Today I attended a truly great keynote during #OERxDomains21 from Dr. Laura Gibbs, @OnlineCrsLady. The full presentation is available below, and you should watch it.
A careful scan of the chat adjacent to the keynote will betray that these aren’t entirely original thoughts. Still, briefly, here are the things about this keynote that I find most impressive.
- It is student-centered. The stuff of this keynote is student work. A lot of it. 250 slides of examples of student projects. This is laudable on its own, because students should be centered more in our conversations about OER, teaching & learning, pedagogy, and such. But there is another, perhaps more subtle awesome. Laura HAS A DATABASE of student work that makes possible a slide deck of 250 examples. And she says she stopped at 250 because she didn’t want to break the slide radomizer.
- It’s spontaneous. It’s randomized. It’s a shared experience that makes me feel connected and included in a way most keynote presentations can’t or won’t.
- There’s BINGO. So not only is the slide deck shuffled, so are the terms that comprise a play-along bingo card. Here’s mine:
- Engagement is designed into the experience. We were active. Listening and scanning and marking and doing things akin to the ways we do most everything except sit and listen to keynotes.
- Community is designed into the experience. I didn’t play alone, we all participated as players or as those who watched the play. And we constructed, we instantiated this keynote together (though it was unquestionably designed and predefined, by Laura).
- The terms that populate the BINGO card enforce the learning goals of the presenter. See that? Well, I barely did. Someone who teaches Trickster Tales clearly picked up a few tricks, as well. It was only an hour later, reflecting on the talk BUT ALSO THE BINGO CARD, that I recognized what I was doing. I was kicking around inside my brain the notion of “stories” and the now proximal notion of “design” and also reminding myself to learn what sic transit gloria mundi means. Going forward, the relationships between these and the many other topics of the keynote will settle together and form an impression in the strata of my understanding. Likely, I will remember the pedagogical priorities for a long time, and certainly more deeply than if I’d been sitting in a room, listening and watching a few slides fly by.
So THANK YOU Dr. Laura Gibbs, for this keynote. This is exactly what I aspire to do when I’m a teacher and learner in my own classroom spaces. I have so much to take away and try for myself.
