“Evolution to Education 3.0,” the 23rd installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on June 1, 2008, by Derek Keats. Derek is a marine biologist with strong interests in using technology to improve teaching-and-learning, to enable higher education to create Education 3.0, and to promote sustainable development. Derek’s research interests include e-Collaboration and lessons for international collaboration from Free Software (open source) and related initiatives; next-generation e-learning systems and Education 3.0; Free and Open Source Software and Free/Open content in higher education. He has developed a number of initiatives in the fields of educational and environmental informatics, Free Software, Free and Open Resources of Education (FORE, often called OER) and has published around 80 research papers in biology and in the application of technology. Thanks Derek for a great posting!

In his posting, Derek starts with the assertion that:

Higher education institutions exist as a result of the need to aggregate resources that are scarce (professors, books, journals, laboratories).

He then moves forward suggesting that a combination of advances in distributed and open educational resources and technologies have significantly reduced (or at least hold the promise of reducing) some of the problems of associated scarcity. So, where does that leave the University and higher education in general? Well, Derek points to Personal Learning Environments (PLE) and, connecting the dots, points us to some work that he and Philipp Schmidt have done on Education 3.0, which is one potential future along a path of reduced scarcity through open educational resources, distributed educational technologies, and social networked learning. He introduced a few other related thoughts about the importance of inter-institutional networking, the recognition of prior-learning, and the notion/challenge of “quality assurance.”

Finally, Derek asks us:

If he is describing a desirable world? Is it a world that we will see in our lifetimes? Or is it the ranting of a digitally-disturbed, hyperlinked lunatic referring to himself)?

Apparently they are good questions, because they lead into a log of commenting and exchange. Upon reflection though… the last question was never answered!

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There was certainly a lot flowing from Derek’s posting. In fact, there is enough here, so I am a little reluctant to provide a “Summary” because it will likely become a transcript of the comments. That said, I do think, though, it is worth mentioning that the comments ran the gamut from:

• Review and accreditation of materials relative to quality assurance (institutional v. materials),
• The impact of licensing and license terms on OER,
• Convergence of technology and behavior of individuals,
• Factors that impact sustainability and speedy progress of OSS, OER, and Education 3.0,
• Informal and self-directed learning – reduction of barriers, knowledge credentialing, portability, and assessment of prior learning, and
• The ecology or OER, reuse, and sharing.

while also maintaining some nice internal flow.

Thanks again to Derek for his interesting and insightful post and responses. I also want to extend a big thank you to Pat Masson, Dave Cormier, Wayne Mackintosh, Leigh Blackall, Christine Geith, Richard Wyles, and Keith Lynip for adding to the post, and other folks who have been reading along. Thanks too for so many great links to additional resources!

I hope to start the Series up again in September, and am starting to actively solicit new contributors. If you have somebody that you would like to recommend, please do email me directly at keu10@psu.edu. If you have made recommendations before and I did not follow up, please make them again. I am sure that it was just a matter of being a little overloaded at the time. I appreciate all of your support with the Series. The schedule for the series can be found on WikiEducator.

It is great to see something work as it should. You know the whole thing about “walking the talk,” “eating your own dog food,” etc. With this in mind, I want to point you to Learning4Content, which I think is an interesting (and brilliant) project that speaks directly to the notion of an “OER ecosystem” needed for sustainability, which is occasionally mentioned in this and other forums.

Through this project, WikiEducator offers a free series of online and face-to-face workshops on wiki skills. The workshops are made available to teachers, learning designers, students, educators, etc. (which is pretty cool), but the best part is that during the workshops participants develop and donate one free content resource back to the WikiEducator community (which is pretty brilliant).

The next online workshop starts on June 23, 2008. If you are interested, check out the L4C Registration page. There is a learning contract and some expectations for participants to engage in OER community. You can Learn about the expectations, funding, and L4C schedule at the project site on WikiEducator.

I want to welcome Joel Thierstein and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. Joel will be sharing some of his experiences and writing on the topic of “The Role Of University Faculty In The OER World,” which will provide the opportunity to open a conversation on the critical role of faculty in the ecosystem that supports the creation, distribution, use, and reuse of OER.

Dr. Joel Thierstein serves as the Associate Provost for Innovative Scholarly Communication at Rice University and Executive Director of Connexions. Prior to coming to Rice, Joel served as an Associate Professor and Director of New Media Communications at Oregon State University. He also served as a professor at Baylor University, Purdue University Calumet, and Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Dr. Thierstein has also served as a visiting professor of Communications Law at Syracuse University.

Writing extensively in telecommunications, Joel’s books include Birds In Flight: Satellites In The New Millennium, 3rd ed. and Religion, Law and Freedom: A Global Perspective. In addition, to Joel’s obvious commitment to open and sustainable education, he also has served as a Board member of Fossil Rim Wildlife Center since 2000 and Board Chair since 2003, and has worked extensively with the Conservation Centers for Species Survival.

Although I was aware of Joel’s work through Connexions, I did not have the opportunity to meet him until a meeting that Wayne Mackintosh called in Vancouver about a year ago, during which we discussed the use of wikis to support development, management, and presentation of educational content. Incidentally I also first met Christine Geith and Leigh Blackall at this meeting, who have also contributed to this our Series. Unfortunately at the time, I did not have the opportunity to really speak with Joel during the meeting, so here is an opportunity for all of us to take advantage of sharing ideas about the critical topic that Joel will be outline for us. In any event, please feel free to comment (early and often!), ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.

I just got back from the annual meeting of that American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC). Don’t let their web site fool you, it is an organization with a lot going on in some very relevant areas. I am not going to give a run down of the whole meeting now, although I might a bit later. I do want to mention two of the interesting activities presented at the meeting.

On the first evening, we were joined by colleagues from the Tecnológico de Monterrey who told us about an OER project that they launched recently. They experimented on a pretty large scale as users of content and reported back on their lessons learned. I hope to have them tell their story as part of the OSS & OER Impact in Education Series. So, hopefully more on that later. I think that examples of how OER are being used effectively at an institutional level is an important part of our dialog that should help inform institutions and individuals who are making OER available.

I also want to point you to an interesting Video Annotation technology that was demonstrated by David Ernst, who serves as the Director of Academic and Information Technology at the University of Minnesota’s College of Education & Human Development. VideoAnt is a web-based video annotation application that is still in early development, but shows a lot of promise. Right now it only deals with FLV (Flash video) files and it has a relatively small development team working on it, but it shows great promise. I hope that this project goes the OSS Community route and supports more non-proprietary file formats to maximize its impact on education. To learn more and have some fun, visit the VideoAnt site and try it out. Feel free to tell us what you think.

On “Doing OER,” the 20^th installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on March 1, 2008, by Amee Godwin. Amee serves as Program Director, OER Commons, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME).

Amee’s work focuses on connecting technology, education, and collaboration. At ISKME, she guides the development of content, interactivity, and partnerships for OER Commons, a teaching and learning network for open educational resources. Thanks Amee for a great posting!

In her posting, Amee moves the dialog around OER from concentrating on the content to exploring the process of creating, recreating, and reusing OER. She describes doing OER as a catalyst for exchanging ideas and knowledge creation among diverse communities of teachers. Amee then sets the stage by asking the following questions:

• What comprises “doing” OER?
• Does it take a new belief system?
• Are we doing it already?
• What examples are there to show off models for active engagement with OER?

Amee highlights some of the issues around community spaces for tagging, sharing, and creation, pointing to developments and activities such as the Library of Congress’ historical image collections in Flickr, the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium’s use of problem spaces, the wide spread use of LeMill.net by several hundred primary and secondary school teachers, and some of the great work that ISKME is doing through the OER Commons.

The focus of Amee’s message is that the potential for OER as a catalyst for change is in the doing, and that “Doing OER” requires support, tools, and a cultural shift in many organizations to take advantage of the strengths of networked communities of practice.

One of the roles of the OER Commons is to explore new models for teaching and learning that is a generative process in which OER is done through active inquiry, sharing, mentoring, in a cycle that includes feedback and peer involvement.

Amee’s posting provided us the opportunity to consider examples of OER in action and reflect on the “promise of OER,” leaving us with the question, are we… “getting any closer to it through the way that we are doing it.”

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There were a number of questions and responses that flowed from the posting. Most of the dialog was around the importance of the process of creation of content as an element of learning. There was also comments and questions about the use and reuse of existing content and the importance of collaboration in knowledge creation.

Thanks again to Amee for her interesting and insightful post and responses. I also want to extend a big thank you to Christine Geith, and “cynthiaj” for adding to the post, and other folks who have been reading along. On April 1^st (no foolin’), Stuart Sim of Moodlerooms will be posting, which should be a very interesting topic relating to business models in open source software. The schedule for the series can be found on WikiEducator.

Modeling “the promise” of Open Educational Resources

The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) has created an online network that aggregates open educational resources (OER) within a social networking environment, for the purpose of stimulating engagement of diverse populations in accessing and using OER worldwide. OER are most often thought of simply as content—that is, teaching and learning materials that are freely available for downloading, sharing, and remixing.

However, the value of OER is best described not through their aggregation as static resources, but through their potential to engage a wide range of teachers, learners, practitioners, and other stakeholders in resource transformation, cross-pollination of ideas and expertise, and collaborative knowledge building.

Research about digital media has shown that the development, use, and adaptation of resources can serve as a catalyst for engaging diverse teachers, learners, and practitioners in sharing their expertise, building their knowledge, and otherwise providing leadership in their fields. This is similar to organizational research that has found that continual improvement and enhancement often emerges from knowledge sharing among practitioners. In other words, OER is an invitation to improve teaching and learning processes.

But what comprises “doing” OER? Does it take a new belief system? Are we doing it already? What examples are there to show off models for active engagement with OER?

The phrase, “the promise of OER,” resurfaces often around the nascent movement for ready-to-modify learning materials. If OER is seen as merely rewritten curriculum, it’s not surprising that the movement might produce a few yawns. “Doing OER” is meant to embrace much more than this, starting with an evolutionary mindset about learning content and the learning itself.

Searchable, web-based resources with clear conditions as to how it can be used represent a platform for collaborative “mutation” or remixing. They are meant to be integrated into ways we are already engaging in collaboration and knowledge building, and in the process, incrementally to be part of growing new ways of teaching and learning that are more participatory, community-based, and bottom up.

Those of us lucky enough to have a dependable broadband internet connection already IM, email, skype, poke, post pictures, edit wikis, blog, post in forums, share bookmarks, video conference, tag, rate, review, and recommend favorite things to both friends and strangers, as part of a digital lifestyle. The knowledge-building potential is enormous and growing due to repurposeable materials and the collaboration possibilities that surround them.

The recent addition of the Library of Congress’ historical image collections to Flickr, which are appropriately tagged with the word “commons,” is a red-hot example of “doing OER.” The images are not formally licensed, but are shared under the terms “no known restrictions.” It is this type of engagement opportunity—i.e., the encouragement of communal tagging—that OER is meant to achieve.

Another example of doing OER is the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium’s use of problem spaces. In contrast to static collections of data or lessons, problem spaces are dynamic workspaces where teachers and students share their work. Rather than using a more traditional lab approach where the students—who in this case are college instructors or pre-service teachers—may be asked to follow highly structured procedures, problem spaces emphasize the development and exploration of student questions as they come to understand biological principles, analytical procedures, and the formulation of data-based inferences. By collecting and displaying the work of others, problem spaces contextualize scientific inquiry within a community of practice where meaning is negotiated and problems have a history across multiple researchers.

Publicly available datasets, inquiry-based models for learning, collaborative tools and environments for sharing—these are the building blocks for “doing OER.” At ISKME we support ways for teachers to benefit from existing practices of online communities. This includes facilitating their ability to create and share “microcontent,” or smaller pieces of information drawn from multiple platforms (e.g., wikis) that can be augmented, revised, and re-combined, and engaging them in the use of web-based tools, such as OER Commons, which allow them to attach their own tags to online content, thus creating meaning from the bottom up as opposed to that which is predetermined by content experts.

One of the things common to doing OER is that of crossing boundaries of traditional roles. Stepping into new collaborative processes creates opportunities for participants to move beyond established roles—by, e.g., providing spaces where teachers and students and teachers and their colleagues can co-create content. But such opportunities may also pose risks to a teacher’s professional status. What benefits are there for teachers to share their content online?

How can teachers work within the frame of institutional structures that do not yet support collaborative ways of working, and do not reward teachers for the time and resources spent? Especially for the K-12 arena, these questions have yet to find answers. Several hundred K-12 teachers using LeMill.net are, in fact, creating and posting content for anyone to see and adapt; yet, teachers on the whole may need support in stepping into new roles such as that of OER author or online collaborators.

At ISKME, we have just begun a pilot project with 18 middle school science teachers in four countries to see how they find and adapt resources, use available tools, and collaborate with each other and with their students around issues related to climate change and ecology. Creative remixing of teaching and learning materials will likely find its place here, but we expect to see challenges in cross-cultural, multi-lingual online sharing. We’re interested to understand how much support and facilitation the group might need, and whether OER materials can be produced with relative ease and with minimal difficulty and risk on the part of teachers.

Furthermore, ISKME has developed a set of OER case studies by studying how a range of other OER projects form, change, and evaluate their own progress, and has created an OER How-To Manual that aims to offer practical assistance to anyone looking to start or evaluate their OER efforts. ISKME’s case study work has revealed that a key element in “doing OER” has been to include face-to-face training, mentoring, and working with peers and experts. In one of the cases, Free High School Science Texts, it was clear that high-quality resources don’t just happen online on their own. In this grassroots project based in South Africa, a highly collaborative and participatory infrastructure was built over time to bring authors together both online and in person, and to organize their workflow, establish quality criteria, reward their input, and deploy their “finished” publications.

Through the OER Commons initiative, our educative role is to identify and construct models that support a mindset about evolutionary change through OER collaboration, knowing full well that simply distributing OER content alone won’t dig us out from old models. New models for teaching and learning are a necessary part of the doing, especially in terms of facilitating problem-based inquiry and data sharing, mentoring and cycling through feedback with peers.

Perhaps through considering examples of OER in action, we might have a chance to reflect on the “promise of OER” and ask if we getting any closer to it through the way that we are doing it.

Further readings:

• B. Collis and J. Moonen, Flexible Learning in a Digital world: Experiences and Expectations (London: Kogan Page, 2001)
• S.E. Metros K. and Bennett, “Learning Objects in Higher Education,” ECAR Research Bulletin 19, (Boulder, CO: 2002)
• L. Petrides and C. Jimes, “Open Educational Resources: Toward a New Educational Paradigm,” iJournal Insight into Student Services 14 (Oct. 2006).
• Y. Benkler, Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials (Utah: Utah State University, 2005) (pdf)
• L. Petrides, Turning Data into Knowledge: What’s Data Got to Do with It? (Phoenix: League for Innovation in the Community College, 2004)
• L. Petrides and T. Nodine, Anatomy of School System Improvement: Performance-Driven Practices in Urban School Districts (San Francisco: New Schools Venture Fund, 2005).