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This write-up covers outlines our learning curve with the NZ OER project.

(External Link)&id=1863

cheers, Richard

P.S A wild goat stew with stout ;-). It’s wintry here, All Blacks start their season this Saturday.

23. wayne mackintosh - june 4th, 2008 at 5:30 pm

Hi Richard,

Wintry in Wellington :-( — that said I wouldn’t mind if the Summer got started here in Vancouver. Raining again today. I won’t go into the Rugby. For the benefit of friends on the list — Richard and I are old buddies and its a bit of a tradition for us to compare notes with a tad of passion.

Linking back to Derek’s point about velocity and impediments — I firmly believe that closed file formats are an impediment to the work of the freedom culture and while there may be shades of openness — I don’t think there are shades of freedom when speaking about free cultural works. I think the adage that all OERs may be open in terms of access — they are certainly not all free!

WikiEducator and the Wikimedia Foundation projects (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikinews etc.) all subscribe to the free cultural works definition. ( (External Link) ) and there is a requirement to use free file formats and to make the source available.

I miss our interactions.

Cheers, Wayne

PS — Have you migrated to a Free Software OS yet? In other words are you walking the talk?

24. richardwyles - june 4th, 2008 at 5:43 pm

Lol - ouch! Yes, I still have Windows on my laptop…&justify it by having to test different FOSS in a MS environment, maybe a pathetic excuse but the Catalyst folk tend not to test stuff in IE etc. Vista is so cool….not!

25. patrick masson - june 4th, 2008 at 8:23 pm

All Blacks - I have no idea. But it’s first intermission in the Stanley Cup FInals so I’ve had a chance to catch up on the discussions. To address Derek’s question:

“I am just wondering if there are any readers who think the notion of Education 3.0 is radically wrong or bad, and if the idea of self-learning using Free and Open Resources is something that we should reject? Will it happen? Who thinks about autogogy?”

I think it’s already happening, especially in technology. Many contributors to open source projects are self taught programmers who found a tool that satisfied a need, then began development for personal use. As a manager within several IT departments, I have valued practical experience over formal credentials in my hires. The various projects a person has worked with and tools like Brainbench have helped me to identify some of the most skilled and “educated” developers. I’ve met several folks with their MCSE/MCSA or a degree in CS that can’t contribute.

26. derek keats - june 5th, 2008 at 12:33 pm

Just to take some thing Richard said and mention it slightly out of context

archived materials subsequently made “open” for example. These can be very difficult to reduce, edit etc.

A rich source of learning materials can be found in PowerPoint and OpenOffice presentations, but probably Powerpoint mainly given the prevalence of its use. In addition, these common tools lend themselves to making simple tutorials.

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Source:  OpenStax, The impact of open source software on education. OpenStax CNX. Mar 30, 2009 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10431/1.7
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