On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 1:02 AM, simonfj <[email protected]> wrote: > In a word, No.
This turns out not to be the case. OERs and computers now cost less than printed textbooks, so that they can greatly improve education while saving money. This is the only way we can graduate children from high school with 12 years of computer skills, ready for information age jobs. I can understand your political misery in an age of financial and political malpractice on a global scale, but those are not new factors in our history. Printing has greatly cut into political malpractice over the centuries, and we are getting spectacular results from even our primitive social media. There is much more to come. OERs are as big an advance as printed textbooks were in the time of Gutenberg. They will have equally large consequences. > OERs, as the content-centric part of a philosophy practice > which is demanding more > transparency of ALL our institutions. has about the same chance as all the > other "opens" = edu, gov, networks, software, science, etc. There are millions of children learning computer and cognitive skills with Free Software and OERs. A recent study by Peru confirms these gains. > Taken separately, as they all are, By you, evidently, and the financial media such as The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, but not by all governments, school systems, universities, and the rest. > they are isolated parts of a lovely idea. > E.g. The OER concept couldn't exist if its individual projects weren't > funded by some government or philanthropic organisation. Incorrect, as I noted above. > So we know, as the > GNP of most nations reduces, so will the funding for its well-intentioned > participants' projects. The reasons for this are quite clear. OERs is simply > about producing content and reducing its production, aggregation and > distribution. So it misses the primary point (leaving out most ideas about > an aethestic education. i.e. education for its own sake). It doesn't focus > on the jobs for which an education is required. Incorrect, as I noted above. > So the accountants can keep playing with their stimulus plans (as they do). > But if you want a picture of economic growth over the past 4 years, this one > addresses reality. > http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-chart-tears-apart-stimulus-package There is this joke of which the punch line is, "So who are you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes?" Why would you believe anything from a such a conspiracy theory financial Web site? > As for the picture on the other side of the Atlantic; as you know, it's much > worse, especially if you're under 30 (with a degree or two or three). And > that doesn't take into account the (30%) reduction in teaching wages and > pensions in countries like Spain, Portugal, and Greece, or municipal > bankruptcies in the US. It is also quite likely that children graduating with 12 years' experience in social media will have a different take on governance and on regulation of the financial interest than their elders. I cannot predict the direction they will take once they have that opportunity, but I can quite confidently predict that the status quo is not it. > So in light of much hard evidence, and the length of time OER projects have > been running, I think WE can conclude that our institutional habits and > dreams about making content freely available have become, and are becoming, > increasingly irrelevant to economic growth. You might as well say that four centuries of Catholic Church hostility to Galileo has prevented the development of any form of modern astronomy, or that Young-Earth Creationism is preventing the advance of molecular biology. You might as well fault Gutenberg for not starting an Open Access scientific journal. > It seems to me, as I haven't the > well-developed belief system of people of people in the political/education > system, that the drivers to economic growth are provided by reasons like > this. > http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/03/us-europe-economics-teaching-idUSBRE86207O20120703 Although this article is correct about the fatuousness of most economic theory and all economics textbooks, I fail to see the connection to OERs. > Mind you, I treat ALL media (like the links above) as an OER. It's just the > stuff which comes out of edu/research institutions which i find largely > irrelevant, because it always relates to a National public employee's > institution and not my (their?) Global private communities. Thankfully, they > DO seem to be starting to coincide. > > N.B. Institutions DO matter. Just not the ones we've got today. > http://www.cairn.info/article.php?ID_ARTICLE=JIE_009_0003 I fail to see the relevance of this article, as well. > regards, si Thanks for sharing. > On Saturday, 7 July 2012 02:38:59 UTC+7, Cable Green wrote: >> >> Follow up article to the 2012 Paris OER Declaration... >> >> Guardian: Are OERs the key to global economic growth? >> >> http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/jul/04/open-educational-resources-and-economic-growth >> >> Cable >> >> >> >> Cable Green, PhD >> Director of Global Learning >> Creative Commons >> http://creativecommons.org/education >> http://twitter.com/cgreen >> > -- 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] -- Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks -- 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]
