I have to give credit to him for about 20-30 of these final images. Thank you so much, new friend!
