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OER blog posts

Page history last edited by Lou McGill 11 years ago

 

The OER landscape is shifting so quickly and it is difficult to keep up with current dialogue. This page draws together key blog posts in the field, with a focus on the UK but including key posts from around the world.

 


 

Open education

 

February 2009

 

August 2009

  • The New Colonialism in OER - Leigh Blackall, University of Canberra, Australia asks 'To what extent is OER part of the cultural imperialism being felt “globally”? He discusses copyright and CC (Creative Commons) and attracted some interesting discussion in the comments. (OERs,politics, imperialism, International)

 

October 2009

  • OERs & Internationalisation - post on JISC e-learning blog summarising discussions had at the UKOER programme meeting. The issue was identified by projects as interesting and important. (OERs, international, imperialism, politics)

 

November 2009

  • OER and a pedagogy of abundance - Michelle Hoyle, Open University post following a presentation by Martin Weller which develops the idea of Big OER and Little OER (see comments) (OER, scarcity, demand, pedagogy, Big OER. Little OER, politics, economics)

 

December 2009

  • Big OER and Little OER - Martin Weller, Open University discusses the politics of OER and creates a definition for the terms Big OER (costly institutionally produced) and Little OER (low cost produced by individuals). The terms have become regularly used within the UK OER community. ((OER, scarcity, demand, pedagogy, Big OER. Little OER, politics, economics)

 

October 2010

 

November 2010

  • Failure to define success - Stephen Carson, External Relations Director for MIT OpenCourseWare provides a list of commonly observed benefits of OpenCourseWare (OCW, benefits)
  • Why Bother Being Open? - David Wiley, founder of the Open School of Utah responds to Stephen Carson's blog post (see above) and argues that the benefits would be as relevant if the respources were published unde an non open licence (OCW, benefits)
  • blogging on blogging on #ukoer - David Kernohan, Programme Manager JISC provides a summary blog post highlighting current conversations by key figures in the field (OERs, overview, creative commons, cc, licensing, imperialism, politics)

 

December 2010

 

January 2011

  • The University of Open - Paul Stacey (Director of BC Campus, Canada) presents a new model for the open university (open source, open university, open access, pedagogy, OERs)
  • Openness, Socialism, and Capitalism  - David Wiley, founder of the Open School of Utah argues that tax payers should be the reciepient of resources developed with their money (OERs, capitalism, politics, socialism)
  • Misunderstanding capitalism and OER - Joss Winn, University of Lincoln responds to David Wiley's post Openness, Socialism and Capital and presents a strong argument around the policital implications of institutionally produced (big OERs) and that these are situated within capitalism by nature of their production. (capitalism, Higher Education, economics, marxism, politics)
  • OERs, capitalism and social totality - Richard Hall, De Montfort University further developes the discussion by David Wiley and Joss Winn (see above) by arguing for the 'need to situate OERs within the totality of critical social theory as applied to education, rather than simply treating them as fetishised commodities or shareable goods.' He also considers the issues around exporting the Western model to other countries. (OERs, Higher Education, capitalism, marxism, politics, economics, international)

 

February 2011

 

March 2011

 

May 2011

  • ocwcglobal-and-the-state-of-ocwoer-2011 - post from David Kernohan after attending the OCWC conference which discusses the links between the open movement and the serarch for new models of higher education  (sustainability, massification of HE, models)
  • Impact model diagram - Allison Littlejohn, UKOER synthesis and evaluation team provides an update of the team's thinking around open practices and presents an impact model for the UKOER programme towards the end of phase two activities (open practice, model, ukoer)

 

June 2011

  • Clarifying My Feeling Toward MOOCs - David Wiley post on MOOCs (Massive Online Open Course) where he argues that MOOCs are of use mainly to those who are already academically prepared as he feels they generally lack structure and useful measurement mechanisms. (MOOC, Higher Education, future)
  • Do open online courses have a role in educational reform? - George Siemens respondes to David Wiley's post about MOOCs which argues that MOOCs can have structure and assessment/grading aspects. George feels that MOOCs are helpful in reframing Higher Education because even if MOOCs don't continue the underlying concepts of distributed teaching, sub-networks, peer teaching, learner content creation, social networks, new methods of aggregating information, local institution accreditation will be the foundatuon of future learning structures. (MOOC, Higher Education, future, learning)

  • Modeling Learning Support in MOOCs in Netlogo - David Wiley resonds to George's post above by stating that 'MOOC-like courses only support student learning if most of the people in the course already know the material.' Some interesting comments, particularly from Scott Leslie who asks if the problem is with using the term courses to frame this approach. He points out that many communities are already operating like this although they are not labelled as courses. Other comments (although actually from Dave Cormier's post discuss the broader issue of defining knowledge). (openness, MOOC, learning, knowledge)
  • MOOCs as ecologies or why I work on MOOCs - Dave Cormier, UPEI, Canada responds to David Wiley and George Siemens arguing that MOOCs provide a structure (or ecology) where learners can take control of how and what they learn. (MOOC, Higher Education, future, learners)
  • Yes, Virginia, There Is Knowledge Transfer - David Wiley responds by stating that 99% of learning is actually knoweldge transfer. This ellicits several more responses and the debate becomes quite heated. (learning, knowledge)

July 2011

  • Knowledge Transfer - Stephen Downes continues the debate around knowledge transfer (and MOOCs) by repsponding to David Wiley's post and lays the conversation clearly into learning theory territory.  Some challenging comments. (learning, knowledge)
  • Yet Another Response to Stephen -  David Wiley responds and again some really interesting comments.

 

 

 

 

Technical aspects of OERs

January 2011

 

February 2011

  • Ranking and SEO - light on a dark art - Lorna Campbell, JISC CETIS post about search engine optimisation which highlights issues around UKOER phase 2 projects. Includes links to other relkevant posts and useful comments (ranking, seo, search engine optimisation, ukoer)

 

March 2011

  • OER and the aggregation question - Amber Thomas, JISC discusses issues around aggregation services to make OERs discoverable and how this links to storage mechanisms, metadata and curation issues.  Raises some key questions for aggregations services to consider. (aggregation, metadata, curation, OER use, OER discovery, retrieval, value, benefits)

 

 

Licencing OERs

 

November 2010

  • What's wrong with Creative Commons - Stephen Downes, National Research Council of Canada argues that CC does not challenge the notion of intellectial property and that it preseves the notion of copyright - which benefits the owner no the users or potential users (licencing, CC, Creative commons, OERs, benefits)
  • No, Stephen…  - David Wiley, founder of the Open School of Utah argues against Stephen Downs and for the benefits of CC licences. Some good discussion in the comments section (OERs, licencing, CC, Creative commons)
  • OER, Creative Commons and a reply to David Wiley Joss Winn, University of Lincoln provides a very thorough response to David Wiley's post (listed above) and raises challenging questions about the use of and polictical implications of CC licences (OERs, licencing, CC, Creative commons, politics)

 

March 2011

  • So what's the deal with fair dealing? - post by David Kernohan responding to queries about the need for licences (fair dealing, creative commons, licencing, UK)
  • CC Licences and Fair Dealing - response from Naoimi Korn to David's post emphasising that fair dealing provided defenses whilst CC provides permisions (fair dealing, creative commons, licencing, UK)

 

May 2011

  • The OER debate in full - Stephen Downes presents a WSIS debate entitled 'Should OER favour commercial use?' as a blog post (to facilitate comments and ongoing dialogue) (licencing, commercial use)

 

 

Use and re-use

 

August 2010

  • Is an OER still an OER if no-one uses it? - David Kernohan, Programme Manager at JISC raises questions on academic re-use of OERs and wonders if this increases the likelihood of failure for oer projects that focus on this (OERs, reuse, repurposing, academics, Higher Education) 

 

September 2010 

  • Do only aliens use OERs - Unesco Chair in eLearning blog post which describes the use of 'delicious' to track oer use and concludes that significant use by computer scientists, mathematicians and physicists implies that you need to be aware of the oer movement to re-use them. (OER use, statistics, tracking)
  • Taking OER Beyond the OER Community: Part I - Mike Cauldfield, Keene State College, US talks about open practice and OERs and discusses issues around pedagogic intention, producer and users/reusers of OERs. (pedagogy, learning design, OERs, OER use, reuse, academics, producers)

 

December 2010

  • Rethinking the 'O' in OER - Amber Thomas, JISC discusses OERs from a broad perspective covering a range of issues. The post challenges some assumptions about OER release and use and proposes a 'hybrid OER version' which reflects both the spectrum of use and release practice. (OER use, OER release, definitions, models, learning and teaching, practice, pragmatism)

 

February 2011

  • It turns out that students do use OER and it does save time - Andy Began, University of Nottingham post highlighting results from a student survey. This was offered as a case study following a call from the HE Academy and JISC (students, OERs, OER use, Nottingham, ukoer, BERLiN project)
  • Some downside to OER? - Phil Barker, JISC CETIS highlights the issue of student's preference for evidence of effort on the part of academics - producing materials specifically for them is valued. (OER use, stutdents, learners)

 

 

March 2011

  •  Making the most of open content: why we need to understand use - Amber Thomas, JISC discusses issues of use in advance of a session at the JISC Conference. Amber argues that we understand more about release than use and argues for the need to focus on understanding use to identify best use cases and sustainable models for release. (OER use, understanding, models, use cases, benefits, sustainability, content)
  • Making the most of open content: understanding use (part 2) - Amber Thomas, JISC follows the previous post with a discussion of the characteristics of OERs and highlights key arguments relating to the use/release. (OER use, understanding, models, use cases, benefits, sustainability, charateristics, affordences, content)
  • What's the re(use) of OER? - Andy Beggan, University of Nottingham talks about prolific use of content by academics and discusses the issue of re-use of non OERs. Uses evidence from the BERLiN Project which tried to release existing content which was made difficult due to widespread use of thrid party content. (OERs, content, use, re-use, thrid party content, learning and teaching)
  • Sharing, Reuse, and Frameworks - Mike Cauldfield, Keene State College, US suggests 'an impact theory of OER, not an input theory of OER.' he argues that the focus on production rather than reuse is unhelpful and also calls for teachers to work through existing frameworks (OERs, sharing, reuse, OER use, frameworks, learning and teaching, learning design)

 


HE Academy/JISC UKOER programme blogs

Programme team

JISC information environment team - Amber Thomas includes posts about OER and the programme

David Kernohan's blog - David includes posts about OER and the programme

 

Phase 2 project blogs

ADM-OER project blog (Practising Open Education: Developing the Potential of Open Educational Resources in Art Design and Media)

ALTO project blog (Arts Learning and Teaching Online)

CSAP Open Collections Project blog   (Centre for Sociology, Anthrapology and Politics)

CSAP Open Cascade Project blog   (Centre for Sociology, Anthrapology and Politics)

CPD4HE project blog (Continuing Professional Development for Higher Education)

DELILA project blog (Developing Educators Learning and Information Literacies for Accreditation)

DHOER project blog (Digital Humanities)

EDOR project blog (Educational Development Open Resources)

ESCalate project news on the ESCalate site (Education Subject Centre)

IPR4EE project blog (IPR for Educational Environments)

Learning from wOERk project blog

Learning to Teach Inclusively project blog 

MEDEV blog - aggregates posts about PORCHE project and ACTOR project (Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine)

OERbital project blog (Centre for Bioscience)

Open Fieldwork project blog

Open for Business project blog (BMAF)

OpenSpires project blog (Oxford University)

Open STEM project blog (Transforming teaching in mathematics and biosciences)

ORIC project blog (OERs for the Inclusive Curriculum)

OSTRICH project blog (OER Sustainability through Teaching & Research Innovation: Cascading across HEIs)

SCOOTER project blog (Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia)

SPACE project blog (Stimulating the Performing Arts Creative Environment)

SWAPBox project blog (Social Work and Policy)

TIGER project blog (Transforming Interpersonal Groups through Educational Resources)

 

 

Support team blogs

Synthesis and Evaluation Team blog

JISC CETIS blog posts are highlighted on their OER page

OER IPR Support blog

 

Other useful blogs

SCORE blog (Support Centre for Open Resources in Education)

ORIOLE blog (Open Resources Influence On Learners and Educators)

OER Impact Study (JISC funded stufy led by University of Oxford)

 

Image CC BY-NC henrikj

 

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