Hi all,

I attended a really fascinating conference in Rice University (Houston, Texas) a fortnight or so ago, hosted by the Hewlett Foundation, dedicated to the world of Open Educational Resources (OER). I was there with Erik Moeller and SJ Klein, along with representatives of many OER projects and organising/funding bodies, such as UNESCO, UNICEF, OLPC, MIT, Open University UK, Moore Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, and many more. The report about the OER movement written for the conference is available from http://www.oerderves.org/?p=23 - the authors recommend, amongst other things, the development of an "Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure" as a next phase of developing simply OERs. I heartily recommend reading this report - it contains some excellent points about this movement/process, as well as many links to relevant projects and papers.

Interesting ideas that have been sparked in my mind as a result of this meeting and various readings include:

* Granularity - what is the smallest piece of a particular resource that can be tagged and reused? Is it the whole document, a part of the document, an activity, an applet, an embedded video, a sentence/question..? How can resources (or parts of resources) be aggregated to create a learning resource/schema appropriate for a particular person's or class's learning context? It seems to me that the more we recognise the fact that our resources will be used in a variety of contexts, the more we are required to define those multiple uses of the material, in order to allow for its greater flexibility in its use and reuse. However, this doesn't have to be done at the moment of uploading, of course, which brings me to..

* Semantics/Tagging/Metadata - It seems imperative to tag material as specifically as possible, in order to allow for greater ease of searching. How does a teacher currently look for resources specific to their context? In Wikiversity, our current system of tagging (ie categories) is ok, but it is fairly hit-and-miss as to whether they would find something specific to a class of 11-year-olds, or university postgraduates. So far, in Wikiversity, our system of specifying what a resource is for has not been so good - and this is something that I think we need to look into. Should we simply implement a system like Semantic MediaWiki http://ontoworld.org/wiki/Main_Page and see how it works?

* Licensing - this is a real headache amongst OER projects - how do we deal with material that is licensed under a Non-Commercial license on Wikiversity? Simple answer: we can't. There needs to be a good deal of work done on trying to harmonise licenses so that they can be used together - at least in practical contexts, like a teacher aggregating them into a book. A new initiative of Creative Commons, CC-Learn, will be attempting to work on this issues, and help free-content projects better work together. If you're in a reading mood, David Wiley (who I met at the meeting) has drafted a book chapter about a hypothetical future of the NC license - it's at: http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/313#more-313.

* Developing world and mobile devices - The vast majority of the world's population lives in the developing world, and if we are to truly revolutionise the world of education, we must not only recognise this fact, but do something real about it. Doing something real means making education available and accessible to all. The internet is a great step in this direction, but most people in the world do not have a computer or easy access to one - much more common is mobile devices, like phones. The more we make content accessible to non-computer devices (as well as to computers, of course), the more they will be accessible to a huge proportion of the world's population.

Finally, I should mention a collaboration between Wikiversity and Connexions http://cnx.org/ (and others), about which we had a pre-conference meeting. This collaboration is in planning at the moment, and funding bid is underway (project management will be by the Connexions team), but it will basically consist of a technical bridge between Wikiversity and Connexions so that both projects can directly and easily import resources from the other for their own use. It will initially involve the development of material (on a particular subject) that can be imported both ways. This is a "proof of concept" - that resources can be made interoperable between projects - rather than a full-scale project, and hopefully it could spark a bigger, more developed project that would take many more projects into consideration. The content developed will be licensed under the CC-BY licence, and will also be used by the One Laptop Per Child project. There are a number of ideas for the subject matter of this collaboration, though it is to be relevant to children in the developing world - ideas range from "How This Works" to "Digging a well/irrigation ditch". Teachers Without Borders will also be providing input on the subject-matter of the collaboration.

Overall, OER has achieved "nascent movement status" (conference report, p. 6), and is "poised to explode in coming years" http://onthecommons.org/node/1124. I think that working with other projects, like Connexions, will be of significant benefit to everyone - and that we should continue to reflect on how we work individually and what we can learn from eachother. I'll set up now a set of pages that can help further these ideas - I'll post about this to the Colloquium, and give links here on the list.

Cheers,

Cormac