Bee, thanks SO much for this introduction! It is exactly the kind of anecdotes that I think help people understand real specific issues with teaching online and openness.
Your page is exactly the kind of site I was thinking about when I first asked people to point to their earliest 'OER' memory - an 'OER' long before the name even existed. I wish I could say your experience with people enclosing your free content in a subscription frameset was unique, but my experience is that it is not. Part of me usually reacts, "so what, it is not infringing my own use of the materials" but then I realize that's to trivialize it, as the idea of people paying for something (especially something that really had not been improved upon in any way) that I was giving away for free is infuriating. In theory, this is one of the things that a NonCommercial clause is there to prevent, but I say in theory - the practice is of course another story.
And your story about wanting to use copyrighted materials also touches on another point that came out in today's session online, exerting our rights to use copyrighted materials in educational contexts. I hope we can dig into that issue, as it's an important one too.
Look forward to more discussion in the next few weeks, cheers, Scott
Scott Leslie
Posts made by Scott Leslie
Yeah, in many ways, it may be. More important I think is to understand the choices one makes and the implications they have on both one's own freedom and the freedoms of others. That way it ties it back to what people are trying to do, their goals and values, rather than some abstract exercise. But let's take that up in another thread, as I think there's lots to unpack.
Hey Jen, both you and Gina point to something I actually think is pretty important, that 'OERs' existed long before any sort of formal movement existed, and what exactly is an 'OER' anyways? (Is it sort of like a 'learning object'? Yes! In that defining it can consume the first half of any meeting, doesn't really do anybody any good, and is better understood by the uses people put it to, not just the intentions of its designer.)
As much as discussion like that can really go off the rails (again, witness 'learning objects') I do hope we'll get into it a bit, because I think sometimes this language can put people off and make them think it's something far more complicated than it needs to be. Anyways, more later, but I do appreciate these comments and think it's important to find a balance between recognizing the new energy and contributions that have happened through the official 'OER movement' versus the acts of sharing and openness that in many ways have always defined the Internet (and long before that too).
As much as discussion like that can really go off the rails (again, witness 'learning objects') I do hope we'll get into it a bit, because I think sometimes this language can put people off and make them think it's something far more complicated than it needs to be. Anyways, more later, but I do appreciate these comments and think it's important to find a balance between recognizing the new energy and contributions that have happened through the official 'OER movement' versus the acts of sharing and openness that in many ways have always defined the Internet (and long before that too).
Hi everyone, and welcome to the start of this three week seminar on Open Educational Resources (OER). If you missed the opening kick-off session, I'm hoping we can organize the next three weeks' explorations over three broad areas:
Before we get into the nitty gritty, though, let's all take a chance to introduce ourselves. I'll do that in a separate post, so as not to make this too long.
But just to make in interesting, in addition to letting the rest of us know who you are and where you work, and maybe a key point of interest in OER, I would love to hear people's stories about a specific example of Open Educational Resource. Maybe tell us about your favourite one. One you've created and shared yourself. One you reused. An example that struck you fancy because it challenged conventional notions of what open educational resources are. Or even just the challenge you had finding or reusing one, but something to tell us all a little more about your interest.
So without further ado, off we go!
- Finding & Using OER
- Creating OER
- Ways of Sharing and Other Issues
Before we get into the nitty gritty, though, let's all take a chance to introduce ourselves. I'll do that in a separate post, so as not to make this too long.
But just to make in interesting, in addition to letting the rest of us know who you are and where you work, and maybe a key point of interest in OER, I would love to hear people's stories about a specific example of Open Educational Resource. Maybe tell us about your favourite one. One you've created and shared yourself. One you reused. An example that struck you fancy because it challenged conventional notions of what open educational resources are. Or even just the challenge you had finding or reusing one, but something to tell us all a little more about your interest.
So without further ado, off we go!
...and I'll start with my own introduction and my favourite OER story. My name is Scott Leslie. I guess my small claim to fame regarding OER is that I manage a project in British Colombia, Canada for BCcampus called Shareable Online Learning Resources (or SOL*R for short) that shares both lessons and full course content both around BC and with the wider world. I also blog at http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/ and have worked for years with WCET on the edutools project (http://www.edutools.info/) where, amongst other things, we examined both learning content management systems and learning object repositories.
As to a story about my 'favourite OER,' I'm actually slightly reluctant to tell this one lest it be seen as 'tooting my own horn' but hopefully you'll see by the end that the real star of the story is openness and the serendipity it enables.
Probably by far the most popular item I ever posted to my blog was a 'Matrix of Blog Uses in Higher Education' that I developed while facilitating a session quite like this one in 2003. Over the last 6 years it consistently has generated a lot of traffic and citations, and like everything else I publish on my blog was created and shared under a Creative Commons license. But the amount of use and attention it's received is not the reason it's one of my favourite OER stories.
The first remix of the matrix diagram I found was actually the second remix (the first being one by a Dutch blogger that has since vanished). Someone in the UK liked the graphic overhaul that the Dutch blogger had given it (my original was not very eye-catching, to say the least) but needed it in English, so translated that derivation back into English. When I first found this I was overjoyed, as it seemed a clear improvement to me, one I could myself use. Similarly, I was well chuffed to see other translations, first in Italian (I think?) and then Spanish. In all of these cases, no one contacted me first - they didn't need to because of the Creative Commons license I had chosen. In none of the cases was my own use of the resource impinged, and indeed in my eyes the remixes were often improvements.
But the biggest pleasure I took was when someone (who did contact me, after the fact) with skills much greater than my own took the matrix and totally transformed it. Tony Lowe, from a UK-based Academic spin-off called Webducate, wrote me to tell me he had created a Flash-based version of the matrix. You can see by my write up that I was over the moon, that I now had a visually appealing and dynamic version of this static diagram I had originally sketched up in a Word document! For free!
But it didn't stop there; I speculated out loud that a version that allowed new uses to be created on the fly and added to the matrix would be ideal, and almost no sooner had I written those words than Tony delivered another version, this one doing exactly that! While I think the idea of the matrix must have resonated with Tony, he was also developing this to help show off his authoring product, something I was extremely please to help him with. And I got an amazing dynamic version that I could NEVER have created myself. And the rest of the world now got a teaching tool so that if the idea of the matrix resonated, but the specific cases did not, they could easily add their own.
I apologize for the long story, but it feels important to tell it in detail, because people often find it hard to understand the value in giving their stuff away, for free. From my perspective, having published anything I was ever able to give away under an open license (or with an invitation to reuse it) it's the opposite - I have a hard time understanding why you wouldn't want to share! So now maybe you have a little idea of where I come to this issue from, but how about you? Have you ever shared a learning resource you created to see it multiply in ways you could never have anticipated?
As to a story about my 'favourite OER,' I'm actually slightly reluctant to tell this one lest it be seen as 'tooting my own horn' but hopefully you'll see by the end that the real star of the story is openness and the serendipity it enables.
Probably by far the most popular item I ever posted to my blog was a 'Matrix of Blog Uses in Higher Education' that I developed while facilitating a session quite like this one in 2003. Over the last 6 years it consistently has generated a lot of traffic and citations, and like everything else I publish on my blog was created and shared under a Creative Commons license. But the amount of use and attention it's received is not the reason it's one of my favourite OER stories.
The first remix of the matrix diagram I found was actually the second remix (the first being one by a Dutch blogger that has since vanished). Someone in the UK liked the graphic overhaul that the Dutch blogger had given it (my original was not very eye-catching, to say the least) but needed it in English, so translated that derivation back into English. When I first found this I was overjoyed, as it seemed a clear improvement to me, one I could myself use. Similarly, I was well chuffed to see other translations, first in Italian (I think?) and then Spanish. In all of these cases, no one contacted me first - they didn't need to because of the Creative Commons license I had chosen. In none of the cases was my own use of the resource impinged, and indeed in my eyes the remixes were often improvements.
But the biggest pleasure I took was when someone (who did contact me, after the fact) with skills much greater than my own took the matrix and totally transformed it. Tony Lowe, from a UK-based Academic spin-off called Webducate, wrote me to tell me he had created a Flash-based version of the matrix. You can see by my write up that I was over the moon, that I now had a visually appealing and dynamic version of this static diagram I had originally sketched up in a Word document! For free!
But it didn't stop there; I speculated out loud that a version that allowed new uses to be created on the fly and added to the matrix would be ideal, and almost no sooner had I written those words than Tony delivered another version, this one doing exactly that! While I think the idea of the matrix must have resonated with Tony, he was also developing this to help show off his authoring product, something I was extremely please to help him with. And I got an amazing dynamic version that I could NEVER have created myself. And the rest of the world now got a teaching tool so that if the idea of the matrix resonated, but the specific cases did not, they could easily add their own.
I apologize for the long story, but it feels important to tell it in detail, because people often find it hard to understand the value in giving their stuff away, for free. From my perspective, having published anything I was ever able to give away under an open license (or with an invitation to reuse it) it's the opposite - I have a hard time understanding why you wouldn't want to share! So now maybe you have a little idea of where I come to this issue from, but how about you? Have you ever shared a learning resource you created to see it multiply in ways you could never have anticipated?