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My last post about elearning experts attracted a lot of interest, a fairly even split between amused recognition and a feeling that I may have been a little harsh. But those of you who follow this blog regularly know that I don’t like to identify problems without suggesting solutions. So here’s a few suggestions for people I’d love to hear give a major conference keynotes – trying to choose people who don’t tend to get these high-profile platforms (often just because they don’t promote themselves as well or as often) but would do a lot of interesting things if offered a chance. Given my background these tend towards the UK, the transformative/open higher education world and tend politically towards the left. And yes, I am honoured to call many of these amazing people friends, fellow-travellers and colleagues. I hope that someone finds this list useful.
International
Christine has a long history in both OER and online learning, and is based at Michigan State University. I’m really excited about her AgShare project, which works directly to support farmers in Africa in creating and reusing OER. She’s also a great speaker and an excellent horticulturalist!
Everyone knows Barbara Chow at Hewlett – she’s been instrumental in driving the new shift to “deep learning” in compulsory ed in the Hewlett Foundation’s funding. But Kathy has had a lot of input into the international OER funded programme, and I’d be fascinated to hear her speak about regional and cultural factors in OER release.
Catherine is the project manager of OER Africa. I wish everyone who grumbles that OER is all very well but no one ever uses it could hear her speak, at least for a few minutes. OER Africa supports new – often chronically under-resourced – universities in Africa make links and partnerships with OER releasers in the west, often making the difference that means higher education is possible.
The story of OER in Brazil is an amazing one – there has been genuine governmental buy-in, which has steered the movement in many interesting directions. Carolina has been instrumental in this process, she’s also seriously in to IPR.
UK people
Helen is one of the smartest and most thoughtful people I know – a consultant with a deep theoretical and practical understanding of OER and digital literacies, amongst many other topics. She’s a challenging and inspiring speaker, and I’m always glad to see her to present in any fora.
If you’re not worried about the impact of IPR on the university system, you don’t understand IPR! Naomi can help. She’s an amazingly engaging presenter and particularly enjoys awkward questions. She’s also the IPR brains behind the amazing Web2Rights tool.
I heard Keri speak recently at the JISC Online Conference and I was completely blown away by her grasp of the wider issues of education, and the social impact of informal online learning. I hear she also impressed at Learning Without Frontiers.
Another #lwf11 speaker, though I heard her at #bebettr. A stunning and chilling indightment of ICT teaching in the compulsory (and the HE) sector. Learners are still learning about HTML tables in 2011! This critique opens up into a wider consideration of what learning actually is and should be. Oh, and Anna is about the age of an undergraduate, and never went to university herself.
One of the real stars of JISC, Amber makes the kind of links and connections betweens areas of work that feels like scales lifting from my eyes. She’s from a BECTA background – so knows HE and FE very well – and has been forging links between repositories and educational practice ever since. Her degree was in philosophy, which makes for some fascinating digressions.
I know Suzanne from OER projects, her journey within these has involved bringing the UK National Health Service on board with the OER agenda, and solving some tricky issues involving patient consent with the General Medical Council. She’s also eLearning lead at the MEDEV HE Academy Subject Centre. And I’ve never seen a bad presentation from her, always interesting, always engaging.
Dawn was involved with leading the Reusable Learning Object CETL, and was part of the team who developed the GloMaker simple learning object creator. As time progressed, RLO morphed into OER – Dawn led the influential OER10 conference and is working with the SCORE team at the Open University of OER11. She also has a side project which records and rates real ale in local pubs.
There are some great speakers in HEFCE, and it is often very hard to get to them (they tend just to send senior staff out). Caroline is one of the few who genuinely understands the teaching funding model and hearing her speak over the next year or so (as the new model comes in) will be very interesting. In a sea of speculation and mis-information, she’ll be one of the few people who can tell you exactly what is going on and what it means. She’s perceptive, intelligent and a very approachable speaker.
HESA collect data on most aspects of the sector, and I’m always surprised that they don’t use this to draw more interesting comparisons and conclusions. If anyone in HESA can do this, it would be Alison, who also has substantial experience working within JISC and at Bristol University.
There are some people that are just so on top of their specialism that they are a joy to watch. Regarding repositories and metadata, Sarah is one of these people. I always love hearing her speak.
Lorna has a vivid and wide understanding of the technical issues around OER, and she presents these with flair, consideration, pragmatism and humour. It’s rare to find a technically-slanted speaker who can really engage an audience around interoperability and data quality, but Lorna is certainly one of a handful I am privileged to know.
What hasn’t Lou done? She’s an ironmonger, a photographer, a home educator, a web2.0 zealot, an ex-librarian and an ex-JISC programme manager, turned consultant. Her main area of elearning interest is around learning resources of all sorts., and she was closely involved with the inception of the UKOER programme along with many other fascinating areas of work.
Humbox is awesome… like mixing a repository with facebook. Hugely popular, and a growing community around the humanities in the UK with great stuff. Kate is one of the masterminds behind this radical departure from “traditional” OER and she speaks very well.
Lyn focuses on the use of online resources to support independent learners in a research area that crosses both OER and digital literacies domains. I’m always keen to hear her speak, her focus on the end user is refreshing and very listenable.
Nicola Wilkinson
I can’t even find a proper profile page for this amazing woman – but she was (is?) based at Loughborough University and was the lead developer on the award-winning WebPA peer assessment project. If you’ve ever wondered how projects get taken up and become community owned, WebPA is the key and Nicola is the key to WebPA. I always loved talking to her as well. (Nicola – if you read this let me know where you are and I’ll update the link.
Token male suggestion so I can appear gender-balanced.
I never understand how it is possible to plan a conference and *not* want to invite Joss – his mixture of community action, student-led development, OER and environmental and societal engagement is a heady brew, and he presents beautifully.
Please do suggest other great (and largely unsung) speakers in the comments below.
Note: this isn’t all just a double reverse ferret to get me loads of keynote gigs. Seriously, I’m not a great public speaker, I do only the minimum I have to because of my job – just let me blog and do the occasional video. Ask one of these people instead for a conference keynote.
Note 2: This list could have gone on for pages! Seriously, this is just the first 20 people I thought of whom I’ve never seen or heard do a keynote and would very much like to. Don’t read anything in to you not being on it.
Other additions:
Several people have recommended Becca Colley at the University of Bradford. Though I’ve known her through twitter and occasionally at conferences as a delegate, it is to my shame that I’ve never actually had chance to hear her speak at length. But based on the comments I’ve had, I’d very much like to.
Fantastic list – everyone I know here would be great, and I look forward to checking out the others.Catherine Ngugi was the opener at OpenEd 2009 and she blew the doors off the place: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1971271 – scan 10 mins in for herI’ve had the chance to see some great speakers from the Spanish-speaking world, and while language may be a challenge, I think it would be worth the effort to tap the expertise of people and perspective of people like Alejandro Piscitelli, someone from the Zemos98 collective, Ismael Lopez-Pena, Olivier Schulbaum or Susana Noguero from Platoniq, Mara Balestrini, Gonzalo Frasca, and many others…Some of these people might not best be served by the classic “keynote’ format, but surely we can rethink that as well.Something that has come clear to me trying to navigate some events using my bad Spanish… these people all have serviceable English (some them have great English), and when they attend international events they can get by… but in ways that limit the range and nuance of their expression. One person told me the language that is spoken by most nations at “international” events is a form of “globe-ish”, not English. In the future, if I host non-English speakers I’d like to do more to allow them to do their thing in their own language, using aids like translation/headsets and translated visuals.
Cheers – Mr Gluesniffer… indeed – the insistence on “conference english” means that we get a westernised Anglo-american mindset reinforced. I’d never considered live translation at a conference before but it would make such a great difference.Thanks for the recommendations too!