The last six weeks have seen around ninety teachers and representatives from the DoE pass through our office at the Open Innovation Studio (OIS), where we hosted our series of evening events on Open Educational Resources (OERs). Thursday night was our closing function, which served as a recap as well as a chance to reconnect with those we met at our previous evenings.

Once everyone had had some refreshments and enjoyed some snacks that our fabulous caterer Carise had provided again (every week we have had the most wonderful food catered in by her), we all took our seats for Mark’s presentation. After a brief introduction from Mark (we had new faces at this event too!), it was time for our first activity – speed dating!

Due to the mix of people that we had at this function (we invited all the previous attendees as well as volunteers from our UCT Hackathons), we thought it would be a good idea to facilitate some exercises so that we could all get to know each other, and serve as a bit of an ice breaker. Speed dating is the perfect exercise for this: when the music plays you move around the room (well, as much as is possible with chairs, tables and couches in your way!), and when it stops, you find someone you don’t know and talk to them for 2 minutes to find out more about them. The room got very noisy very rapidly, and the exercise turned out to be good fun and a great way to connect with a diverse range of people.

After this, Mark spoke about connectedness and the opportunities that exist that we can connect to and access through communicating with each other. With the power of network effects, connections grow rapidly, even in a small group of people. There is so much content out there that we can all connect to, and when we come together in a group and brainstorm about how to use this information, we can come up with powerful resources and innovative ideas.

Following this we proceeded with our second activity for the night: we asked everyone to divide themselves into roughly 5 groups of 6 people, and we put to them a challenge: brainstorm a design for a logo that we could use as branding for our evening events. Ultimately we weren’t too concerned about ending up with a logo – the activity was more a demonstration of how talking to people and sharing ideas, bouncing thoughts off of each other and teamwork, can lead to new ideas and connections with people. We had some great suggestions at the end of the activity, with a few laughs and good spirit all round.

Mark spoke about what a true community of practice is (people with a shared interest who voluntarily come together to share information and resources, with the aim of improving their practice), and how teachers could really benefit from such communities. We would like to see such communities established for all school subjects, and are happy to help facilitate the initial set up of such groups. Our website FullMarks, is the perfect tool to take the physical sharing of content to the next level – helping sharing go virtual!

And that wraps up this series of events on OERs. We trust that everyone enjoyed themselves over the past few weeks and found the sessions to be worthwhile. If you have any comments, queries or suggestions, please send me (Bridget) an email at this domain, or feel free to comment under this blog post.

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