OER Takeaways: What I learned from my first speaking engagement conference

A few months back, my friend Lou Mycroft (well worth a follow if you're into education!) told me that I should submit an application to the Open Education conference on the subject of my work (Cultural Poverty... but you already knew that!) 

My initial reaction was to not do that. Why would people want to hear me talk about this? Wasn't there someone better? Was my argument even good enough? That little voice of doubt tried to convince me that this wasn't worth it. I am very glad in this case that I didn't listen! Though Hollie Barnes might have had something to do with that...

I submitted my draft piece on "Chaos, Creativity and Culture". In short, I wanted to showcase my ideas on a classroom re-focused around creativity in order to push cultural capability and how using chaos in the classroom can achieve that. I drew a lot of inspiration from Sir Ken Robinson, a favourite theorist of mine who I credit with getting me interested in education. I relied on his concept of divergent thinking in our students to inspire my own theories. Give his talk a watch, if you haven't already! It's full of some interesting points.

OER got back to me. They liked it so much they offered me a scholarship place to come and talk about it! Months later, I arrived in London and got to meet some of the amazing people who run and contribute to the conference before delivering my talk. To all those at the Pre-Meet up that listened, explained, bowled and nerded out with me- I hope I get to speak with you all again very soon.

Thoughts on my delivery

I've been at conferences before, notably Me+ that I've helped to run up here in the North East and speaking for the online FE Swap Shop with Hollie Barnes. OER was the first one where I wasn't around an FE only crowd. It was more focused around HE researchers, mostly looking at EdTech and open education. 

I knew I had to make this presentation something memorable- so rather than sit on the presenters table and cycle through my slides I'd stand up and wander about a bit. If it's one thing I've learned from half a decade in front of a hostile "I don't wanna learn English" resit class it is that if you move around you command attention. After all, my talk was all about how we're competing for the attention of learners addicted to dopamine and action-reward cycles!

I did the talk, answered a question on how my college is supporting me (with everything it's got, college has bought in- came my reply). Had some smiles, some applause. It went well but man oh man, adrenaline is real! My project was now Out There in the real world. People who were not my colleagues and friends were talking about it! 

I had some very positive feedback from a few people. It made the whole event worth it. 

Thoughts on the other talks I attended

As you know, I am FE focused. Dr Maren Deepwell, the CEO of ALT and one of the principal organisers for OER is hugely keen to get more researchers from the area of FE to speak at these things and contribute to the discussion on open education.

I think that this is a huge undertaking and worthy cause. FE often feels neglected in the overall discussion on education, sandwiched as is is between the mammoth area of primary/secondary education and the labyrinthian higher education sphere. FE may only be 3 years in the lives of many learners, but they are transformational and deserving of discussion. 

Some of the attendees on learning I was from FE looked at me like I was a Zebra who'd learned to speak and were fascinated research was even taking place in the sector! I can only hope I left them thinking more about the sector and how their research may have impact beyond the HE sphere.

Another speaker I took something from was Bryan Mathers, founder of Visual Thinkery. He spoke about a related area to my own study on the creative process and it got me thinking about how we are increasingly using images to add emotional impact to words. 

Our learners are growing up with the dual languages of images and words more so than any other time. While there have been pictures with books in the past we now live in the "Era of the Emoji". I am now asking myself if I can pair the questions from the exam with an image to greater impact the the ability of the learner to answer it!

Conclusive Thinking

I loved this experience and I want to speak and write more, in more places to more people. There is power in speaking ideas, not only for yourself but for those listening, if you give them the chance to use their own cultural and creative lenses to parse your ideas. 

FE needs to be more active; it needs to wake up and push educators out and into these spaces to make noise and influence the conversation. Right now, HE has the floor and is spending a lot of time and energy on beautiful ideas that need the FE touch to get them into classrooms and practices that can really benefit. 

Our learners relationship with the world is becoming instant and emotional. There's no stopping it and we shouldn't want to anyway- empathy has always been the great peacemaker. Use whatever tools you can to make that lesson emotionally relevant. 
My slides for the event can be found here. I'll try to write a script for it over the coming weeks.