Open Education Oral History Project

I hope you know about the amazing StoryCorps project. They’re recording the life stories and memories of ordinary people, and the stories people tell are personal, touching, and incredibly moving.

We’re only two weeks away from the opening of Open Education 2008, and at this year’s conference we’ll be undertaking an oral history project of our own, recording interviews with conference goers about their participation in the open education movement. We’ll be asking questions like:

  • How did you get involved in the open education movement?
  • Which of your contributions to the open education movement are you most proud of?
  • What are the most important lessons you’ve learned as you’ve been involved with the movement?
  • From your perspective, what are the biggest obstacles for the movement?
  • What do you think is the ideal future for the movement? What do you think is the most likely future for the movement?

We’ll be remixing highlights / memorable moments from interviews and sharing these the final day of the conference. But even if you can’t attend the conference this year, I hope you’ll take a few minutes with your favorite audio recording application, answer these questions, and leave a link to your mp3 file in the comments below, along with your name, affiliation, and some contact info. Something like this:

Open Education Oral History Interview, David Wiley, Brigham Young University, [email protected]

To be included in the project archive, your interview audio should be licensed CC By. All the audio we collect will be made available for direct download as well as through iTunes (I’ll post download links after the conference). While we hope to assemble a critical mass of interviews before / during the conference, the archive will be “open” for submissions even after the conference on an ongoing basis.

If the fancy strikes you, please pass the word on about the project through your own blogs and networks. We anticipate this being a very rich resource in the future…