final bits from fOSSa 2015, from Open Education to Ecology

fOSSa 2015 was such a great conference that I and Wouter Tebbens already wrote four other posts about it (see below). Here are the last bits that are worth sharing but did not fit elsewhere.

Open Education

What Mitja Jermol and his colleagues are doing in Slovenia is REALLY interesting, go check it out. Seriously. I can only add that they seem in a great position to, in addition to what they are already doing, _also _bring Open Data in/from schools, as I suggested here a while ago. Other valuable bits about Open Education from Mitja and others, each of which may be a separate talk topic in its own right, are:

  • Mitja: Open Educational Resources = _“Mass content, missing mass use” _

  • Domi Enders:

    • [a big problem of _current _Open Education is that it] “excludes people who don’t know how to self learn”

    • Commercial interests are using the term “open” for marketing

    • “Open” was hijacked by Silicon Valley

    • We need to “scale openness to the mainstream society”

Ecological Transition

Terribly interesting topic. Was the panel good? Not sure, because the first speaker was great, but after him everybody else switched to French… Anyway, what I could hear, or read from the slides was enough to make me **love **some quotes, and wish to know more. Again from my notes:

  • ecological transition knows where to go, not how. Geeks know how, but have no purpose

  • Open is not automatically green

  • what can Open Source bring to ecology? “Open Source can provide a narrative”

  • There are upper and lower planetary boundaries to consider, aka Doughnut Economics: “decoupling is on one end of the doughnut, degrowth on the bottom”

…by me or Wouter, in more or less random order: