I’m releasing a day early the collection of Amazing Stories of Openness I will show tomorrow at the opening of the ETUG Spring Workshop in Nelson, BC. These are just the videos, for the session, I have a few surprises up my sleeve, and may even gamble on doing a chunk of this w/o any visuals. So, yeah, bryan Alexander, go ahead and tweet it- your video with the axe was the first one I recorded and is a gem.
The stories are up now at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/etug11/ — the FLVs are bigger than I usually do, as I am running the site locally tomorrow, and want crisp videos. This is doing the CoolIris shtick for the wall of media.
The bulks of these I recorded on my iPhone hitting up people on my travels over the last few weeks. I do want to give a nod to Scott Leslie and Karen Fasimpaur for being the only folks that actually sent one on their own. I gotta take some lessons from Alec Courosa and Dean Shareski on doing better at getting other people to do my presentations.
Anyhow, I’m winging my way to Castlegar, BC and from there onto a merry trip. I likve a conference that opens with a beer party and hockey. Well, I admire the hockey, I dig the beer.
Ah, lovely territory for stories of openness. HAVE FUN! I have a short story – no video to add (actually we have vid, but have not dealt with it yet.) At Elearning Africa last week on the last day, nearly end of workshops, we ran a 90 minute session on sowing the seeds of innovation in elearning in higher ed in Africa. It was basically a love song to individuals who make things work, despite the mountains of barriers and excuses in front of them. A teacher, an administrator, a government official, an entrepreneur, a funder and an NGO person.
In a fishbowl, I first asked each of them to share a story of their role as an innovator. Each story in itself was amazing, full of ingenuity and perseverance. Then I asked them “how did this experience change you.”
The woman from the Tanzania Ministry of Education – who has the incredibly hard job of training teachers to use online tools where a) the teachers themselves have insufficient education themselves b) often no electricity and c) tiny tiny bandwidth — blew us all away. She said, quite simply, “these teachers taught me that I am a learner first.” It was one of those moments when we all held our breath and then smiled and nodded as a whole.
Openness –> gives us voice and the chance to be truly seen, heard and loved.
Thanks for posting this. I’m a huge fan of these stories and hope to contribute one next time around!