Open Education, UAL and the Tate Gallery

I was invited to the Tate this week to talk with some Tate staff about the open education work I’ve been doing over the past few years at UAL as well as other related work. 

A few months ago Rebecca Sinker Curator Digital Learning Tate Britain and Tate Modern came over and introduced herself to me in the Café at Chelsea College of Arts. Rebecca had been following the work on process.arts and had recognised me through online posts, I thought this was a great example and endorsement of the value and potential reach of open educational practice. Ironically Chelsea College of Arts and Tate Britain are next-door neighbors but as we’ve found at UAL open education can help connect groups of interest within the same building as well as supporting national and international collaborations.

A few weeks later Rebecca was invited over to Chelsea for a staff event we organised called the learning studio, a community of practice encouraging informal discussion around learning technology use in Art and Design within UAL. It was great to have Rebecca at this UAL staff event; we had some really interesting discussions about Art School and Gallery collaborations and how learning happens in these two environments.

Talking Open Education and online learning communities:

The slides for the Tate presentation can be viewed below. I was really pleased to have been invited to talk with the staff at the Tate. I'm really interested in finding out more about the projects mentioned by the group and other activities happening. I’m looking forward to follow up questions/discussion. 

The key takeaway points I took from the meeting were:

·      To establish some sort of mutually beneficial collaboration, starting with workshops, which explore open education and open online learning communities of practice. The workshops would be designed for staff from Tate, UAL and schools and also some related workshops for gallery visitors, art students and school children.

·      To explore the differences between formal and informal modes of learning happening in both environments and how online open educational practices could potentially help bridge the gap and enhance new modes of hybrid formal/informal online learning for the creative industries.  

DIAL will kick off/road test a small online interest/collaboration group (test the concept) - 'Online Learning Collaborations: Galleries and Art Schools' - a good starting point could be to share some details about all the interesting projects, ideas and questions, so we can plan possible new areas of collaboration.

Please join the group if you’d like to contribute, anyone can create an account and join, not exclusive to UAL and Tate we welcome collaboration so please join and contribute here http://process.arts.ac.uk/user/register 

Presentation Slides

A Community Based Approach to Developing Digital Literacies and Open Education at UAL. DIAL Tate Britain presentation 13th May 2014

Online at http://openpractice.org/ and Download slides here.