Hey y’all! As we wind up for the satellite event in Vancouver, I realized that there’s a healthy mix of folks who’ll be in attendance that I’ve never met so I thought I’d share mine out in a recent email update.
The ever vigilant @cogdog caught it and thought it’d be worth sharing here as well, so here’s a bit about me for those who don’t know who this cheeky upstart is out in YVR!
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This may surprise nobody, but I have been (justifiably) accused of being a keener here and there because of my tendency to throw myself at things I find interesting. Back in 2014, I was wrapping up my BA in Chinese at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa after a 6-year enlistment in the US Navy. On a whim, I decided to sit in on a talk that Cable Green was giving about Creative Commons, OER, and OA broadly. Admittedly, I showed up because free food was promised. However, I left more than a little inspired and with lots of questions. The biggest one was, “how can I get involved?”
That hour-or-so session, which lured me with the promises of sandwiches, got me started on a path I could not have imagined. It led to me:
- Meeting up with Cable again at his house a few months later to talk OER and the educational side of YouTube
- Asking UBC’s Open Librarian Erin Fields if “we could chat about OER” during my first week of my MLIS program in 2016, after she casually mentioned it during library orientation
- Working with her as a research assistant to understand how public domain primary sources could help put grade 4-12 students and teachers into meaningful contact with their own histories
- Running a YouTube channel all about libraries and information science that’s found its way into iSchool curricula internationally
- Attending OpenCon in Toronto in 2018 (oh my gosh I was such a baby with no gray hairs then), and LPF in 2019 in Vancouver, introducing me to a whole wide world of Open folks – including some of you!
- Working with SPARC, CCCOER, KQED (a California affiliate of PBS) and ISKME on a few contracts after graduation
- Landing at ISKME (and now ISKME Canada) for keeps … and now, helping organize this event.
I don’t know how many people can point to a specific day and say, “that’s when it all started!” but I feel so fortunate that I can; doubly so because of all the people at every step of the way who helped me get here. Really, my OERigin story is succinctly summed up by Nathan Pyle:
(Source, image (c) Nathan Pyle)
I hope that this event can do something similar for other students. Who knows what they might bring to the open education movement?
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Would love to hear others’ OERigin stories too!
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