26.1 Evolution to education 3.0  (Page 17/19)

To me, the most important thing in that model is my currency in ALL the media and communication channels in my field, my ability to filter it all and express an effective pathway for people, and have my assessment methods as non obtrusive and partnered up with worthwhile credentials as possible…

34. derek keats - june 6th, 2008 at 7:28 am

Thanks Wayne and Richard, but I was thinking of a little more than slideshare, rather about being able to take content and make it remixable. I think that there is a lot of opportunity to automate the repurposing of various kinds of content, even when it is in ‘compiled’ format, perhaps more so than with software because content is perhaps easier to decompose.

regards, derek

35. derek keats - june 6th, 2008 at 7:39 am

Leigh in response to

A question that comes to mind when reading your paper.. why do we need open courseware even!? or OER for that matter? The practical truth is that people are learning via the internet regardless of its copyrights

I would say that there are four reasons, probably a lot more:

1. Collaborative production is a valuable learning opportunity, and it is a powerful confidence booster to see what you have written or created used by someone else. Thus F/OER of the kind that interests me most are the ones used by students to remix and create something new.
2. Velocity. When the license does not permit remixing, it is a source of energy dissipation. However, when I see something good that I can simply reuse, I can move so much faster to produce what I wanted to do. For example, I am doing a chapter for the KEWL book on blogging and podcasting. There is a lot of stuff on both topics that I can use under BY-SA so I don’t have to rewrite everything from ‘pseudoscratch’ .
3. When institutions collaborate to produce content, it enables them to enter into a form of co-opetition that is widely recognized as being beneficial event in the cuthroat world of business.
4. When there are no legal impediments to sharing, then novel uses are easier to achieve. For example, my animated tutorial could be captured and printed with text from wikipedia to make a tutorial on Wujibas that is printed and handed out to kids in schools throughout the Republic of Povertaria. My manuscript on the biology of left-handed fleas can be turned into an educational documentary for use in the department of fleaology in another institution.

Those are the practical reasons. Then there are the moral reasons, but let me stop on the practical for a change.

But if we only see F/OER as a means to create consumers, then sure, we don’t need them. I would argue we probably don’t need anything ,because if all we do is consume, then education is dead anyway.

d

36. christine geith s- june 6th, 2008 at 9:04 am

Leigh - my impression, in the U.S. anyway, is that institutions aren’t quite there yet when it comes to acting as if content is pre-competitive space. I believe part of it is lack of experience unbundling content, teacher support, social support and assessment of learning outcomes. There are only a handful of institutions in the U.S. built on the bedrock of earning academic credit based primarily on assessment. But, I do agree with you that when distance died, 20 years ago, so did content - now free/open nails it - and more importantly, gives us the creative tools to learn through more authentic means.