Wayne, Cherry, Gurmit, Thanks for this one; especially "I think we need to concentrate more on the whole process of learning rather than put so much store on the content of learning". I tend to conceptualize this a bit broader. i.e. the whole concept of media production, and distribution, and "the kind of (educational) institutions we might expect to see in the future". The latter discussion, about 'the unis of the future' is going on at the UK's OU's Cloudworks and around Europe at the moment.
Re: Rory's piece. The Nederlands is well down the track here, primarily because the gov paid (800 Euros/yr/student) for schoolbooks until recently. Now they're looking at how this cost might be used to develop OERs. You might like to watch this video about their 'emerging National OER strategy'. http://openedconference.org/archives/1069 (Note the Indian report). There's a related slideshare here.http://www.slideshare.net/ ronaldhuizer/the-dutch-case-with-oer-at-opened At the same time Open Access is pretty well accepted, and most institutional librarians offer an upload box for authors, even though they get their kudos by getting published in journals, owned by third party publishers, who play games by bundling them, and selling them back to the same librarians. Academic media is the only media which hasn't reduced (like commercial media) due to no one coming up with a way to help librarians aggregate and market peer reviewed papers (and conferences). I don't need to point out all the aggregations of largely duplicated OERs, each course of which costs between 3,000 to 30,000 euros (as a dutch guide), produced by 1% to 2% of teachers. And open for remixing and redistribution due to their open licences. The sad part in all of this is that the making of OER, being a collaborative process, is not often seen as 'professional development' or an education in itself. So one one (old) side we have (overworked) teachers who don't have the time (or skills, or whatever), and on the other (young) side we have students who would probably love to contribute to improving OERs. And we all learn by watching others. I think we all see this. As Gurmit says, "The political economy of "sharing" is not a given". We all understand it will be, simply because if things continue the way they are, the web will be doubling in size every 11 minutes by 2030. It is quite hard to see how these new collaboratories of learning might look; certainly wikieducator points the way, if only with one tool (a wiki), and this google group. Others OER distance learners make their choices. E.g. http://moril.eadtu.nl/supportaresources/learning-tools.html The thing which i still can't get out of my head is this idea that we are all sitting in the vast unclassified library called the internet. If I ever want to learn something in a physical library, I can ask a librarian "where might be something about xyz", and she can always point me at a shelf. On the internet she can't do that, but at least, if the OER movement would work with a global group of librarians like OCLC, she might be able to help classify the domain name that a global (subject specific) community uses. And if they kept their open access journals in the same domain, we might have a chance at saving our edu institutions a few billion dollars. OK, it's only money. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
