As many of you know, COSL is undertaking a project to lead the development of an “OER Handbook for Educators” on Wikieducator.org. We went through a really informative process while drafting the outline, and were grateful for all the contributions we received then (and even for the conference call!).
Now there is a modest amount of content in the Handbook - basically a very first draft. And while the development has been completely open and well documented on the Wikieducator.org site all along, we’d really love to get even more of you engaged with the project now, and have you come contribute. We’re especially looking for user stories - are you an educator who has used OER? See Seth’s post to get a sense of what we’re looking for.
Hope to see you over at Wikieducator! And thanks again to Wayne and his fabulous crew over at Wikieducator for hosting the project for COSL!
So here I was, looking forward to upgrading my blog to Wordpress 2.5… I waited until the evening so that I would have plenty of time when things inevitably went wrong with the upgrade. But one
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/
later, after about 30 seconds everything is up and working. Huh.
A very brief post today. I’ve lately heard some people express regrets that that the Cape Town Declaration focuses exclusively on open educational resources. In fact, it doesn’t. The “Cape Town Open Education Declaration” talks about “Unlocking the promise of open educational resources,” saying explicitly that:
Open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning. Understanding and embracing innovations like these is critical to the long term vision of this movement.
If you ask me - which I realize you didn’t - open education is comprised of at least three things:
1. open educational resources
2. open learning support
3. open credentialing
At a bare minimum, you need content (1) in the form of websites, podcasts, videos, simulations, and yes, even textbooks and lectures. You need help, answers, and explanations (2) from someone when the content is stumping you; it’s also quite useful if you have social interactions (2) with others to help contextualize and explore the local relevance of what you’re studying. Finally, you need assessments (3) that help you determine if you’re really “getting it” or “can do it” or not (studies of metacognitive abilities show that we’re actually awful at judging this ourselves), and you’d also like someone to attest to others that you actually “got it” and “can do it” (3).
Perhaps I’ll simply begin another flame war over terminology with this post, but that’s not the point. The point is that “education :: educational resources” as “open education :: open educational resources.” Content is not education, and of course open educational resources aren’t enough. But they’re a first step, and we need to continue pushing down this path while we also explore new models of open learning support and open credentialing.
This is one of the special times of the year when “us Christians” around the world pause for extra reflection on the incredible gift we’ve received from God in His Son Jesus Christ. Even if you aren’t Christian, I’d encourage you to take some time this weekend to “count your blessings.” There’s no feeling in the world like gratitude, and the world needs more people whose hearts are filled with thanks.
Happy Easter.
Before you start screaming that you’ve already written about this and I haven’t cited you, notice what I’m asking here. I’m giving a talk with the following abstract in a few weeks and am still doing research for the talk. If you have written something on the topic, let me know so I can be sure to include you. If you know of something interesting in this area that you didn’t write, please let me know anyway!
(1) Open educational resources such as MIT OpenCourseWare demonstrate that educational materials are increasingly becoming a free, ubiquitous infrastructure for teaching and learning. Leveraging free and open access to a wide range of high quality educational resources can allow the faculty member to drastically change their role in supporting learning. (2) The increasing connectivity of teachers and learners via email, SMS, instant messenger, Twitter, and other tools allows us to move beyond “groups” in our thinking of multi-person assignments to a broader, more loosely knit notion of networks. Large-scale, collaborative social networks challenge our ideas of academic honesty but are a simple fact of life that instructors can either fight against or leverage to better support learning. (3) Open educational resources and social networks point toward a future for higher education in which services traditionally consolidated within a single institution (e.g., providing content, providing learning support, providing assessments, providing degrees) are disaggregated and provided by a number of institutions that compete on quality of service and price for learner business.
(I’ve already found Terry’s excellent Networks Versus Groups in Higher Education.)
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