2025 Open Education Awards for Excellence

Who would not want to be part of something called “We Like Sharing” especially when encouraged by the enthusiastic voice of Bea de los Arcos? This clever idea for a photo competition from TUDelft held annually since 2021 is less about prizes and more about generating an understanding of openness through the sharing of photographs, and at the same time, creating a rich visual collection of images representing openness… shared openly.

We Like Sharing has planned each year to coincide with Open Education Week and was also recognized in 2023 with an OE Award For Excellence in the Wildcard category. This conversation was recorded in late January 2025 in hopes of generating more interest, but was hardly necessary given the quality of this year’s 150+ submissions and the winners selected by public vote.

As usual there are more interesting, and anticipated, ideas and understandings that come from our OEGlobal Voices conversations. Listen to learn not only about We Like Sharing, but also Bea’s path from the seaside of Galicia, Spain to the innovative university in the city in the Netherlands painted by Vermeer, and maybe even a hint of bagpipes.

Listen to our conversation, get inspired to go outside with your camera and find interesting details to photograph… and hopefully share.

In This Episode

FYI: For the sake of experimentation and the spirit of transparency, this set of show notes alone was generated by the AI “Underlord” in the Descript editor we use to produce OEGlobal Voices.

In this episode, Alan Levine talks with Bea de los Arcos about her inspiring project, “We Like Sharing.” They discuss how the initiative encourages Creative Commons licensing, open sharing of photographs, and the value of appreciating and documenting beauty in everyday moments. They also explore Bea’s personal journey, her love for walking, and the importance of community in open education.

• Introduction and Background
• Bea’s Personal Journey and Influences
• Living and Working in Delft
• Overview of the Extension School
• Inspiration Behind ‘We Like Sharing’
• The Evolution of ‘We Like Sharing’
• Impact and Stories of Reuse
• Ideas for Encouraging Participation
• Bea’s Personal Interests and Hobbies
• Conclusion and Final Thoughts

(end of AI generated show notes)

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 81

I love this photograph, it was one of the winners from last year. And it is a white wall and there are lots of hearts painted in different colors on the door.

It’s a wall and a door and lots of hearts.

So for some reason I love that photograph because there’s so much love in just the one wall. It’s actually called “Love on a Wall.” And that was picked up in Flickr by the algorithm In Explore. It attracted lots of views. so that allows me to go back to the [photographer] in this case, that person wants to remain anonymous. But it allows me to go to this person and say, “Hey, this is what’s happening for your photograph.” And of course they get super excited, “Wow!”

I know [many photos] have been reused because I see them on presentations by colleagues. So [they] pick the photograph, put it on a slide, and that’s a beautiful example of reuse.

But in this case, it was more interesting because one of those little hearts on the wall, so not the whole photograph, was used on the cover of a little booklet from the University of Leeds, a little booklet, called, “With Love from Your Supervisor.” It’s about giving advice to o PhD students about how to go about research. The cover is a little person holding the book and all these hearts. That’s love from your supervisor and that heart is one of the hearts in “Love on a Wall”. So I thought it was just amazing.

Bea de los Arcos on reuse of a We Like Sharing photo

• 2023 Open Education Award For Excellence Special Award in Wildcard category (Open Education Global)
• OEGlobal23: From Bananas to OpenCourseWare: Lessons from Curating an Open Photo Bank (YouTube)
• Bea de los Arcos (TU Delft)
  • Galicia, Spain (Wikipedia)
  • Erasamus Student Network, Ireland
  • Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN)
  • OE Global 2018 Conference, Deflt The Netherlands
  • Camino de Santiago (Wikipedia)
• Delft, The Netherlands (Wikipedia)
  • Delftware, Delft Pottery, Delft Blue (Wikipedia)
  • View of Delft by Johannes Vermeer (Wikipedia)
• Delft University of Technology,TU Delft
  • Online Learning TU Delft
    • TU Delft MOOCs
  • TU Delft OpenCourseWare
  • Delft Extension School for Continuing Education (TU Delft Learning for Life)
• We Like Sharing (Flickr)
  • Open Photo Competition, 2021-2025 (TU Delft Online Learning Hub)
  • We Like Sharing Open Photo Competition 2025 (Open Education Week)
  • We Like Sharing 2025, submitted photos (Flickr)
  • 2025 Open Photo Competition Winners Announced TU Delft Online Learning Hub)

We encourage you to visit the full collection of over 1500 openly licensed images curated over the five years of We Like Sharing Open Photo Competition. Each image’s caption includes description text suitable for an alt image description and cut and paste text for full attribution to the photographer who shared it. If you reuse any images, please consider leaving a comment in flickr or contacting Bea, so she can communicate this back to the photographer.

We full expect to see We Like Sharing back in 2026 for Open Education Week. This is a very replicable activity and we have previously discussed with Bea in OEG Connect about what it takes to organize a spin off version.

It comes to you. One of the photographs that I took was when I was waiting for the tram and I just looked down. There was a campaign in Delft at the time around violence against women. [Someone] had this stamped on the pavement this hand and a message “stop violence against women.”

So, I was thinking, wow, become a bit more curious about what it is that is happening around you. Don’t look at your phone with your apps or your messages. No, just look. Look away from your phone– maybe that’s what it is. — look away from your phone. What can you see?

Bea de los Arcos on looking at the world around you

Our open licensed music for this episode is a track calledPhoto Album by Crowander shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.. Like most of our podcast music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

Finally, this was another episode we are recording on the web in Squadcast, part of the Descript platform for AI enabled transcribing and editing audio in text– this has greatly enhanced our ability to produce our shows. We have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descript, but our posts remain human authored except where indicated otherwise.