Scott Leslie

"Not only do I have a lot of personal links stashed away like a squirrel hiding nuts for later when needed, but most of the people in my delicious network do similar work to me and as a result, bookmark tons of great stuff. I find much of it relevant and (most importantly) vetted by people I know/trust, either because I know them personally, or I have followed them long enough to learn that their resources as credible."

Clint, couldn't have said it better myself. This is the hard part for people to grok when they first get into any of these social tools; it's not the tool, per se, that is the important thing but the network you grow in it. Because, done with some care, that network can reflect and amplify your own focus, values, interests, needs, etc in a way that increases the value of anything you find through them much better than even the best crafted google search. But it takes time (just like developing any network, be it online or face to face, takes time). This is why it is so hard to *teach* (and why ideas like Jen Jones' "viral professional development" are so valueable) because it needs to develop over time, as part of your own practice, reflecting you. But then that strikes me in the end as an apt description of any real learning.

and (will serendipity ever cease? never!) just came across this post from pal Jared Stein in Utah, currently taking David Wiley's open course on...open education. Jared does a great job comparing OCW materials from MIT and Carengie Mellon's 'OLI' courses, and finds the later to be much richer experiences (While ostensibly Carnegie Mellon's OLI courses don't fall under the OCW 'brand' they were funded by the same funder, the Hewlett Foundation). Anyways, a good read, gives you a sense of different approaches, something I hope we can discuss (given, as I mentioned elsewhere, that faculty, and faculty-directed/supported learning, is not the only model in which OERs need to be used).

Anca, you've probably seen this already, but Gerry Paille brought up a very similar point just now at http://scope.bccampus.ca/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=2101. You are right about closed LMS providing a barrier to sharing, not just because of ShareAlike but for a number of reasons, which is something I'm interested to dig into more next week when we tackle the issue of 'Creating OER.'

The issue about local labor/IP agreements is a real one, and can vedry much be idosyncratic. While I don't want to give the impression that OCW is the ONLY way to do OER, you might find http://www.ocwconsortium.org/share/toolkit.html helpful if you are interested in ways to get OER efforts going on your campus. This is the OCW Consortium's 'Toolkit,' an attempt to collect resources and arguments together for change agents trying to get OER efforts going on their campus, part of which includes resources around the different value propositions about OER as well as discussions about IP and faculty association issues.

Gerry, yeah, license incompatibility definitely can be a challenge, though my take is that we make far too much out of it, and I'm skeptical that it is the major disincentive. But I'll accept for now that 'Share Alike' (specifically) may cause some folks not to want to reuse existing open content because of the implications it has for them to share any derived works.

But I guess to take it out of the realm of the theoretical, have you ever had occassion to find an OER that was really good, that you wanted to reuse or remix, but didn't because of it's license? I'm really interested to hear specific examples of this. That's been one of my ongoing frustrations around OERs in general, lots of edge cases and theoretical discussions around licensing that don't have actual examples attached to them. Not accusing you of this, but would like to see if we can move past that.

Going into the end of the first week of this seminar, where we've focused so far on 'Finding and Using OER,' I thought I'd try and turn the discussions to questions of Reuse.

Of the 4R's (Reuse, Redistribute, Revise, Remix) the last 2, which involve creating a derivative work based on the original, seem at once to be the most promising yet also the most contentious. Look around, and the larger media zeitgeist seems to be one of remix and mashups, yet it is not clear that the same can be said of Open Educational Resources - it is hard to find a lot of good examples of educational remizes. Why?

What is stopping you from re-mixing an existing OER for your own uses?

Have you remixed or revised someone else's materials? What was the experience like? Are there things that made it easier, or things you'd recommend others to consider to do to facilitate this for others?

Or do I have this completely wrong; are OERs getting remixed and revised everywhere? Point out your favourite examples to help inspire others.