Colleagues, some of you will remember Pete’s amazing keynote for us at CELebrate 2016.

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LSE has been awarded with the Campus Technology Teaching and Innovation Award (see pg30) for their innovative work on the Constitution UK project which ran in early 2015. Constitution UK was a collaborative project that aimed to crowdsource and hack the UK constitution within a free and open ‘learning’ environment. The project, led by LSE Professor Connor Gearty of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) in partnership with Learning Technology and Innovation (LTI), invited individuals to share views and ideas on what should be part of a UK constitution in the 800th anniversary year of Magna Carta. The project generated over 1 million words, thousands of ideas and tens of thousands of votes and resulted in the writing of an 8000-word crowdsourced constitution for the UK.  Over 1500 community members took part in this large scale public policy and learning project, with 20 LSE students acting as moderators.

The project utilized innovative methods of engagement, used techniques such as ideation, crowdsourcing, informal learning and gamification conducted through an online platform (Crowdicity) in order to generate engagement and participation that increased over the duration of the 14 weeks of the project.  We engaged social media organisations and special interest groups to ensure successful integration of learning outcomes and the effective and representative engagement of the community in the platform.

It also employed an innovative approach to open on-line learning through social media, which addressed some of the debate around the suitability of social media to effectively support participatory citizen engagement and democratic debate.  You can read about this aspect of the project HERE .