Rob presents on UK Open Textbooks to #owlteh – photo by Daniel Villar

October saw the Hub team head Stateside to present and contribute to #OpenEd18 in Niagara Falls, USA before rounding up the month by participating in both MozFest, the Mozilla Foundation annual festival in London, and a Mozfest fringe event at The Coventry Transport Museum. The fringe event – Learning On/With The Open Web – was organised by Coventry University’s Disruptive Media Learning Lab, with a range of interesting presentations from across the spectrum of open, and a special focus on open technologies and the open web.

The day was packed with an array of excellent speakers, workshops and talks – from SPLOTS to updates on open education initiatives and activity at UCL to helping shape the development of the Data Literacy Playground. And of course, lunch to the sounds of the SIDsynth! We were sharing our experiences and findings from the UK Open Textbooks project, reporting on the outcomes of the pilot project, extending the UK network even further and looking forward to our final report in December.  You can find the artefact produced for the session here.

The day wrapped up with a fantastic final session where Tony Hirst, Anne-Marie Scott and Jim Groom considered new open technologies and Juypter Notebooks received a lot of attention. You can sign up to Tony’s regular updates on Juypter Notebooks here.

Using the Open Web in Schools

Two days later it was off to Ravensbourne College, London, on the banks of The Thames by the O2 Arena.  MozFest attracts more than 2,500 people annually, from across the open communities.  In particular, Mozfest’s approach to inclusion and diversity can really act as an example to others.

The team got involved in a number of different activities. Rob participated in a session designed to conceive of ways to use the open web in school teaching whilst Beck headed downstairs to a fantastic hour long session featuring Julie Owono on The State of Privacy in Sub-Saharan Africa and an excellent panel on Data in Oppressive Regimes. You can catch up on the recording of Julie’s session here and also find more of the livestreamed sessions from Mozfest on YouTube. Nats noted the latest Mozilla Internet Health report as a particular highlight. The report is the result of collective sharing of experiences and information in 5 key areas: privacy and security, openness, digital inclusion, web literacy and decentralization in addition to ‘spotlights’ on issues such as Fake News and the Internet of Things. Essential reading!