The dilemma for OERs:why they will not survive as socially created,shared, free entities.

This is a brain-dump too, as it appears, according to my wife, that this is the type of writing is of which I am most capable.Maybe I should write my own On The Road?

As we were encouraged to rant, I will oblige accordingly

If our most successful OERs in 'production' or 'mass circulation' now are the ones that are highly organized and stripped of cultural content, and if we agree that OERS that are the most pedagogically beneficial should be imbued with socially, politically, economically or culturally relevant context embedded or integrated, then we have a huge diametric contradiction here; one that cannot be solved by love nor money. Also if the ultimate goal is to have the underclasses of the world maximize the use of OERs, we need to scrutinize their underlying objectives, both overt and covert.

Are they to:

1/ gain legitimacy or prestige for the content creators and the 'experts' on these much debated learning objects

2/ build momentum for rapid adoption of OERs based on altruistic, democratic, humanitarian and philanthropic reasons for all learners to usher in a new golden age of teaching and learning

3/ monetize all online courses to eliminate the messy human element of teaching in favour of a more streamlined, cost effective, non-unionized, self-directed learning model for all learners, while still applying the ShirkyPrinciple.

We must examine not only who the target audience is for these individual OER commodities, but also , if we are serious about their use as a 'global levellers' for education, how we can give the content creators, regardless of geographic and economic constraints, the means to create their own OERs and by extension, their own reality. While this is on the radar I think it is imperative to any successful global pragmatic implementation or sustainability
I think I would have to agree with Douglas Rushkoff's argument in his recent book Life Inc., that global societies have essentially been systematically stripped of social interaction in favor of passive consumerism. We, as individuals, have become slaves to our ideals of private ownership and are only capable of identifying ourselves through branding and consumption. (For me, MIT's branding is the main reasons for MIT's success in the OER field). Because this anti-socializing corporate mentality is so firmly embedded in the global psyche that even questioning the power structure is tantamount to heresy, we cannot even approach framing a cogent argument toward the fact that OERs cannot exist in the diametrically opposed medium in which it (and all of us) exist.

As Rushkoff and many others point out, there has never been a level 'playing field' for any human endeavour since the ascendancy of money but rather one of privilege and monopoly. A lot of us are just becoming aware of this in the crisis situations unfolding around the world but rationalize this out of our academic and everyday lives. This rationalization is being applied in huge doses to the online OER debate."If the OERs had full funding...." or "If this technological roadblock were only removed...." or "If the Institutional leaders could only see....The commercialization of this section of the Internet has the same underlying constraints as those of the green energy revolution: Unless it can be controlled for private gain, it will be always subordinate to, if not actively fought against, by the status quo of more profitable means of business. There is no money in poor folks (former Yugoslavia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda...........) and no money in OERs. Thus they will not continue.

Libraries and Open content2

Checked MUN and they are similarly locked into the pay for content structure.

IN the Articles area you can see that many are not accessible unless you are enrolled.

In the ejournals section ........

.....some publications are free and some are Ebsco host

and some you have to be a enrolled student at MUN to access.

The only open area with completely free is in the Digital Archives which run have specific and historical content only.

Great for the Folklorist or the Newfoundland-o-phile but hardly a repository in the sense mentioned in the Educase and other literature we have read in this course

Cool for a screen saver however!!

Libraries and Open content

I chose to access the Brandon University Library website which has totally proprietary content (Ebsco Host as seen from the highlighted areas.


Each time you tried to access any of the content areas you had to log in and be a registered student
I tried to access the Catalog but of course 'NO CAN DO!"
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I used my wife's account to access Ebsco host and then did a search for Slavoj Zizek.

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The Search in Ebsco host was not as good as that in Google Scholar for a general interest search on Zizek but it yielded more articles than Scholar ( as would be expected for a high priced service).




I finally found a few articles and they are relevant to my personal online learning. A very uninteresting search, but there were some great filtering options after a broad search was done. So much for my OER contribution. I can see why Scott J says he doesn't use his library, but I have yet to plumb the depths of the Ebsco beast. Time is still the limiting factor though ,, even if all this information is free. The more curiosity you have the more time it takes and the more distracted (even while learning) you become.
I guess all universities are not so enlightened as MIT . I will check my Alma Mater (M.U.N.) tomorrow

The reusabilty paradox

The reusability paradox as I posted last time is as Wiley et. Al. pointed out: the more bereft of context a Learning resource (LO or OER) is the more reusable it is but the less instructionally effective. People get more from highly structured online materials in an LMS or OER repostories, but is structured nature eviscerates it usability.

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I think that the reason that highly structured learning resources work so well is that people like to be guided, directed or outright told what to do. It is the most efficient way to achieve a goal in a lot of cases. People take the path of least resistance or the most expedient route to achieve a goal. Take this course for instance; had not the readings for week 4 being 'channeled' reading, the (perception of ) amount of resources I would have had to read would have made what already was a daunting task (due to my procrastination) into an insurmountable road-block to my progress. I would have had to then either take a hit on the reading /blog entry marks for that weeks deliverable or buckle-down for a technical paper immersion-fest! The guiding and rendering down of the instructor (and the papers themselves as they were overviews of literature and OERs) helped alleviate much of my apprehension and made the task achievable for me.

From my searches it seems that it is notoriously hard to keep track of how and when resources are being used. The metrics even using link back data are sporadically collected and of dubious value even by the CC Commons statistics people
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/License_statistics. I guess it would be harder to track if people didn't observe the letter of the liscence once a resource was downloaded and modified. If creating OERS is a time-consuming venture, then keeping statistics on these resources would be even more tedious and consuming. It is however, I think, at the crux of the reuse issue: how we can engage users – students and also educators and for what purposesthey using them ( whether we can tailor-make them for a context or not)

From another link I read on Wikieducator it stated that the cost of re-purposing a OER should be less than that of creating a new OER which brings with it the a host of technical and time constraints (which can be circumvented by Open source and standardized means). Also there are pedagogical limitations to recontextualizing a resource if embedded context is not easily removed. I suspect that Connexions and WikiEducator are headed in the right direction with the modularization of OERs to help them be repurposed but my question would be will this 'sub-element' compartmentalization be enough to outweigh the 'transaction costs"(complexity of Design, Cultural contexts etc.). Someone has to set the standard and then all parties need to comply to ensure maximum compatibility for reuse.

In my educational situation there are few people who know what an OER is, let alone how to repurpose it. I think what we are seeing is the efforts of a few groups and individuals creating and using these resources and drawing the general conclusions from the specific examples. It is good for debate and will ultimately lead to a greater good but without accurate measurements (metrics) how are we to make informed decisions on how to proceed to benefit the maximum number of people?

Reflections on Learing Objects and OER sustainability

The Question put to us was: QUESTION -- How are the issues around OERs similar to those around learning objects? How can OER initiatives be sustained?
I read the papers (after printing): Learning Objects Literature by David Wiley (http://opencontent.org/docs/wiley-lo-review-final.pdf), the Reflections on Open Educational Resources:and institutional case study by Norm Friesen (http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/664) and Creating, Doing, and Sustaining OER: Lessons from Six Open Educational Resource Projects (http://tinyurl.com/bgssvw)

Wiley defines Learning Objects at the outset of his paper on the current literature in the field as reusable (but not necessarily free) and states very early on, that LOs rarely build upon each other in a meaningful way which is the lynch-pin of Open Education Resources. Whether the prevailing metaphor is LEGO, molecular,Brick and Mortar or a programmers Object to manipulate, LOs are require a 'contextual glue' in order to be assembled or aggregated into something meaningful to a (re)user. They exist in multiple forms and incarnations evolving from, but not adapting of, the original resource. Learning Objects can function in a highly structured, formatted and precise, non-organic and somewhat sterile automated environment.This Wiley says is not a natural way of learning and thus provides a paradox since the highly structured Learning Resource is not how we naturally learn. His heterogeneous more flexible use of Learning objects provides a facilitated or guided direction to aggregating knowledge but is less amenable to reuse and automation. This he calls the reuseability paradox: the more bereft of context a resource is the more reusable it is but the less instructionally effective!

I like that he points out how the fight is about nomenclature, metaphors and staking out ones turf in the new Online educational milieu. In the section on Competing Definitions and Related Terms he runs the gamut of how confusing this can be for even the most well versed in the literature on this topic. I think that these debates (verbal jousting if you will) would certainly scare off the initiate to these complex topics in education and will ( and does ) intimidate a lot of others who feel woefully inadequate to wade into the mire that has been created; the cacophony being less without one added voice


Cataloguing learning resources ranges from highly structured models(SCORM,LOM, etc.) which requires highly technical skills and time consuming resources but are codified and efficient to search; to the cataloguing of the masses (Tagging,Metadata and RSS feeds) which carry with it polysemy (single tag many meanings) and synonymy (resource tagged with different words) and while democratic can lead to difficulty finding resources.
I like that he provided equal time for critics like Parrish and Friesen ( pedagogical and technical issues of LOs) and that he mentions how intertwined the Corporate/Military Industrial Complex is with the infrastructures over which much of this learning is to take place. As Howard Zinn said "You can't be neutral on a moving train" and to skirt the issues of net-neutrality is to in essences bury ones head in the sand to all but the relevant issues of the moment. Context, criticism and a more world-centric view with regard to many issues in these current debates may provide some clarity and practicality in the future.

Open Resources by their very nature are designed specifically to be adapted and modified by others and at their central core is the Creative Commons or GNU FDL open licensing /transaction schemes to clear all obstacles to creativity and reuse. ( not sure if everyone is following the licensing to the letter but I have yet to hear of high profile cases being made against copyrighted materials licenses in this manner ) Wiley suggests that these resources can both be aggregated and adapted but mentioned nothing critical about OERs, so I turn to the article by Friesen Reflections on sustaining Open Educational Resources: an institutional case study.


Are not the vast majority of these OERs linguistically can culturally biased and does this not carry with it a cultural imperialism of a sort (see Downes 2005). If we have no buy-in because of cultural or contextual limitations then reuseability becomes a moot issue. The content providers might not be able to "..... context and culture into account when developing and implementing technological solutions in complex social systems" due to
Content re-creators may not have the technical skills or language skills to adapt highly technical information to specific needs so much more time and money will have to be invested to support OERs in countries other than the US( 1700 courses in the US vs. 950 in all China, Japan and France since 2006 (Wiley) attests to this). Given the global economic downturn this seems unlikely to happen. When big business hurts, post secondary institutions ( and funding) get crippled.

Most OERS also rely quite heavily on traditional revenue sources to be successful. Not just any institution can follow MIT's lead, which Friesen suggests that all educational establishments should emulate for lack of money or talent or technical expertise surrounding getting such an endeavour off the ground. I suspect that what appeared to be quite successful OERs in 2002 or 2003 (such as CLOE and ARIADNE) fell victims to one or more of the limitations of the project management triangle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Management_Triangle

To sustain OERs, As Karen mentioned is a very hotly debated topic and has caused it share of divisiveness in the academic world I'm sure . But as I read the paper by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (LINK) (ISKME) I realized that there are best practises that can occur world-wide as long as people are willing to contribute freely of their own volition and support mechanisms for collaborative authorship are maintained or enhanced for (re-)creators of content. Additionally a recurring theme in all these representative best-practise case studies funding. All success is predicated on stable and secure ongoing funding models (see rant to follow) of More interest to me was the explorattion of the aspects of engagement by users of Curriki, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Teachers Domain projects. I think if they can identify key uses and interest patterns they may be able to target and increase traffic more successfully and thereby secure the necessary funding. The advertising component is after all a necessity (either for prestige or monetary gain) in order to maintain the altruistic goals espoused by most OER projects leaders.

It is very sad to see every human endeavour enslaved to capital, but that is our current system; a system based on class and debt regardless of the country you live in. I think that the free democratic open courseware /resources movement is unsustainable and fails within the 3 year time period because it is at odds the the power structures and corporations that commodify every aspect of life including (free, online , or otherwise) education. Even if there isn't a profit motive, the contributors must still work and live and work within the hierarchy and control of the few. Thus for world-wide acceptance on a paradigm-shifting scale of this very democratic educational ideal , we need to fundamentally undo the existing systems of control as proposed by the edupunks, Paulo Freire, Marx & Engels,Chris Hedges,John Ralston-Saul, Howard Zinn, Martin Luther King Jr., Noam Chomsky,Naomi Klein and a host of others who speak truth to power.

MADLat 2010

This year's Manitoba Association of Distributed Learning and Training annual international conference at the Red River College Princess Street Campus was a roaring success by reckoning. The workshops by Darren Kuropatwa from MECY and Stephanie Chu from Simon Fraser University provided many educators with Web based online learning tools they hadn't previously known about. But my thoughts on both of these workshops, as I am familiar with many of these tools, was towards the comments about the establishment of a great student-teacher rapport and the liberation and sharing that occurs when collaborating online.This is oft touted as the main pedagogical reason for incorporating social networking and Web 2.0 technologies in your classroom. I must concur that this can and does happen, but does it also not l take place between and effective teacher and his students without being in the public domain? If it is indeed beneficial to share with others and post all of your students work (akin to a WorldWide Bulletin Board) why can it not be on the school intranet or in a WAN set up for that purpose.This would then be inclusive for not only the students but also parents and other stakeholders who have a vested interest in particular student's creativity and work; as the neologism goes, a 'walled Garden. Not everything that is created is in, or belongs in, the public domain! I suspect that the answer to why all things must be posted to the web lies in the fact that everyone is looking for either their 15 minutes of glory ( students) or some shameless self-promotion and aggrandizement (teachers). I know of many very effective and superb teachers and professors that accomplish all their curricular outcomes ( and then some) without excessive or even ANY use of the current social networking tools.In many cases they either have no access to PCs due to scheduling not the number of computers or in a lot of cases they choose not to spend all the extra time required to implement and administer the online/application technology for the same outcome that can be achieved much easier. My wife is one such person and I would not classify her as a Luddite in the least. She is just trying to be effective and maintain balance in her (our) life. Many instructors and teachers do not examine the pedagogical grounding for incorporating a technology into their classroom and so either use it because of the 'neato' factor or to show they are incorporating ICT into their coursework, thereby placating their superiors who have invested large sums of public funds in said technology and infrastructure. He who mandates technology is not interested in mass-adoption of technology but rather has ulterior motives . We as educators need to exercise the critical thinking skills we are expected to instill in our students and question if and why at technology should be incorporated in our class and how it fits with our education and teaching style.
As we learned in the Emerging Tech course, people learn best socially anyway. This would explain why the luminary thinkers of yore, without Facebook, email or even any means of video or audio capture, still managed to create enduring works that we are still remixing and recreating today. As Steven Covey's 7 habits suggests the character and real substance lays beneath the surface (roots) not in the facade presented to most people.Unfortunately we are immersed in a culture of immediate gratification, the trivial and vain.When my boy says to me after I tell him to stop going from screen to screen (T.V, Computer, DS, WII....) "Dad! That's what we do!", I am saddened because he is right; that is what they do. They do not engage much in the use of their imaginations or any active 'creating' of learning materials, for sharing or otherwise. They are passive consumers. And this I think is the overarching societal condition that is leading to the results that are evident in the BU study.





Dr.Michael Power from Laval University was this year's keynote speaker and a very engaging one at that. I thought he was from Newfoundland as his accent seemed to attest to, but he is from Nova Scotia.(He's 'caper', they threw rocks at the seagulls to create NFLD ya know) .He talked about Blended Online Learning Design (BOLD) which prompted some lively discussion within the post secondary set of instructors. I saved my questions until after they were finished as a lot of what applies to post secondary institutions does not have the slightest bearing on High School; namely funding, student motivation, institutional barriers to technology and a myriad of others factors which have unique parameters within our domain. I asked him how his theories would be adapted and incorporated at the secondary level and he gave pointed me towards a PhD candidate who is working with BOLD concepts and implementations in the high schools of Newfoundland ("DA ROCK Brudder")

My primary reason for attending this year though was to find out more about the work by Mr. Michael Nantias and his colleague Dr. Glenn Cockerline on the abilities, or lack thereof, of Digital Natives based on the survey work they did at Brandon University last year. Their session, Are Millennials Digital Illiterates? Busting the myth about the current cohort of post-secondary students, was very well attended and the discussions could have went on for longer than the prescribed hour. Their research paper (Adobe Acrobat pdf file p.57) is here http://www.mern.ca/reports/Journal-V3.pdf. Basically it states that last years education students at B.U., some of whom are post-graduates, are sorely lacking in the skills that ,we are constantly told, are needed for the 21st century. The limited skills they do have are acquired from using the ubiquitous devices of our age in conjunction with the Internet purely for entertainment purposes, the skills being ancillary to the fun. This was a theme followed up by Dr.Keengwe later in session 31 in which he attributed the same to his graduate students in is classes in North Dakaota. One of my perceptions that I shared with the presenters was, that these are merely technical skills in which one must become proficient so that creation/recreation and personal learning with OERs (or offline materials) may take place in some meaningful, deeper manner; the presumption being that students all ready have the the higher order thinking and reading skills required to be successful critical thinkers online.

If, by their own admission, this filtered and elite subset of post secondary students is the best we can hope for in the turning of the pedagogical tide towards ( blended ) online learning , or in fact inculcating these skills in our youth as educators, then we are a very long way off from the paradigm shift that much of the current literature says is imminent. A mass-movement towards engaged learning in a remixed culture of participatory learning and sharing cannot happen without the masses and this study shines a pragmatic light on this whole area of learning with some serious ramifications for teaching as well. But like all things antithetical to the accepted wisdom ( Tapscott,Prensky etc.), it is heretical to criticize or even bring a 'questioning mind' to the discussion on the 'new' technologies. Indeed you are either seen as anti-technology or a gadfly who wishes nothing but to take an adversarial position for some sort of perverse pleasure; not as someone seeking some scientifically quantifiable measurement which will actually be of use beyond selling the next technology as a panacea for all our educational deficiencies. I feel that is why the literature in this field is so sparse and why the work of Mark Bullen et.al. , Douglass Ruskoff , Mike Nantais and Larry Cuban, to name a few, is so important. It lets us know there are some persons who have the 'rose-colored' glasses removed and are staring down the microscope for our benefit. Thanks guys.

Open, Educational, and Resource -Definitions

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.

Also check this podcast from UIC http://www.firstmondaypodcast.org/audio/open2_final.mp3

For another similar perspective see George Siemen's Connectivism site where he discusses

Challenges faced by African Universities in technology integration