Summer leaves near Annecy Gorges de Fier

In the leafy month of June

Thinking aloud, Travel

June is good busy. Here are three highlights.

Wednesday and Thursday 4-5 June 2014 I’ll be at the second Google Course Builder Faculty Workshop in Zurich. Google engineers built their own platform to host courses internally, but soon offered public-facing courses like “Power searching with Google”, and then open-sourced Google Course Builder. For an organization that seeks to retain full control of its content and data, Course Builder is one of only two MOOC-era open-source platforms available. (The other one is OpenEdX. Moodle is the elephant in the room). The workshop will bring together 30 learning leaders from universities, companies, and non-profit organizations to share diverse experiences, ranging from citizen math to entrepreneurship and global health. Only downside: this workshop overlaps with EdX’s Future Edu.

Then, for two days, I’ll be in the open online symposium on scaling corporate learning, on 18-19 June 2014, organized by George Siemens and hosted by Corp U.

Last but not least, Pablo Suarez from the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre is running a workshop about humanitarian games in Lugano, Switzerland. To get a flavor of Pablo’s work, see this report to his main donor (note references to videos, publications, etc), or if you want to go deeper you can check out Games for a New Climate.

Keep reading for more about these events – and what they mean for the future of humanitarian education.

Photo: Summer leaves in the Gorges de Fier, near Annecy, France (Christian Baudet/Flickr).