I am going to take this occasion to rave a bit about OpenEd 2007 and the 3rd day of the meeting. This was one of the best meetings that I have attended in years. It was small enough for all of us to dine together (and for David Wyles to act as personal host to each guest), but was diverse and large enough to support spirited conversation from multiple perspectives. I hope that the Open Education meetings can maintain this balance as the Open Educational Resources and Libre Knowledge movement continues to grow.

It is worth mentioning that Open Education 2007 is supported on a conference resource site called 51 Weeks, which is still under development. It is a great tool that allows the activities occurring at the conference and the conference resources to be made available and put in some context. Each session has a description, chat area, and links to download resources. The application was being tweaked throughout the conference, so if you visit the support site and it is behaving oddly, you can report the behavior through 51 Weeks Feedback.

As mentioned in my postings on Days one and two, I was thoroughly engaged in each of the presentations that I attended. If you were not in attendance, it is worth checking out the presentation materials, audio files, and presentation videos where available. These materials are available on the Open Education 2007, 51 Weeks conference support site.

Although not well attended (it was the last session on the last day of the meeting), I found that Requel Xalabarer’s presentation titled Open Content, Universities and ISP Liability Exemptions, provided a refreshing perspective on the liability issues that institutions and OER projects might be considering. Her presentation reflected some of the complexity and confusion in the laws (particularly US and EU) that regulate and assign responsibility for transmission, cashing, and hosting of content. Although some of the presentation focused on copyright infringement, Requel also highlighted other types of non-copyright related issues such as rights to privacy, which I think are largely overlooked or at least have lower profile than “property” rights in our dialog.

I also would like to point to an interesting presentation by Amee Godwin and Leslie Rule that put a new perspective on “Localization” for me. Their presentation titled Placeholding: Location-Specific Metadata and Context for Open Content, pointed to the connection between physical location and context for educational experience. It seems to me that fusing geographic, and demographic information and educational content, activities, etc. with a graphical map-like presentation, could be a very powerful way of connecting learners, teachers, content designers, developers, and other stakeholders who want to take advantage of OER and who want to design and share OER that is internationalizable and localizable.

Once again, I am just highlighting some of the stuff that I found interesting. I will be taking advantage of the resources on 51 Weeks to “virtually” attend many of the other sessions that I was not able to physically attend during the meeting.

It was another great day here at Open Education 2007 in Logan Utah. In addition to some fantastic presentations there were a number of substantive announcements including:

• Establishment of the Open OpenCourseWare (OOCW) initiative, which will be a non-university based resource designed for individual faculty members who want to share their openly licensed course materials, and provides a low-barrier means for universities to launch their own open courseware effort without having to host and maintain their own OCW site.
• ccLearn is launching an Open Education Search project to enhance large-scale access to open education resources. They are still collecting links and feeds for resources.
• Establishment of an eduCommons development project. The eduCommons team is interested in engaging with institutions that are willing to commit programmer resources to contribute to the sustained development of eduCommons. Universidad de Alicante has already contributed a fulltime developer for the coming year!!
• The Utah OpenCourseWare Alliance was announced. This is an alliance composed of 7 colleges and universities in Utah that will share expertise and resources to develop open courseware and community.
• Utah State University has connected its OCW initiative to reduce financial barriers to earn credits at USU. Learners can use OCW to prepare for “testing out of courses” and earning credit at a fraction of the cost of registering and completing the course work for credit.

Note that the audio files of these announcements are available at the Opening Remarks, ccLearn and OER Custom Search, and Utah OpenCourseWare Alliance Launch presentation sites.

I find the last point about USU connecting OER with credit opportunities very interesting. We have some ideas about success factors in resident, distance, and online learning, but what about independent self-paced courses that are taken without traditional educational support services? Would it be in the interest of the OER movement to think a bit about how to support learners using OER to attain credit?

Although I have not been disappointed with any of the presentations that I have attended, I was very exited about the Keynote by Fred Mednick of Teachers Without Borders, who did a great job connecting OER and education development need. During his presentation he offered partnership opportunities to connect in real ways OER projects with Teachers Without Borders activities, providing opportunities to make the promise or OER real and to learn about how to make our efforts more impactful.

I also enjoyed Kim Tucker’s presentation on Libre Learning—OER and Equality during which he discussed a number of activities and challenges in southern Africa and pointed us to an interesting resource he just wrote titled Say “Libre” for Knowledge and Learning Resources, in which the differences between free/libre and Open are discussed.

Finally, I had the opportunity to learn a bit about an interesting analysis framework that tied motivation and ability (capacity) to innovation for OER in developing countries. The model treated NGOs, Governments, and Education and Education Service providers as groups and pointed to current and future influences that would impact effectiveness. This is the first application of research that I have seen in this area. Very exciting and worth following.

Hello. Rob Abel’s Posting, Open Source and Open Standards for the OER and OSS Impact on Education Series has been underway for a week and is still active. Please feel free to read Rob’s posting and contribute to the dialog. Although I do not normally make any posts while a guest is contributing to the OER and OSS Impact on Education Series, in this case I am going to make an exception.

I am participating in a very exciting meeting and want to provide a quick update of the first day of the OpenEd 2007 meeting and two of the points that I found very interesting that were raised during presentations. But first, if you are interested in learning about the meeting, check out the COSL web site, and if you really interested in following along, click on the Final Program link, that will take you to the conference support page on 51 Weeks.

Yesterday morning Manohar Bhattarai (HINT: click on the name to access audio podcasts and presentation materials) delivered the first keynote presentation, which was fantastic. One of the things that really stuck with me was his introduction of the idea expanding “OER” to “OERD” (Open Educational Resources for Development), which would shift the emphasis from academic resources to educational resources that more directly address development needs. During the presentation I was participating in a conference chat session and a short dialog developed about how this notion was quite coherent with the emphasis that some universities have on Extension services, Cooperative Education, and Outreach. Scott Leslie mentioned that although “Extension Services” is a U.S. term, that the same functionality exists in Canada, and I know it exists elsewhere under different names and is articulated through difference organizations. In any event, I feel (although this is unfounded) that the development, outreach, extension, cooperative education, etc. communities might take to OERD with even more enthusiasm than academic faculty and managers have in higher education.

Later in the day Chris Hoadley of Penn State presented an update on a fascinating project in India and Nepal that emphasized the importance of cultural coherence and relationships when designing appropriate educational technology for the developing world. Chris Geith of Michigan State University asked a follow-up question about video resources that were created during the project and how they are being made “open.” Chris’ reply was thought provoking. He indicated that in making them available through the Internet, accessible means will not make them available to the principal intended audience in India and Napal. The extent to which the materials are open should be determined by the communities creating the assets, within a context that makes sense. This raises interesting questions about the impact of creating context around culturally mediated and value-laden content that requires translation and other types of processing for wide distribution and use (internationalization).