[Note: apologies if some of the links in this message are messed up - it's not clear to me how these textboxes are formatted, whether pure HTML or sthg. else]
So who's got the compass?
One answer to Chris's question “How can we get the word out and invite more thought-leaders and action-takers to participate?” is to define the key operational terms in her question - What is the word, and how can people participate?
So far, I've yet to find a coherent answer to these questions. The “magnetic north” metaphor is appealing, but my experience so far in trying to educate myself about this initiative is more like watching a lot of wellintentioned wandering, collectively speaking. When “human development” can be defined as broadly as fighting against “Microsoft domination” or “media moguls”, or as narrowly as “free textbooks,” where is the magnetic pole in this flurry of activity?
As part of the process of , I participated earlier this week in an online presentation about OER- see http://www.slideshare.net/cgreen/developing-a-culture-of-sharing-and-receiving-open-educationalresourcesfor the slide show. It was a good presentation, but much of it was focused on creating open textbooks to relieve the high cost of textbooks - naturally since it was largely a community college audience. Today Stephen Downes had a post on a site listing more than 100 free places to learn online 1. OER must be a mighty large umbrella to accommodate these and many other similarly unrelated initiatives, and this is a long way from UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries from which the term OER is reportedly derived.
So, I suppose that one answer is that OER can be operationally defined however thought-leaders and action-takers want to define it. Hard to see how there's a “magnetic north” in this notion, however. Another answer is to provide clearer operational definitions that would help prospective thought-leaders figure out how to think about this initiative and help action-takers to take coherent action.
One good place to start would be to keep clear the distinction between formal education and informal/ lifelong learning, as an earlier comment noted. If anything, the increasing availability of open content highlights the distinction between education and learning, rather than blurring it. Put simply, when content becomes freely available, what distinguishes learning from formal education? All the forms that make education “formal” - accreditation, learning support systems, instructors, quality control measures, etc.. In other words, most of the stuff that's missing from most of the OER content I've seen thus far.
In looking at some of the resources I found thus far, I'm feeling an eerie sense of deja vu: haven't there been openly available content resources before in print form? At the same time, it seems that OER collections are often unvetted for quality. For example, I clicked on the Wikieducator link and started exploring. I ended up looking at some science exercises created for elementary school biology students by students at Saint Michael's College. The exercises were interesting and well-structured in many ways, but they also indicated that these OERs were of variable and sometimes untested quality.
Finally, it would help if OERs included a 'chain of custody' of sorts, by which I mean a way to trace the resources back to their creators. For instance, I've tried to trace the Saint Michael's College OERs back to the source to see if I could learn more about them. The link on the Wikieducator site led back to the college web site, but the college's search engine turned up nothing on the resources themselves. There is a professor teaching a course with that in the title; perhaps I could contact him and find out whether or not there is a connection there. But the connection should be more transparent and traceable than that.
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