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Leigh in response to
A question that comes to mind when reading your paper..why do we need open coursewareeven!? or OER for that matter? The practical truth is that people are learning via the internetregardless of its copyrights
I would say that there are four reasons, probably a lot more:
- 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.
- 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'
- 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.
- 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.
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