OpenEdJam

aac-talk-3 — Mariah Villarreal hosted Chancellor Bruce Leslie at Geekdom for a discussion about the open text book initiative by The Alamo Colleges. The chancellor gave a great talk and the audience had many questions that helped further the discussion on integrating open text books into higher education at an administrative level.

One day I was sitting with Mariah Villarreal and we were talking about open education initiatives. She mentioned wanting to do something big on the topic, she had been talking to Mark Barnett about it as well. Various ideas were thrown out and next thing I knew she was planning OpenEDJam.

As an informal member of our collective (the best kind), Mariah has a track record of pursing her interests in activism and education not just through research papers, but outside the classroom. She currently works for FIRST as an Americorps member and in her free time studies open education solutions. Her friendly persona and ability to work well with others has led her to develop a good network in the open education field.

Since the initial inception OpenEDJam has developed into a full on conference with a planned 150-200 attendee 3 day event.

The collective has offered to help promote and develop media for the conference. For us, it is important to help each others efforts to take ideas and make them big. Mariah is setting an awesome example and we are very proud of her efforts.

And so what is OpenEDJam? Well this wouldn’t be a CMC post without some video. We helped put together a call to action video which can be viewed below: