I want to make it clear that I have no fundamental differences with your points; it has more to do with “tactics,” I guess.

The VAST majority of academics have NO idea what OER is, much less what it might mean; so, saying that OER needs to move away from a “mere repository” to a “useful dynamic environment” is (bear with me here) a little like a 1995 email complaining that the first version of Netscape didn’t have enough social media features (and yes, i was around and writing Web pages back then!)

My own thoughts (and isn’t it amazing how another person’s worthwhile musings contribute to one’s own) are that the whole set of “open” (software, ed resources, open access initiative) movements are in such a state of infancy, no one (and I certainly don’t exclude myself) has a clue as to the true implications.

So, stepping one small step further back, getting to the educational implications of all this: The TRUE transformative implication is that it sparks conversations such as this! And it sparks the bigger questions: What is education, anyway? There has been some resistance (on my campus, but I’m guessing not exclusively!) to things like iTunesU because (paraphrase) we’d be “giving away” our educational expertise.

Which leads us right where I feel a lot more conversations need
to be (and perhaps back to your main point), namely: Very little of education is “content” per se. “That” we master content is, generally, not anywhere as near as important as “why and how” we master it.

Again, thanks, and would be interested to hear more comments from you and others, Mike!

I’m not trying to suggest there isn’t any value in OERs, because I definitely think knowledge and information is more valuable the more it is shared and accessed. Rather that OERs are really just one aspected of a much larger conversation about open education – and indeed learning more broadly. Information and knowledge are not just being created and then shared, they’re being accessed, used, adapted, discussed, synthesized, etcetera.

However the latter phase – where much of the learning occurs – tends to be considered somehow separate to the vision and creation of OERs (not to mention the mandate of organisations that produce them), and then omitted from the conversation. It’s that omission that I think needs to be re-examined.

To use an analogy, the current model for OERs is much like the traditional library model, where books are available to those who wish to read them and then contemplate their meaning. They’re fantastic public resources for people to browse and use – providing access to information that might have previously been unavailable – however they do not actively facilitate the learning process.

What I’m suggesting is that we start thinking about ways to establish “book clubs” for OERs (or nurture their development) to give people opportunities to come together and discuss works they are all reading. We’d then be starting to move from a mere repository of useful objects, to a dynamic environment that includes multi-way flow of conversation and social construction of knowledge.

This would let people take the general context laid out by the resource itself and more easily examine it within their own context.

Having said that, you’re quite right, we really have NO idea what is going to happen once OER are released to the public. It’s like a library that is instantaneously anywhere and everywhere on the planet, in all contexts, cultures, religions, languages, geographies, levels of development and understanding, etcetera.

Knowing how best to facilitate learning when you don’t know the learner is a very complicated situation. Then again, perhaps that’s one reason why it’s not broached as frequently.

My concern, I guess, is that (by my reading anyway) you seem to be suggesting that OER’s, absent this “dynamic network,” aren’t worth it. I guess that’s where I’d differ; yes, they need to have more supporting materials and expertise… but, until you get it out there and let people see for themselves, can we really predict WHAT that supportive environment should look like?

Thus, Anne Marie’s post, where we take the tools at hand (twitter, etc.) and share what we’re doing, and see what happens..

As for the hype out-stripping the reality of a very new tech/educational resource… well, that’s hardly a new development, is it? ;^)

Now with your field being Medicine there are some obvious caveats there with regards to client confidentiality and privacy, but as a general rule the more transparent the process and the greater the community input the better.

I think including ongoing communication, as you’ve indicated, is a really good idea because it starts to build a culture of open discussion above and beyond the actual creation and production. If ongoing multi-way discussion takes place throughout the process, you will hopefully find that at the formal end people will have built up ties with one another that will continue afterwards. In a sense a key outcome will be the development of self-sustaining networks.

One of the other ideas that just occurred to me here is to somehow track usage of the OERs after they have been released. If it were suggested that anyone who uses the resource were to also assign their work (reflections, reuse, papers, presentations, etcetera) a specific tag you would be able to monitor and aggregate examples of how it was evolving and/or being used in practice.

This data might in turn be used to establish a second phase of the project where new students could locate existing examples and individuals they could see or engage with. So you’d be mapping and sharing the emerging networks and thus establishing opportunities where people could explore the concepts and ideas together.

As far as examples of people blogging/openly documenting the OER production process – I’ll have a think about that and will let you know.

If anyone else has examples for Anne Marie please post a comment

Good luck!

Anne Marie