Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak at the PA Forward Information Literacy Summit. I talked about Open Education and Information Literacy, my pet topic, using Open Educational Resources and the ACRL Framework as hooks. My main point is that open practices exercise and develop information literacy skills, so we can use interest in OER as a way to integrate IL development into courses. Along the way, I talked about open education and its historical context, to get people to see OER as more than just free textbooks. I tried to highlight the historical aspect with my visual motif – the yellowed paper background and the images from the Internet Archive’s Flickr stream. (Friendly warning: If you look up “open” in the Archive’s photostream, you will see a lot of images of an anatomical nature.)
The session moderator introduced me with an introduction that I had written, in which I qualify my international speaking experience with “meaning he went to Canada once.” While the audience got a good laugh out of it, the moderator was mortified, and emphasized that those were my words, not hers. I wonder if that’s something I should be more sensitive about.
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