Something Scott wrote today reminded me today of one of my favorite quotes:
“There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.”
Versions of this quote are attributed to Emerson, Truman, John Wooden, and even former LDS Church President Harold B. Lee. Scott joins the lofty ranks of these folks by ending his description of the very interesting looking Free Learning with his emphatic assertion:
“See – I DON’T CARE if you use THIS site or SOME OTHER SITE. I just care that people ACCESS OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES.”
If everyone involved in the OER world had this opinion, we’d be much further down the path. Does this run counter to the popular thinking that each OER project should establish, promote, and protect its OER brand? Yes. Does that make it wrong? Absolutely not. You go, Scott. Spread the selflessness!!
Scott, as usual, sees things clearly.
While I agree with the first quote, I don’t think the entirety of OER should be like that. Simply put, contributions to the systems are experience and proof of skill similar in usage to the information that would accumulate in a students Open Learning portfolio. Then their is looking through the resources by author.
So, attributing credit does have a very helpful and accepted set of uses that you find in Web 2.0 services that should be integrated into the contribution systems for the OER systems to make them more friendly to both contributors and users.
Yet there are times where it doesn’t matter, and it shouldn’t be the responsibility of the resource user to keep track of credit. In this way the OER systems can be very helpful by giving a simple way to make quotes with all the attribution and some relevant links included. This way the quoters have an easy way to make their quotes more useful to the contributors, systems and users.
So far as I understand the OER goals, the point is to make it so everybody wins. I don’t see this without some credit being given. It isn’t just abut the contributors. Credit, approval, endorsement and many other aspects of putting your reputation on a resource is a part of how many find and choose resources. It’s the same as posting a link about a post in your blog. You are saying, “This is relevant/a good read/useful/an example of/…” That’s a part of how the internet is useful, and why OER is so great. Even on Wikipedia there is credit. It’s in the history tab.
what does it mean though? i am in alpha and it is on my homework to describe what the poem means.