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
