Well, it was pretty quiet in here over the weekend; hopefully this means that you, like me, were out enjoying it with your loved ones, but if it's because people's energies for the discussion are waning, that's fine too. I'm going to toss out a few last big topics and see what happens, but already I feel like there has been a lot of productive discussions over the last 2 weeks, and hopefully you've gotten something useful too.
I think it's undeniable that there now exists large numbers of both formal and informal OER, but a criticism we see fairly regularly now is that, in focusing on the 'publishing' of static resources, the OER movement is promoting a 'shopping cart' model of education, one that is too content-centric.
Do you think this is true? If it is true, is it a problem? If it's a problem, what can we do differently? How might we change our educational practices themselves to become more open, or position educational resources to facilitate more learner to learner interaction?
Scott Leslie
Posts made by Scott Leslie
Valerie, I have 2 different takes on this. One is to point to http://www.oerrecommender.org/ as actual infrastructure that has already been implemented to provide recommendations on related OER material. It may not be exactly what you are describing (it does not, for instance, contain the idea of a review or rating) and is not IMO widely adopted, but is an interesting early proof of concept.
But the second is to point to the earlier discusson around 'How do you find OER.' One of the cases I was trying to make there is that one's existing personal learning networks are the best way to collaborative filter/recommend OER. People grumble that this does not scale, that it requires work, is complicated, etc, but that's exactly the point - rather than expend energy on centralized and ultimately unsustainable efforts at generic recommendation systems, if we each start to craft our own learning networks as integral to the way we work, teach and learn online, then a natural by product is more high quality OER recommendations then you can shake a stick at. My delicious account's 2391 items, the vast majority references from trusted sources, is more than proof of that.
But the second is to point to the earlier discusson around 'How do you find OER.' One of the cases I was trying to make there is that one's existing personal learning networks are the best way to collaborative filter/recommend OER. People grumble that this does not scale, that it requires work, is complicated, etc, but that's exactly the point - rather than expend energy on centralized and ultimately unsustainable efforts at generic recommendation systems, if we each start to craft our own learning networks as integral to the way we work, teach and learn online, then a natural by product is more high quality OER recommendations then you can shake a stick at. My delicious account's 2391 items, the vast majority references from trusted sources, is more than proof of that.
Valerie, another thing I can't let pass by because the announcement came out this week is that Flat World Knowledge moved into public beta this week (cf. http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/736). It is an interesting initiative in that they are a business built on open textbooks, the business model (as far as I understand it) to offer free unfettered access to the electronic copies of the textboos and make money off of print versions.
This is one of the reasons I have an issue pushing the Non Commercial restrictions on OER - I understand there are some realistic fears people have about comercial interests profiting off of free materials and imposing roadblocks for people to access the free versions, but so far those are edge cases. Instead what I see is people wanting to make a small living by adding value that people (learners and instructors) actually want, while still giving away the knowledge for free and indeed improving on its original state.
Anyways, hope it is of interest, cheers, Scott
This is one of the reasons I have an issue pushing the Non Commercial restrictions on OER - I understand there are some realistic fears people have about comercial interests profiting off of free materials and imposing roadblocks for people to access the free versions, but so far those are edge cases. Instead what I see is people wanting to make a small living by adding value that people (learners and instructors) actually want, while still giving away the knowledge for free and indeed improving on its original state.
Anyways, hope it is of interest, cheers, Scott
I want to acknowledge right off that the 'solutions' to the 'problems' of OER are never going to be solely technical (indeed may only minorly be technical ones). But I did start this particular thread to explore how the ways we create OERs can have a profound effect, on what we create, how we teach, and the sustainability of the whole enterprise. So I'm going to keep trying to introduce some ideas along those lines.
Many will be familiar with the idea of using blogs and wikis for online learning. There are many good reasons to try this, not least of which is - they are simple. Rather than thinking of blogs as 'personal journals' instead it might be more profitable to consider them as the simplest web-publishing system there is (similarly, the creator of the wiki termed them "simplest online database that could possibly work.")
Why is this important? Well, as friends have tried to explain http://opencontentdiy.wordpress.com/ and demonstrate in courses like http://newmediaocw.wordpress.com/, once you start creating your courses in blogs, not only do you have a simple thing to then maintain, you are also at the start of a distributed platform for remixing and reuse, as demonstrated in projects like http://eduglu.learningparty.net/ and http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/. Because not only are blogs the simplest web publishing platform around, they produce RSS, XML, a format that frees the content from it's specific presentation and let it flow where it needs to go. Where the students or other instructors might like it to go.
And wikis - not just simple collaborative editing places. With the addition of the WikiInc plugin, for instance, mediawiki is transformed into a distributed publishing platform.
I am not really doing justice to each of these innovations in this short post, but if you are not already familiar with these techniques I urge you to follow up on some of the links. The reasons why many of us have been excited by the potential of social software and 'web 2.0' in education extends far beyond the fact that the tools are easy to use and reflect more the social nature of learning. They extend to how they can become (have already become for many of us) an everyday platform for swimming in the seas of open content, remixing as we go.
Many will be familiar with the idea of using blogs and wikis for online learning. There are many good reasons to try this, not least of which is - they are simple. Rather than thinking of blogs as 'personal journals' instead it might be more profitable to consider them as the simplest web-publishing system there is (similarly, the creator of the wiki termed them "simplest online database that could possibly work.")
Why is this important? Well, as friends have tried to explain http://opencontentdiy.wordpress.com/ and demonstrate in courses like http://newmediaocw.wordpress.com/, once you start creating your courses in blogs, not only do you have a simple thing to then maintain, you are also at the start of a distributed platform for remixing and reuse, as demonstrated in projects like http://eduglu.learningparty.net/ and http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/. Because not only are blogs the simplest web publishing platform around, they produce RSS, XML, a format that frees the content from it's specific presentation and let it flow where it needs to go. Where the students or other instructors might like it to go.
And wikis - not just simple collaborative editing places. With the addition of the WikiInc plugin, for instance, mediawiki is transformed into a distributed publishing platform.
I am not really doing justice to each of these innovations in this short post, but if you are not already familiar with these techniques I urge you to follow up on some of the links. The reasons why many of us have been excited by the potential of social software and 'web 2.0' in education extends far beyond the fact that the tools are easy to use and reflect more the social nature of learning. They extend to how they can become (have already become for many of us) an everyday platform for swimming in the seas of open content, remixing as we go.
"the notion that one's OERs need not be works of art" Amen! Gina, this SO resonates with my own experiences. Exposing the process is as, if not more, important, and it doesn't have to be perfect. I see us make this mistake over and over again, not just in higher ed, of over complicating, over designing, of focusing on the wrong parts because they are the ones we feel like we have more control over. Not only do I believe this will improve our teaching, it also shifts OER away from being too 'content centric' and finally starts to bring in the other missing actor in these discussions, the learners, both the formal ones and informal reusers.