Week 2 of our course on OERs required all students to blog about what they thought the definition the title terms above were. I have fell behind in the course but, because of the magic of asynchronicity in these courses, I can catch up without much of the course content (except being interactive with my colleagues ) being lost. I can (and have seen) however that this can caused much grief and has actually caused some persons to loose course credit due to the insurmountable amounts of work that accumulated. This online medium for learning is for the highly motivated, who at times have great difficulty keeping up.
Without searching the web or reading my course-mates blogs I am going to define Openness as a state that can be chosen or forced upon a person. I can choose to share my photos or other creative work, my course development work for the speciality computer courses I teach (although it technically property of the Brandon School Division), or my video lessons for those same courses. If I post them on the WWW then they become common property for which not many professionals I know, feel the least compunction about taking and using without permission, let alone giving credit where it is due. With professionals acting this manner, students simply follow that which is modelled.
Forced openness is a little trickier to define but it is around us everywhere. When we renew or vehicle licenses, get a passport or take out a loan or mortgage, we are forced into divulging more about ourselves that Facebook or any other social networking application can ever hope to collect. There is little wonder online social media and other businesses wish all of our most intimate details; they are simply following their offline counterparts. This in order to commodification permeates not only education but all other human pursuits (which is apparently the pinnacle of our achievements). Whether we know it or like it, forced openness is with us through mechanisms in power structures beyond our control.
Defining the word 'Educational' has gone on for millennia and is an epistemological debate to which I can add very little that has not already been pondered by the great thinkers. I would just say that something worth knowing has to be of practical use or else it becomes trivial. The pursuit of esoteric knowledge may lead to a greater practical goal, but it ultimately has to be useful to some group or person in order for it to remain a valid pursuit. A lot of our curriculum's at the secondary level is the fitting of 'portioned-out' knowledge by content experts into knowledge receptacles. Again, after being pointed towards the writing of Paulo Freire I cannot but think of how our modern educational system, while giving us technological wonders to make our life easier and to endless entertain us, has somewhat diminished the true knowledge many of us need. here in the western world and in the developing world alike.
Lastly, 'Resources' can be anything that is useful to an individual in the pursuit of the betterment of himself or others. It can be an educational learning object, a tangible good, or a idea of thought shared with others. The terrestrial type of resources, of which we care quickly running out, are important but are finite. The creative and renewable online (and offline ) resources are where we need to focus our imagination and creative efforts, so that we will not only share, recreate,expand, improve and transcend but also so that we will never be in a situation where there is scarcity, real, manufactured or perceived.
Further to the implementation issues in the developing world I have provided a few links to some resources I accessed in the Intro to Emerging Technologies course.
Providing content and facilitating social change: Electronic media in rural development based on case material from Peru by Robin Van Koertrom at the University of Illinois at Chicago is a very interesting paper and better articulates the limitations on OERS and their practical use. No better place to find out about how OERs work thani in 'field trials' from people who are trying to implement them.
For another similar perspective see George Siemen's Connectivism site where he discusses
7 comments:
Thanks for this blog Robert. Oddly today I was doing a read-through edit of a Diversity in the Workplace mini-course produced at our college. I'm thinking this might be "open" by virtue of it being portable, viewable at any time and useful in its gentle reminder to treat each other with respect and consideration. EXCEPT, the media is so "rich" that even using a computer in the media lab, the pretty little thing was scary slow and crashed a few times. Some of the slow down is a system problem and the daily afternoon social networking crowd that fills the library outside my office door after classes. The other part is, in my estimation, this object is not open for the simple reason that it's not open able unless the user has access to the cutting edge equipment used to make it.
And this brings up a question: do you think the drive to attract students by making learning ware visually attractive will undo OER? The drive to be entertaining isn't serving the goal of education. Instead replacing living teachers with video arcade like modules maybe we should dump some bling and try something meaningful as an educational lure?
Just had a large amount of a response here and it got blown away by a problem. Dwonload and use notepad++ and it's free spellchecker. It won't improve your wirting ( as eviddenced by me ) but at least you can not experience what just happened to me.
I think that the delivery method has taken precedence over the actual learning if that's what you mean. I don't think it will kill OERs but it will definitely be the limiting factor in their successful implementation, especially in Africa and South America where the revolution should take place. It seems to me in our media-drenched, easy access, always connected society, if we have many difficulties with implementation of Web 2.0 and OERs that these will be insurmountable for developing nations.Yet the proponents soldier on in some utopian vision of how all will be right if things change en masse. I guess they should take up the mantle, as there needs to be discussion about how best to implement free education but 'cost recovery models' and other economic priniples come into the discussion, you cannot help but think something sinister is afoot.
A few questions I will put to you and my other learning colleagues:
One of OERs touted major benefits, apart from it's being 'Free' which is another debate, is their force for education through creation/recreation, remixing and re-purposing to suit ones own needs or proclivities. But as is pointed out by Prof Eduardo Villanueva in his writings that most of the source material is in English which becomes a limiting mechanism for creative expression in my mind? Just like if you are given only watercolors to express yourself or a video game with predetermined outcomes, it can stifle imagination and therefore true expression and creativity. I keep thinking of my son on the Hockey Night in Canada website doing mash-ups of his favorite shots and saves.............. it was the same as everyone else's as they were limited but the source content.This is not to say in academia there cannot be sharing and co-mingling of ideas and research. But what of persons who are going to provide the ground swell for this paradigm shift toward open education. If OERs aren't accepted by these 'masses' then they will only be for those like you and I who choose to use them for personal learning, the remaining persons abandoning them for entertainment.
Also, if the persons using this content from their munificent benefactors are NOT the primary generators of the materials that they see as useful to themselves of their society, are they not just accepting the 'wisdom' of the content creators? Propaganda, misinformation, disinformation and entrenched believe systems (economic and otherwise) have been perpetrated for years in this manner. I think they need to be creating in the context of what is suitable as knowledge for their purposes. Should we not be just giving them the tools to create their own learning objects in the context of their reality rather than imposing our cultural imperialism upon them?
Robert,
Definitely delivery over content. Two forces at work here. First is the noble intention to provide access to everyone in our sparsely populated area to all the college's content.
Second is to leverage the talent and resource capabilities of the instructional media lab to create secondary products to "sell" to finance the first. (This second idea is, as you can guess for Alberta, mandated by government).
Sexy, marketable content is what comes out of this marriage of operations which is to be expected from a top down system embedded in a user-pay atmosphere.
Not sure how this can be changed though there might be workable clues in the operational strategies of organizations like Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International. As soon as you say "our vision is so important that we're willing to act in a way that's contrary to our core beliefs to accomplish it" the game is over.
It may come to it that Neil Postman was right and we will end by "Amusing Ourselves to Death"? I hope not, I hope we can refocus, stop decorating the "educational" pig and get down with some learning again.
And free is not exactly free since the amount of money spent on infrastructure to get those few geographically removed students incorporated into the 'new' learning environment is huge in scope and cost.
I have taught on numerous Reserves across Canada and the 'Great White Hope' for them in the absence of being able to attract teachers was technology. My reponse to the administration on each those Reserves was that it was technological utopianism. If a student was not going to attempt math in my class with me urging, assisting, cajoling and threateing himor he,due to lack of relevancy, lack of motivation, poor skills, or whatever the reason, then why would that same indvidual be motivated to sit in front of a screen and try to do the work of his own volition. The students needed more human interaction and guidance, more positive, interactive experiences and the immediacy of feedback that can only come from a physical human-being. But Indian and Northern Affairs and others governmental agencies are on the bandwagon out of necessity.
The one size fits all accomodation of computer programs leaves a lot of losers in it's wake. I have been trying to find research literature on how computers can affect the 'learning styles' of students but the only thing I have found thus far is a paper peer reviewed paper from the journal Psychological Science in the PUBLIC INTEREST that I was directed to by Dr. Mark Bullen from the British Columbia Institute of Technology. It doesn't address how computers and learning styles are related but rather points to the fact that the 'learning style' theories have no imperical evidence.
My thinking was that computers is primarily a visual and textural learning environment so how does it meet the needs of say a kinesthetic learner. But I guess my question is answered in a round about way.
BTW Love Neil Postman. Have you ever read Todd Oppenheimer (Flicking mind). There are some persons out there brave enough to question the accepted norms.
http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/reviews/krause_review.html
Also there is an Ellumiate live session recording by Mark Bullen et al. (Blocked here at work) that you could check out. IT is on Ustream if you want to do a search on MArk Bullen and Net Generation. There is also some associated sites
http://www.netgenskeptic.com/
I'll try the websites. Reading Karen Armstrong on early stages of religion and Franz Dewaal on primate behaviour--no particular message in this, just interesting stuff.
My cynical take on the whole computers to the First Nations is it sounds right, burns up money ineffectually and keeps white people gainfully employed. Somehow, it's become truth that having net access is empowering. Like even the smallest group can speak to the WHOLE WORLD and whatever... The weather is a much more distributed network than the net so I would submit that pissing into the wind could also be empowering (maybe not in January though).
Anyway, late here, I'm setting up message board for the class this weekend. This is fine commenting at each other's blogs, just slow and disconnected.
Scott
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