[Wikiversity-l] Report on OER conference

[Cormac Lawler]

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