Laura Proctor

Everyone:

Would it be true to say that to be relevant, educational content must often be locally-authored or at least locally-edited? Is empowering individuals to create their own content not essential to developing good, grounded education everywhere?

There are many open software systems that support collaborative, distributed development of content as exemplified in WikiEducator:
http://www.wikieducator.org/Main_Page
The open software provides a big piece of the puzzle for decentralized groups to work together and for people around the world to collaborate - without the need to take the airplane trip that is so often an obstacle. Providing a basic set of tools, at no cost, would seem to be a first step in creating that local content.

I think the most important element will always be communication between individuals both within and across cultures. Finding the time and the willingness to share ones thoughts is difficult for many different reasons. But, it is that communication that creates context online through the effort of sharing reflections and making connections.

Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts here.

Laura

Thank you and David Wiley for sharing the resources in his course on open education. I've only scanned the materials but I am looking forward to reading in more depth. This course seems to "be" open education as well as "about" it. The unlocked access to the content, some guiding questions for discussion and then sharing, through the use of blogs, of reflections and use in context.

I recently listened to CBC Ideas "Who Owns Ideas?" that I found a fascinating historical overview of copyright and related issues. Have a listen:
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/who-owns-ideas/

The "Exploring Our Boundaries" Panel discussion at ETUG Fall 2008 brought together three B.C. educators to discuss their experiences and approaches to education on the international dimension. The panelists and their presentations were:

Solvig Norman, Royal Roads University (presentation slides)

Lynette Jackson, University of Victoria (presentation slides)

Gina Bennett, College of the Rockies: (presentation slides)

Some of the "boundaries" mentioned in these presentations were:

Solvig noted that interacting with others in different cultures requires respect, patience and careful attention to our own actions to ensure that we are not imposing our cultural views on others. This can be very difficult especially in areas that we often may not think of as relative to culture rather than absolutes. Three of those dimensions are

• Food: What are "appropriate" foods? Are deep-fried scorpions on your list of delicacies? What would you do if offered such a treat?
• Language: How do you cope when you do not share a language with the people you are interacting with? Do translators do the whole job? What are the challenges to working in a foreign language?
  
• Time: Is 9 to 5 the only standard for the work day? What does it mean to be "on time"?
  

Lynette described the ECDVU program designed to build capacity in Early Childhood Development on the African continent emphasizing the importance of careful consultation to set goals relevant to each student's country, ensuring that course activities contributed directly to achieving goals important to their country. Again, avoiding the imposition of goals from outside. Technology is used to support course delivery with careful attention to the challenges for some students who lived in areas with unreliable of electricity and/or limited access to internet connections. In spite of the challenges with technology, with appropriate accommodation and careful attention to personal communication and support, the ECDVU program has been very successful.

Gina spoke with passion about opening doors to education and information to all people. For me, with the following quote, she gives us an empowering perspective to contemplate with respect to (online) resources and education:

"When is it ethically justifiable to deny people access to and dissemination of potentially useful information?" Reinking, 2001

These are the thoughts I took away from that panel. Can you share a story, a comment, a reading that can help us expand boundaries in our thinking about education in the whole world?

Hope to hear from you. :-)
laura

Hi Sylvia:
Welcome to the discussion! I will be continuing to add more of my notes and reflections on the workshop throughout this week. If there is some topic mentioned that you'd like to know more about, please ask! Questions are our way forward.

As to the "etiquette" of new threads, I will say, for this seminar, that everyone is welcome to add a new topic at any time. If you'd prefer to simply suggest a new topic, in any of the current topics, then I will be happy to create the new thread.

Laura

The ETUG Fall 2008 workshop stated off with a dynamic presentation by Brent Lee from Vancouver Island University in which he introduced many internet based services that are freely available and provide a way of moving beyond our personal computers or institutional data centres. You can get a list of URLs for all those services he introduced in the "Our workshop resources" section of the ETUG wiki, found online at:

http://etug.pbwiki.com/

Most of those links can also be found at the delicious social bookmarking (http://delicious.com) by searching for the tag "etugfall08".

These services provide a way to work and learn "in the cloud" - a lovely metaphor for the internet. Although I have been involved in many aspects of using the internet for over 20 years, this term had escaped my notice. If you are interested in more background, have a look at the entry in wikipedia for "cloud computing" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing).

Are these applications and services new to you? How do they or might they expand your boundaries? What possibilities do they offer you or your students to "Learn on the Edge"?