Openness is very much in action in the generation and dispersal of knowledge. The Open Research and Education stream will offer talks, debates and hands-on workshops geared particularly towards educational specialists, researchers and scientists.

The Open Data research session will focus on the impact of Open Data research within the academic environment. The session will bring together the latest research concerning Open Data and Open Government Data, forming a interdisciplinary mix of short presentations followed by a discussion panel.

In the Open Education sessions, participants will explore open education in a series of innovative workshops using pecha kucha and fishbowl techniques. A collaborative team from P2PU, the School of Open and the School of Data will discuss peer-learning and education beyond institutional walls, giving you the chance to create your own open course. Another swarm of people will present Peeragogy as a way of looking at current learning trends. All open education sessions happen on Thursday.

The Open Research programme will cover a range of topics, with sessions on everything from drugs to development! Throughout, the focus is on how to deliver open access to data and publications, and how to form scientific communities that share and collaborate on accumulated knowledge. The emphasis is on doing as well as talking, and discussion and seminars will be interspersed with writing sprints and review sessions. The bulk of the programme will take place on Wednesday, with sessions taking place on the Thursday as well.

On Tuesday, the Open Science group will also be holding a satellite hackday, to work together on projects, technologies and tools around open science.

Guest Programme Planners:

• Tarmo Toikkanen (researcher, Aalto university School of Art, Design and Architecture) – Finland
• Sridhar Gutam (Senior Scientist, Central Institute for Subtropical Horticulture, Indian Council of Agricultural Research, India)
• Jenny Molloy (Open Science Working Group Coordinator, OKFN and University of Oxford, UK)
• Laura Newman (Community Coordinator, Open Knowledge Foundation, UK)
• Jane Park (Communications/Project Manager, Creative Commons, US)
• Tom Olijhoek (scientific consultant,Dutch Malaria  Foundation, SURF-NL , coordinator @ccess initiative,  Netherlands)
• Ramine Tinati (Researcher, Web Science, Southampton University, UK)

Sessions on Open Science & Research:

Key Note: Open Source Drug Discovery Mat Todd from the Chemistry Department at the University of Sydney will give an introduction to the Open Source Drug Discovery Project, exploring how to develop drugs and progress science rapidly and cost-effectively, particularly in the developing world.

Open Access in Practice A panel discussion to explore how Open Access can work in practice – exploring business models, funding, and the technicalities of standards and licensing. Also to include an introduction to the Open Access Index. The panel will include several leaders in opening access to science, including Tim Hubbard, Tom Olijhoek, Mark McGillivray, Sridhar Gutam and Carlos Rossell.

Immediate Access to Raw Data – why and how Mark Hahnel (Founder of Figshare) and other experts explore the practicalities of data sharing platforms and aggregators, open source algorithms and tools, and the challenges and benefits of releasing raw data now.

Communicating Science Representatives from Wikimedia, academia, scientific social networks and the media come together to discuss how science can be shared most effectively – both with other scientists, and with the wider public.

Open Science at the European Commission The European Commission is highly supportive of both open access and open science. Carl-Christian Buhr (Member of the Cabinet of Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda) will present the Commission’s new open access policy and infrastructure initiatives, before leading an interactive discussion about opportunities for bringing together the European open data and open access communities. Not to be missed!

From Data Mining to Graduate Training – Meet the OKFN Panton Fellows Ross Mounce and Sophie Kershaw, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s first Panton Fellows, introduce their work. Featuring a new Panton Science video, Ross and Sophie will explain how they have used their Fellowship to change the face of open science – creating data mining tools and bringing training in open science practices to doctoral students.

Plus: Cross Stream Events

Crowdsourcing Data for Development A session jointly run with the Open Development stream, to discuss the challenges of collecting, analysing and sharing development and scientific data via citizen science projects.

Open Museum Data A joint event with the Open Cultural Heritage stream, to discuss Museum Data for the Sciences.

And: Hands on Workshops and Participatory Sessions!

• Book Sprint: Draft the Open Data Research Handbook
• Open Science Video Booth
• Hands on peer-review session of different open science tools
• A space for impromptu lightning talks, socialising and debate!

Open Education Sessions

Open Peer Learning: School of Data and School of Open

(Led by Creative Commons, P2PU, OKFN, Indiana University of Pennsylvania)

Outside  of the open communities, few people know how to apply “open” tools,  practices, and standards to their work. In addition to a discussion on successful open peer learning environments, Creative Commons, P2PU, and the OKFN will introduce the School of Open and the School of Data and lead a workshop to prototype “open” challenges  — a collaborative process of designing and developing challenges on  how “open” applies to various domains of interest, eg. data, research,  education. Challenges may be anything from “Copyright for educators” to  “How to get your journal to be Open Access” to “Using (open) data to  prove your point”.

Workshop: The Peeragogy handbook: an open learning work-in-progress

The Peeragogy project is a volunteay project of people who are coming together to write a handbook on peer-to-peer learning. The handbook is intended to be a growing how-to resource for various aspects of Peeragogy. Current articles include, for example, meta-learning and cognition, personal learning networks, personal learning plans and how to organize a massive open online course.  For the workshop, we plan to break into several smaller workgroups. Some examples of the type of content that could be worked on are:

• visualization (communicating aspects and articles of the handbook with videos, infographics, etc.)
• activities (we would like to enhance the handbook with hands-on descriptions of activities that could be done in-person or with computer/internet tools, that help people grasp and use the ideas in each chapter).

As the project is an evolving work with many people involved and shifting energy centers we cannot predict the state of the project in September 2012. Therefore, only a few examples of possible workgroups are mentioned above.

Workshop: Invisible Learning Roleplay

Participants can attend live on location or virtually from a distance. This is a playful competition between small groups. The workshop begins with a brief familiarization with invisible learning as context and mindset for the game. The teams will get a task including co-creating a solution to a practical case related with future school. Teams are encouraged to use all possible open virtual tools and networks to help in their work. The results will be published as a real-time open collection for further development.

Open Data Academic Reserch Session:

The session will bring together the latest research concerning Open Data and Open Government Data, forming an interdisciplinary mix of short presentations followed by a discussion panel. The panel will be 2 hours long, and invites submissions from a broad range of disciplines. Below is a list of some of the topics that the Open Data Academic research track is interested in. See the call for papers – Submissions still open till the 20th July!

Pecha kucha: Open Education

20 images, 20 seconds each. That’s a pecha kucha talk that takes exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds. We have a series of them lined up to give you a fast-paced 90 minutes with topics ranging from aesthetic responsibility in social media to forestry mapping, urban identities, and more. Stay after the talks to talk to the presenters in depth! See the planning pad for up-to-date proposals on topics.

Fishbowl conversation: Open Education

Fishbowl conversations on topics such as MOOCs, new pedagogical approaches, and open content in education. Speakers: EVERYONE! See the planning pad for up-to-date proposals on topics.

… and many more still to come! If you are interested in participating as a panelist in one of the above sessions, or proposing your own, please contact educationandresearch [@] okfestival.org