Dear Wayne While the argument to reduce govt. waste through collaborating to produce free OERs is appealing, it rests on certain assumptions. The author does hints at these,but not enough. For example: 1. While hard sciences curriculum can be 'standardised' and 'applied' globally/nationally. what about other disciplines that are not based on universal laws or general principles? 2. That the user can change open content. Even when content was closed, did it ever stop people from changing or adapting it? Teachers used to cut and paste from various textbooks and workbooks, and make up a package for their students and appropriate for their context. We might have been doing it illegally in the 80s, by photocopying for example, but we never had to wait for somebody to "make needed revisions". 3. The political economy of "sharing" is not a given. Who should share with who, at which level, at what depth, and who is guiding/"leading" the developing of a standardised curriculum? Which kinds of curriculum and pedagogies are being valued? 4. The production and distribution cost-benefit argument seems to be very dominant in this discourse. What is less talked about is the quality assurance of curriculum development. Just because it is free does not mean it is of high-quality does it? I guess this is harder to write about in an op-ed piece for a newspaper. 5. Finally, it assumes that open curriculum content alone is enough, and makes no mention of pedagogy. This is worrying in the whole OER movement.
With WIkiEducator, for example, lots of educators are being asked to collaborate to produce OERs. After a certain point, when the curricula are polished and good enough for use as the 'norm', someone is going to start charging to recoup the costs of having taken all the time and effort to create the buzz, raise the funds, and produce them. If life and education are really for free, who is going to pay the teachers? And why would parents pay for their kids to go to school? The answer is not as simple as the author claims. Regards Gurmit On Oct 22, 9:17 pm, Wayne Mackintosh <mackintosh.wa...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > Rory Mcgreal from Athabasca University has written a great piece for the > Calgary Herald, Canada. > > Rory proposes a workable solution for eliminating government waste, we'll > aligned with what we are collectively trying to do. > > "The answer is simple, rather than buying and/ or renting content, we can > either produce our own or buy the full copyright to materials ONCE. Or, even > better, make effective use of public domain or free copyright materials. > Today tens of thousands of free, high-quality courses or course modules are > produced by learning institutions across Canada, in the U. S. and around the > world. WWW sites such as WikiEducator, Connexions, Merlot and Curriki have > growing collections of free educational content." > > You can read the short article here: > > http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/op-ed/Time+change+rules+textbook... > > Cheers > Wayne > > -- > Wayne Mackintosh, Ph.D. > Director, > International Centre for Open Education, > Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand. > Board of Directors, OER Foundation. > Founder and Community Council Member, Wikieducator,www.wikieducator.org > Mobile +64 21 2436 380 > Skype: WGMNZ1 > Twitter: OERFoundation, Mackiwg --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
