Christine, great questions and interesting point about where collaborating and OER might intersect.
Last week some of us heard John Seely Brown note in a talk at the Open Learning Interplay meeting at Carnegie Mellon that making MIT and other OCW materials public is having an 'unintended' effect of aligning previously unrelated courseware and faculty's course objectives generally, just through the power of making all the materials public.
For those of us exploring the mechanisms around continuous improvement and sharing, this effect is very much an 'intended' enhancement, that is, access and use of open, adaptable materials is meant to impact teaching strategies. It's hard to draw a line between “making fresh” and “building on existing”, but the participatory activities used in making materials is a form of learning that then might stimulate collaboration in the form of feedback, reviews, discussions, new examples. The access, the tools, the social factors are making new blends in and around the content and practices used in teaching it.
Amee
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