OER17

OER17 Conference

I bet the OER17 conference will be one of those that are referred back to for some time. It seemed like the right number of participants and the right mix of people. Although with so many parallel sessions, I must have missed out on a whole bunch of great insight.

I was there to run a workshop on “from Voice to Visual” (prezi is here), looking at the creative journey of the ALT visual strategy, together with Maren Deepwell CEO of ALT.

I like to visually process what I hear, and tune in to the messages that resonate with me. Hear it, see it, draw it (which also helps me remember it!) Call it my own form of active learning. The illustrations are below – just click for a slideshow…

 

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The sketches and gifs below are available for use under a CC-BY 4.0 licence, which simply means that if you’d like to use them, all you have to do is attribute the creator (@bryanMMathers) wherever you use them. My business is dependent on people who attribute, so please do! To download a high-res version of an image, just click on the image to open it full size, and right-click / alt-click and select “Save image as…” or equivalent. 🙂

Ada College

Ada College

Ada College is the National College for Digital Skills in the UK. They are brand  new, and take a fresh approach to creating the designers and programmers of the future. They asked Visual Thinkery to come along and listen on the first day of the first intake of students. Having had experience getting alongside creative young people with Wapisasa C.I.C. I was more than happy to pitch up, talk to students and staff and pick up the vibe of the day.

The College itself has a great startup feel – and I couldn’t help think that I would have loved to have had the same opportunity when I was 16.

A number of thoughts emerged throughout the day, and I found myself asking the students why they had chosed Ada. There were a whole mix of reasons, but it became a key perspective that the college were keen to capture.

Read more about what Ada College are up to here.

UCL Academy

UCL Academy - An aesthetic logo

UCL Academy

I met the principal of UCL Academy, Geraldine Davies, at an Edu-think event in Westminster, and she invited me to come and spend a day with her students and staff. The brief was to try to capture the essence of the Academy from both a student and staff perspective. In what I think was a brave move, we decided to spend the morning with a range of students, and the afternoon with some of the staff.

We applied visual thinking techniques in order to stand in the shoes of those participating and see from their perspective. As usual, we captured all the thoughts, mostly in the form of sketches and whiteboard photos and presented them back to the principal. A few were selected to be taken to artwork:

It remains the most impressive Academy that we’ve ever visited – especially with regard to their approach to collaboration skills. And yes – how the students saw the school resonated with how the staff saw it…

Making it easier to work harder...
The UCL Academy secret formula

Jisc – Student at the centre

Jisc – putting the student at the centre

 

This project centred used conversation to explore the creation of a visual language for a number of projects at Jisc. One project in particular focused on putting the student at the centre. Here are some highlights:

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