Book Sprints at Open Education Conference
Last month at the Open Education Conference in Vancouver, Arthur ‘Gill’ Green from the University of British Colombia, Clint Lalonde of BCcampus, and Barbara Rühling of Book Sprints presented together a Book Sprint for an Open Geography Textbook for college students that we did in 2014.
The slides for the presentation You created an open textbook in 4 days?!?!? are online available here:
Clint had been part of the organization team of BCcampus who made the textbook Sprint happen and also participated during the four days, Gill spoke from his perspective as a participating scholar, and Barbara as the facilitator.
While Clint and Gill rocked on stage, Barbara participated remotely from Tel Aviv where she was facilitating a Book Sprint that week. In Tel Aviv it was 7:45 pm by the time the presentation started in Vancouver at 9:45 am, the Book Sprinters had already left the office and the cleaners kept coming in to vacuum the room or turn off the lights, but we had a fun and focused 30-minute session nevertheless, with good questions and great interest from the audience.
Photo by mnlamberson shared under a CC BY-SA 2.0 License
We had done a similar presentation at the BC Open Textbook Summit earlier this year with Barbara speaking remotely from Tokyo (another Book Sprint!). This time, Clint added a little gimmick, a second camera for Barbara to see the public and their reactions. From her side, it looked like this:
The crowd at the Textbook Sprint presentation at #OpenEd15
The presentation provoked positive reactions and a lot of discussion – time was short with so many other great sessions at the conference! Dr. Vivien Rolfe wrote in her blog that “this session blew me away”:
It is also impressive that a number of the textbook projects aren’t just working within one institution – this project involved faculty (teachers) from 4 post-secondary institutions in British Columbia with the aim of writing a first year Geography textbook, and that is what they did. I liked the careful choice of the team – teachers, librarians, instructional designers and a facilitator. It must have been an exhausting but exhilarating process. The draft book underwent peer review with further colleagues to engage them in the process. (Blog post OpenEd15 Soup, December 5 2015).
The BCcampus team wrote more on the Book Sprint here: http://bccampus.ca/2014/06/20/how-to-turn-a-great-idea-into-an-open-textbook-in-just-four-days/