True+Stories+Openness+Yavapai+College

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//May 15, 2013 • Yavapai College Summer Institute//
 * Alan Levine • cogdogblog.com**

While the Open Education movement focuses on institutional issues and often the sharing of "things" (content, resources, courses), a large ocean exists of powerful individual accomplishments from the simple act of openly sharing what they create, their ideas, or just themselves. We start our educational careers (e.g. kindergarten) intrinsically knowing the value of sharing. Somewhere between there and graduate school we lose track of this simple concept, be it worrying about intellectual property rights, fearing theft, or just questioning the value of what we do.

The open ecology of the internet can undermine what I think is learned and limiting stinginess. In this session I want celebrate the True Stories of what happens to people when they share something openly on the web. I asked colleagues to share their own stories of something unexpected, valuable, powerful, or just plain inspiring as a result of sharing that piece of media, document, video, blog post, even a single tweet that became valuable to someone they did not know before. I have experienced it first hand for 20 years.

In one of the first stories I gathered, filmed on a windy night outside a conference hotel, at the very end the brilliant Nancy White said, “It is isn’t just about open resources, it’s about open attitudes.”

The power, the strength, the future of the internet as we know it now, depends on this two-way flow. You cannot expect these stories to happen, nor should that be the reason to share. But I can guarantee if you do not share your work or your ideas online,, that you will //never// experience one of these amazing stories.

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Resources Mentioned

 * Enquire Within Upon Everything (Project Gutenberg) http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10766
 * A Short History of the Web (Tim Berners-Lee) http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory.html
 * Reddit makes a picture for Dexter http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/19lzy5/this_is_my_son_dexter_he_picked_these_flowers/
 * “Openness is an attitude” (Nancy White) http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/video/nancy-white-2.mp4
 * Amazing Stories of Opennness (Open Education Conference 2009) http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09
 * Námsefnisgerð í HTML from Writing HTML to Iceland http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/video/alan-levine-iceland.mp4
 * Writing HTML http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/
 * "Námsefnisgerð í HTML" Translated into Icelandic http://thor.vma.is/tut/
 * From .az to .is (1999 visit to Iceland) http://dommy.com/alan/az2is/
 * Death Valley Photo to cover of German CD http://stories.cogdogblog.com/german-band/
 * Random Walks in the Southest (source of sea-level.jpg) http://dommy.com/alan/random-walks.html
 * The Sea Level CD Has Arrived http://cogdogblog.com/2005/11/12/the-sea-level-has-arrived/
 * Amazing Story of Unknown Flower http://stories.cogdogblog.com/unknown-flower/
 * 51 True Stories of Openness http://stories.cogdogblog.com/
 * True Stories of Openness for Yavapai College http://stories.cogdogblog.com/collections/yavapai-college/
 * Share something and come back with an Amazing Story http://stories.cogdogblog.com/call-for-stories/