Jeffrey Keefer

Nellie-

Collaboration is becoming my life; seems there are few places where informal learning can be done more intensely!

Jeffrey

Nellie-

Collaboration is becoming my life; seems there are few places where informal learning can be done more intensely!

Jeffrey

This sounds like a great topic, and it is wonderful to see so many familiar friends here in SCoPE.

I am a project manager in a clinical education department of a large home care organization in New York City. I teach some classes as an adjunct instructor, and am now studying toward a PhD in eResearch and Technology Enhanced Learning at Lancaster University in the UK.

What interests me about this subject? I find that I have benefited greatly from informal education, and am particularly fascinated about how transformative learning can occur via online education. As a qualitative researcher, I am quite interested in understanding how different people make meaning of this, and what we can learn from the experiences to share with others.

Gina-

I find your pushing the boundaries of ownership and the role of education to be very refreshing, especially when we hegemonically work within systems where we often find challenging the dominant paradigms to be fraught with other issues. I digress . . .

One of the items you mentioned I especially found interesting,

"Wouldn't it be FAR more efficient, making better use of taxpayers' money, if we were legally allowed & institutionally encouraged to build on existing resources, using our precious time to update, contextualize, & even translate if necessary? In fact, this is what I understand that BCcampus has done by insisting that all curriculum developed with provincial monies must be made freely available to other partners in the system."

In many ways, this makes sense. Public funds that support public education should ultimately benefit the public. Along the same lines, I have never been paid to develop my content (the tradititional adjunct experience in the US), so my content is my content. Universities hire me to teach my content, and they do not own that content themselves. When I create content at my full-time employer, this is a different situation.

Regardless, I do choose to share my own content at times because I am beginning to see more of a value in getting the feedback from others who use and or comment on it. Perhaps this is more the issue--it may be easier to share if there is a sense that others appreciate the efforts and thus the benefits then get spread around (somewhat like karma)?

Jeffrey

I am starting to think about this for the first time, and while "open" implies "freely available and accessible" to me, I do realize the importance of attributing work to those who created. I think about this from the perspective of being "fair," as I do not want to give the impression that something is original if it is not.

This is not always the easiest to do, and the cloudy part seems to happen when things are adapted (as so many things are in education).