Last week, went to Winchester School of Art to meet with some university colleagues to join a couple of facilitators from We Are Open, for a Thinkathon. “What,” I hear you ask “is a Thinkathon?”
I guess in less enlightened times, we might have called it a brainstorm, but it was a tight, friendly discussion/workshop to help us think through some challenges we’d set ourselves about open heritage scholarship, to wit (quoting from Graeme’s brief):
- The nature and extent of user transitions from one open scholarship mechanism to one or more others e.g. one of the 40 million users who have already seen one of our documentaries following through to ePrints or our Massive Open Online Course, visiting Italy to see the archaeological site via a bespoke tour or paying to visit an exhibition.
- The impact of our improved system on user engagements with each mechanism e.g. reading and commenting on Arkivum or ePrints datasets; public sharing of related content via social media. This will identify the opportunities for monetising activities in open scholarship
- The impact of the design of the open scholarship ecosystem on these user journeys, building on previous work including video annotation, navigation via 3d content, interactive mapping, and timelines and multimedia navigation.
One thing that set it apart from your more traditional brainstorming session was the presence of Bryan from We Are Open, who constantly drew as we (and he) talked, projecting his doodlings up onto a screen so we could watch our ideas take shape as we came up them. Some of his sketches illustrate this piece.
So what did we conclude? Well the second half of the day went down a credentials rabbit hole, which was fun (and interesting) but I think, probably not yet where we are in the project. The Portus MOOC which in the new year will have its fifth intake, has been a great experiment in open education, and more Heritage Organisations are taking their first steps into those waters. But the challenge (I think) is to test the willingness of heritage organisations to think “open” (at least in the digital world) rather than strictly controlled and moderated. I’d like to get these guys from We Are Open into a room with my professional colleagues, and with others from Historic Royal Palaces, English Heritage etc. I learned that week that John from We Are Open actually started is working life with the National Trust, before moving on to organisations like Mozilla, so it would be fun to join the circle and get him involved again.
Can the PORTUS project afford it though?
