Initial Thoughts

Mike — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 23:17:43 +0000

The following post reflects only my thoughts (Mike Bogle) and is intended to instigate some discussion on the nature, scope and philosophical underpinnings of the SpeedTech presentation series. Ultimately I hope this blog will feature multiple authors.

I encourage people with thoughts to comment on this post, or use the tag ‘speedtechedu’ if posting to your blog, or #speedtechedu as a Twitter hashtag (there are other unrelated references to the term ‘speedtech’). I’ll try to set up a feed that aggregates everything shortly.

About the experiment

This blog has been created to facilitate planning and discussion around an online event that Dean Groom has coined ‘SpeedTech’. The event will feature a 1-hour series of 10 rapid-fire presentations – each 5-minutes long. The theme, format and topic of each presentation is left to the presenter’s discretion, with the main criteria being it is related to an emerging educational topic that makes people think.

Ethos

My initial thoughts on the experiment – and I do like to think of it as an experiment – is that it should be open, highly participatory with minimal (if any) hierarchical structure, encourage back channel conversations and widespread discussion on related topics, and above seek to inspire the emergence of a vibrant nurturing culture of peer communication and collaboration.

In keeping with a core aim of inspiring the emergence of a nurturing collaborative network/community, I’d like to propose the adoption of Ubuntu’s Code of Conduct as as the guidelines for how we interact with one another.

On Openness

In keeping with this ethos I believe all planning for the event should be made publicly visible, and use freely available tools (either free as in Freedom or free as in Beer). Furthermore, given its collaborative nature in which participants will hopefully come from different institutions, levels of education, sectors, even languges and regions, I also believe the organisational spaces should sit neutrally outside the web domain of any one educational institution. It is hoped this will facilitate a sense of equality and shared ownership over the experiment and is this reason why a a WordPress.com blog was selected.

Planning and discussion for this experiment is still in the early stages so your input and feedback are welcome and encouraged.