Upcoming Talk: The Public Dollar

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Last month, Creative Commons, an organization that I'm a big fan of and who literally show up in every single post in this blog (check the bottom) announced a call for proposals for lightning talks.  It was an opportunity for folks interested in open education to share things they're working on.  For me, it's an opportunity to flesh out an idea I'm trying to gain traction on and develop to help articulate the value of open education as part of the public sphere.  

A quote in black text with yellow background:  "the cure is worse than the disease"
A screenshot of one of the slides

Here is the abstract that I submitted so you can get a sense of what I will cover:  

"Quantifying the public good that education provides is often elusive and hard to quantify in a capitalist world defined by numbers, so often grounded in financial transactions. But what if we are looking in the wrong places to capture the public good that open education affords us?  For decades, the market has determined the ever-increasing value of textbooks, monographs, and journal articles. This talk highlights how we might invert market forces to define the ever-increasing value of publicly-held goods to create standards across higher education that capture how the content output of higher education in the form of open-access materials represents a quantifiable and formidable financial return to society."

There's a lot that I'm thinking about and what I appreciated about this opportunity was the challenge of condensing my thoughts into a clear and succinct argument about my idea.  Such opportunities are incredibly useful for me because now that I have this script, it allows me to build out more and develop it further.  

You can check out the full list of talks here.  Each session will have 6-8 speakers, each speaker goes for 7 minutes followed by 2 minutes of questions.  I'll be Thursday, 17 December: 10:00am – 11:30am (EST/Boston time) session.  If you're interested in the topic or in hearing me share my thoughts on the idea above, I hope you'll tune in.  


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