I’ll start this by saying I’m going to sound like a broken record, but for some reason reading the Times Online’s post on “‘Self-learners’ creating university of online” (hat tip to @lisaharris) has got me feeling really irate.
The article discusses the notion of open educational resources (OERs), and the increasing trend for many universities to open up their content to the public, share their lectures, curricula, syllabi, reading lists and other course related materials.  It continues to discuss how people are beginning to reference these resources, and use them either …

In response to my post on collaborative spaces, Gina Minks over at Adventures in Corporate Education posted her thoughts on what she sees are some issues with my argument. I posted an initial response as a comment, but wanted to follow up with further elaboration here.
The main question her post brought me to consider is that of the role and purpose of institutions in an age of increasingly open access to course materials, portability of information, and hyperconnected learners. Significantly too though is the notion of the digital …

An interesting discussion is unfolding on Seb Schmoller’s blog regarding the quality of OpenLearn’s content. Schmoller is Chief Executive of ALT – the Association for Learning Technology.
Earlier this month, Schmoller speculated that the Open Unveristity was being cautious in what content was made available (“Is the Open University making the right content open in OpenLearn?” 7 February, 2008), adding that:
“I think that if the OU does not use OpenLearn to showcase its best stuff, the OpenLearn initiative risks being judged as some rather pedestrian content sitting in a (possibly) …

Connexions is “a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.”
The module I’ll be looking at first is a featured listing called “Understanding Basic Music Theory”
This is one of the modules referenced by a recentCNN.com article. CNN indicated the content has been viewed nearly 7 million times. According to the summary, this module is:
“An expanded version of “Introduction to Music Theory”, this course includes a review of common notation and an introduction to the …