It is that time of the year when I get watery eyes, a runny nose and I feel I could sneeze my way to the end of the world, but would that stop me from updating you guys on what we’ve been up to in June? Hang on, let me get that hankie.

Fact no 1: there is life in Mars. Fact no 2: not all Martians are green but kind and courteous folk with a keenness for flipped learning, or so it seems after this small town in Pennsylvania played host to FlipCon14. In their plenary, Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams explained that flipped learning (and good education) sits at the intersection between relationships, content and curiosity. I’m hopeful I managed to convince at least all attending my presentation that what binds these three together is openness. I’ll be posting the recording later on during the week, but in the meantime, have a look at my slides here or read my review of the conference here. Although virtually launched at the beginning of the month, FlipCon14 was also Mr O’ Pen’s first outing in the real world: he’s on a mission to help flipped educators understand Creative Commons licenses, but I hear he’s an enthusiastic open researcher too; we’ll be seeing more of him in the School of Open course: don’t forget that registration starts on August 25th, curtains go up on September 15th.

For me, the journey to Mars was a welcome break from the weeks I’ve spent cleaning data: putting together thousands of responses from over 15 different surveys to produce a respectable data set to work with and share openly has been time-consuming, to say the least. Not that I want to repeat myself, but there’s another blog post queued up for publication.

As always, we continue to spread the wOERd. The team presented at the Computers and Learning Research Group (CALRG) Conference here at The Open University. Martin travelled to Portugal to give a couple of digital scholarship workshops (BTW, if you ever have him around for dinner, don’t give him blood sausage). We had a visit from Jorge León Martínez from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), the largest university in Latin America and the oldest in the continent; and Nick Isles of Milton Keynes College, who talked to Rob about ways to learn from innovation in US community colleges. Rob also had a meeting with Sorel Reisman, MERLOT Managing Director, to discuss a potentially very interesting and fruitful collaboration (watch this space!).

And so it is that with another blow of my trumpety nose, I leave you to enjoy July and look forward to more adventures from the OERRHub. Don’t tell me you missed open textbook week, did you?

Photo: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Raffaele Camardella, https://flic.kr/p/hA2zJq