The Wales-Wide Web

We've spent a lot of time at the Hewlett Conference on Open educational Resources being persuaded that mobile phones are the future platform for e-learning, particularly in the developing countries, especially with the spread of wifi enabled phones. May be right, may be wrong - I'm not convinced one way or the other. in general I am unconvinced that the next platform is the key issue although affordability and access to hardware and infrastructure is obviously a key issue in those countries. I am even less convinced that aid is counter productive and the answer is to leave it to the market as we are being told (citing research funded by Vodaphone!).

Some of the figures are pretty interesting though (not sure of the source).

Developing world

• There are 1.5 billion mobile phones in the developing world
• The industry expects to sell another 1 billion in the next 3 years
• Mobile phone usage is growing by 1 million a month growth in india

India

• There are 48 mobile phone users per thousand of population
• There are 23 internet users per thousand of population
• There are 11 PC users per thousand of population
• There are 0.5 broadband users per thousand of population

China

• There are 258 mobile users per thousand of population
• There are 73 internet users per thousand of population
  
• There are 40 PC users per thousand of population

Brazil

• There are 109 internet suers per thousand of population
  
• There are 86 PC users per thousand of population

South Africa

• There are 471 mobile users per thousand of population
  
• There are 81 internet users per thousand of population
  
• There are 88 PC users per thousand of population

Indonesia

• There are 141 mobile phone users per thousand of population
• There are 52 internet users per thousand of population
• There are 19 PC users per thousand of population

Percentage of population with mobile phone coverage

• India - 40%
• China - 56%
• South Africa - 90%
• Indonesia 73%

What does all this mean? I'm not sure but it does tend to point to the potential of mobile phones as a platform.

As promised an update on the Wliiam and Flora Hewlett Foundation Open Educational resources programme.

There are many interesting people here and the informal sessions are pretty good. The conference itself is rather traditional - bit of a shame given that they did get the key documents out in advance - there could have been far less presentations and more time for discussions.

Yesterday i posted a summary of the main report introduced at the conference - a Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities. by Daniel Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen Hammond (see also a critical review by Stephen Downes).

Discussions, at least in the informal sessions, have focused on three main issues.

the first is internationalism and the role of the programme with relation to the developing world. In this regard it is unfortunate that the major part of the report on the developing world is contained as an appendix to the main report. But there remains a feeling that the report is talking about how we can export OERs from the economically advanced countries (which sometimes seem to be reduced to the USA) to the developing countries.

There is little or no emphasis on how the OEr movement can support development in the underdeveloped countries, less still on how that content might be shared and valued.

The second is the assumption of the leading role of universities in the OEr movement. whilst talking about wider forms of learning, new pedagogies and different forms of knowledge, especially tacit knowledge, universities are still given the leading role in developing the proposed Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI).

And the third 'emergent issue' is the role of people and networks as opposed to technology in facilitating the development, sharing and reuse of OERs. Although the document recognises social objectives as integral the OPLI still seems technologically driven, rather than based on real learning needs.

Nothing new in this - but given the global ambition and social objectives of the Hewlett Foundation they are pretty fundamental issues.

I am in Houston, Texas for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation 2007 Open Educational resources Grantees meeting.

Central to the event is a presentation by Daniel Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen Hammond, of their 

Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities.

It is a substantial report with many interesting asides and well worth a read.

They identify the following 'key enablers' as driving the OER movement:

• "open source code, open multimedia content and the community or institutional structures that produce or enable them;
• the growth of what we are calling participatory systems architecture; Our notion of architecture includes both technical and social dimensions.
• the continuing improvement in performance and access to the underlying information and communication technology (ICT);
• increasing availability and use of rich media, virtual environments, and gaming; and
• the emerging deeper basic insights into human learning (both individual and community) that can informed and validated by pilot projects and action-based research."

Central to the report is the call for the development of an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) (which is not a long way form what Ray Elferink and I have been advocating in the form of an Architecture of Participation. The authors "believe that the Hewlett Foundation can play a leadership role in weaving the threads of an expanded OER movement; the e-science movement; the e-humanities movement; new forms of participation around Web 2.0; social software; virtualization; and multimode, multimedia documents into a transformative open participatory learning infrastructure—the platform for a culture of learning."

They go on to say that "the proposed OPLI seeks to enable a decentralized learning environment that:  (1) permits distributed participatory learning; (2) provides incentives for participation (provisioning of open resources, creating specific learning environments, evaluation) at all levels; and (3) encourages cross-boundary and cross cultural learning." The OPLI can be envisaged as "a dream space for participatory learning that enables students anywhere to engage in experimenting, exploring, building, tinkering and reflecting in a way that makes learning by doing and productive inquiry a seamless process."

This is good stuff indeed - visionary but not beyond the realms of what can be achieved. Particularly welcome is the weving together of technical and social objectives. My only reservation is the continued stress on the role of higher education institutions - but maybe this is a reflection of the objectives of the Hewlett Foundation.

More tomorrow - I'll try and post a couple of live blogs from the conference. In the meantime I'm off to the Longneck Reception and the Good Company Barbecue Dinner.

As part of my work for the the European Bazaar project I am  running a seminar entitled Social Software and Web 2.0: a challenge to the future of schooling. You can find details about the seminar and how you can take part below. But first here is the topic of the seminar.
 
'In a recent blog post Rita Kop says: “There is currently a vast array of communications options available on the Internet. Especially young people have grasped the potential offered to them by blogs, web pages and increasingly personal spaces such as 'My Space' and 'youtube' to make links with like minded people and to invite comments and messages to their postings. The speed in which communities are being formed has surprised most observers. Participants in these developments, though, take them for granted as expressing themselves to the wider world has increasingly become part of their life style.

The education world has not grasped yet the revolution that is taking place outside the class room. The discrepancy in the way technology is being used inside and outside the class room seems to be growing.

The availability of blog and web authoring tools and their ease of use have made that a vast number of people are now engaged in interacting on the Internet. It has created a huge leap forward in moving people on from being consumers to becoming producers of information.

As educators know, the pace of change within institutions is a lot slower than outside the brick walls, which raises questions about the ability of formal education institutions to keep engaged the generation that lives in a technology saturated world and has grown up with technology.”

At the same time researchers have begun to explore the idea of Personal Learning environments or PLEs. Rather than access a single learning application or a walled institutional learning area, the idea of a PLE is that learners can configure different services and tools to develop their own learning environment, bringing together informal learning from the home, the workplace as well as more formal provision by education institutions. The PLE is controlled by the learner and as well as offering an environment for accessing different information and knowledge allows access to web based publishing and other opportunities for creating content and expressing and exchanging ideas.

The idea behind the PLE is to harness the power and potential of social software and web 2.0 applications for learning.

As Graham Attwell has pointed out PLEs may be a seriously disruptive development, challenging the present model of schooling. The seminar is intended to examine the changing ways in which we are using technology for learning, to look at the potential of Personal Learning Environments and to discuss the implications for the future of our education systems.

This could include (but is not limited to) the following issues:

• Young people are increasingly using social networking sites and social software applications - but are they learning?
• What does the new uses of technology for learning imply for pedagogy and the future role of teachers
• What is the role of school in the future of more and more learning takes place over the internet
• How can technology supported informal learning be recognised
• How disruptive are the new technologies to the education system - is it just a bubble?
• How can Personal Learning Environments be reconciled with the social nature of learning?
• What are the implications of technology supported learning and PLEs for social equity within education?
• What sort of technological infrastructure should the education system be providing for learning?
• If content is increasingly created by teachers an learners and is open for access, how will we guarantee quality?
• Does increasing learner control and autonomy spell the end of centralised curricula?

and

• How dude, where’s my data?'

Click 'more' to find out how you can take part.

Last Friday I chaired one of the morning plenary sessions at Educa on-line.

the session was on informal learning and was packed out - about 700 'participants'. At least informal learning is now being taken seriously - although I have to say this was not perhaps the ideal setting for learning to take place - formal or informal.

there were four speakers. I was a little disappointed with Jay Cross - who - although he said it nicely - seemed to say little or nothing new. I was greatly impressed with Kevin Wheeler from 'Global Learning Resources' - in general I am pretty cynical about consultants but Kevin knows what he is talking about, is reflective and challenging.

Then there were presentations form Yael Ravin from IBM and Mike McKeown from Cisco (I have to say this is not my normal setup or company - but I kind of enjoyed a glimpse into the corporate world). Both gave competent presentations, as one would expect. Both showed off what their companies were doing in terms of using ICT to encourage informal learning.

Neither really gave any indication of how successful such activities were (even more useful would have been what is not working and why) - rather they focused on the different platforms they had developed. I am quite sure they had put much time and expertise into developing these platforms but i saw little that could not be hacked together in a day or two using open source and a little ingenuity. perhaps that is just a sign of how fast social software has advanced!

I spent a tedious morning yesterday subtitling a video into five different languages (and in the course of it discovering every bug in i-Movie). To entertain myself I was listening to BBC Radio 5 - mainly because I'm thinking about chat show formats and their applicability to simultaneous on-line teaching and learning.

And on came this fascinating report.

"Five Live Report: 'Bullied Teachers'
Teachers have always had to face cruel gossip from kids, but until very recently the trouble has usually been contained within the school building. Now - with the advent of the video mobile phone and websites like Bebo.com and ratemyteacher.com, they are finding themselves publicly humiliated and even falsely accused of sexual impropriety. Reporter James Silver looks at the internet phenomenon encouraging school children to grade their teachers and talks to those in the profession at the receiving end of malicious comments and allegations."

The big discussion was over the web site, ratemyteacher.com. Students create their accounts and are able to rate their teacher. There is a flag for alerting to inappropriate content which the site managers say will then be taken down and investigating. One cause of controversy is whether this does happen and if so, how long it takes. Clearly the process is not as effective as the service claims.

The second, and here the teachers unions in the UK were most unhappy, was over the stress it can cause to teachers. My fear is that students are probably quite fair - teachers are unlikely to be stressed by unwarranted invective but may well get stressed by learning the truth of how students perceive their teaching.

There appears little effort by the (commercial) service developers to educate students in providing constructive feedback, neither is their a mechanism for discourse between teachers and students.

Given that such services will flourish in the future, education providers are going to have to rethink how students can be involved in the development, design and management to teaching and learning. It is only by giving learners a voice (and by listening to that voice) that constructive and inclusive approaches to quality (for this is - albeit crude) a quality system) can be developed.

NB. The programme is available to listen to over the internet for the next six days. But you will have to listen tot he whole programme and I think this report occurs about half way through. What a pity that the BBC does not make this sort of content available as a download for remixing - this would be a great piece of content for starting a discussion with learners over the use of the internet and quality systems.

Technorati Tags: quality2.0, social software

Great Bazaar seminar - 'Hey Dude, Where's my Data' in Barcelona yesterday. No time now to write a longer piece as I am at an OECD 'expert meeting' on Open Educational Resources (ironically invite only). I will try to write up my first thoughts at the weekend and of course will write a fuller account on the Bazaar project wiki. In the meantime you can read blog posts from the meeting by Ismael Pena Lopez on his ICTlogy blog.

Now live from the OECD meeting. Shigagawa Miyagawa from MIT talked about the MIT Open Courseware initiative as a social initiative to counter the "huge social cost if we let the dot coms take over'. He acknowledged the need to develop sustainability models. He talked about access and that in many African Universities despite poor internet access, there were excellent Local Area Networks. Therefore the is copying open courseware onto external hard drives for physical installation of university LANs.

Patrick McAndrew from the UK Open University presented the OpenLearn initiative, launched by the University yesterday. Looks extremely interesting, especially as through their OpenLab they are trying to make it easy for users to remix materials. We are going to hear a lot more about this in the future. Patrick presented OpenLearn as an experiment, saying the OU is not as brave as MIT. However he feels it impossible for the OU to reverse the direction they have taken, although he is still concerned at the costs of development.

The materials are available in XML and he feels the experience of this is of value to the university as a whole.

There is a continuing debate (which also came up at the Bazaar meeting) running over quality and whether universities should have a role in accrediting materials.

Patrick feels we are looking at futures - University 2.0 - and said there are many unknowns. We do even know if people learn using open content.

Technorati Tags: open_content, OER, social software

One of the reasons I like blogging is the opportunity to share work in progress. In this case it really is work in progress. I am writing a paper on Open Content and Open Educational Resources for the CODATA conference to be held in Beijing later this month.
One of my issues with the Open Content / Open Knowledge debate is that it is hardly new. So what is innovative about the whole idea. This is what I have juts written. Be interested in any comments.
"Open Content, or Open Educational Resources, is hardly a new idea. Indeed it could be said that everyday teaching involves the open sharing of knowledge ideas and content. Furthermore, much of scientific development through publicly funded universities has been premised on the sharing of research and research outcomes with often elaborated cultural and social processes for both assuring the quality of those outcomes and for regulating the exchange of knowledge. It may be that rather than seeing Open Content as a new phenomenon we should rather look at changing forms of cultural exchange and regulation, based on changes in production processes, new forms and organisation of innovation, new understandings of knowledge production and, of course, rapid changes in technologies."

Technorati Tags: open content

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | Home videos, beauty contests and party stunts: the future of mobiles:

I don't know whether to be sad or sorry. Having spent the last two years talking about user generated content, the big technology providers have themselves suddenly got it:

From the Guardian on-line:

"Mobile companies have been watching the rapid growth of networking and video-sharing websites such as MySpace and YouTube. They have realised that content created by users themselves might be just what they need to persuade their customers to do more with their phones than make calls and send text messages.

The mobile industry has spent billions of pounds on licences to run new services over 3G networks, and reassured nervous investors that the future of mobiles in markets where everyone already has a phone is based on customers downloading videos and accessing the internet. But the take-up of such products has been slack."

"Having invested in high-speed networks, user-generated content is an obvious next step, whether they do it themselves or work with existing online brands," says Frédéric Huet, managing director of industry specialist Greenwich Consulting UK. "It's very cheap to set up and it very quickly gets high usage.""

As the idea of user generated content mainstreams, the issue for education is how we use such content, store and share content and how we 'judge' the quality of content. This has quite profound implications, given that the traditional model was to trust in academic qualifications and names, to provide approved lists of materials or to trust in publishers kitemarks.

Technorati Tags: Open content, social software

I am increasingly interested in how we can use social bookmarks or tagging as a form of developing social networks based on content. We all know that social networking is a powerful tool for informal learning. But the friend of a friend type approach assumes a commonality of interest which does not always exist!

Tagging has the potential to generate similar social networks - based not on just friendship - however many steps renewed - but based on commonality of interest.

There are two contexts in which I am looking at tagging and at using delicio.us. The first is for research students. A friend of mine is researching sustatinable production. She is spending a considerable time undertaking a literature search, mainly through the internet and bookmarking sites on her computer. If she was to use delicio.us tags, not only would she develop a useful shared resource for all of us, but through following people who had used the sme tags, would speed up her work by finding what other work they had been following.

My second interest is as part of the background research for the MOSEP project. MOSEP is a European funded project researching and piloting e-Portfolios for vocational school students. For this project I have devised an initial list of tags which (I have suggested the seven or so partners in the project all use in their literature reviews and research activities. Hopefully, this will allow us to share our work in a distributed network. I will report back on how this goes.

My friend Mike Malloch has developed a very considerable resource of tags. He uses an interesting link blog to display this tags. he also has been working on developing different tools for displaying tags, including tag clouds and a tag viewer.

for another example of a useful tag collection, Colin Milligan from Cetis has assembled a collection of links to resources around Personal Learning Environments.

Technorati Tags: Peronal Learning Environments, tagging

for the last two years i have written regularly on this blog about the dangers of privatization of education and more particularly about the risk from privately owned technology companies.

And so it has come to pass. Blackboard have announced that it has been issued a U.S. patent for technology used for internet-based education support systems and methods. The patent, they say, covers core technology relating to certain systems and methods involved in offering online education, including course management systems and enterprise e-Learning systems.

Already Blackboard have issued legal action against Canadian company DesiretoLearn, claiming infringement of patent. Obviously this poses a threat to large parts of the Open Source educational technology movement.

I could go on but to be honest I fail to find words which adequately describe such stupidity. See Stephen Downes for a summary of what people are saying.

Two immediate things need to be done. we must put more effort into the campaign against software patents in the European Union. And Blackboard claim to have patents pending in Europe. Does anyone know what this means and if there are ways of opposing them?

Technorati Tags: Copyright, e-learning, no patent law, Open content, Open source

Second of two posts on new open content initiatives.

"Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in the database and write high quality descriptions of the resources. The database contains 113495 records."

Many years ago I was involved in the REM project, run by Bangor University. REM was supposed to be a Resource Locator. It sort of got built - but would only run in Netscape 4 - on a good day - when the servers were feeling friendly. REM was years ahead of its time - so of course the funding was withdrawn. Now 8 years later Intute comes along showing what REM should have been.

Its been a long wait - but its worth it.

Technorati Tags: open content

Inside Higher Ed :: New Model for Scholarly Publishing:

It might be summer but the Open Content movement continues to gather strength.

Here is the first of two post on recent announcements / releases.

"Rice University Press, which was killed in 1996, will be revived. But unlike every other university press, it will publish all of its books online only. People will be able to read the books for no charge and to download them for a modest fee. Editors will solicit manuscripts and peer review panels will vet submissions — all in ways that are similar to the systems in traditional publishing."

Much to be welcomed especially given Rice's association with the Connexions project. Interesting - why would I publish through Rice, rather than just put the PDF on my own web site. Guess the answer has to be that they see publishing through the Rice site as conveying some kind of additional prestige. I am not so sure this will work in the long term.

Technorati Tags: Open content

Multimedia software is not particularly difficult to use. It is quite rewarding in that there is an air of mystique - you really know how to mix sound or to edit video. In truth it is no harder than using Microsoft word (although perhaps that is not a recommendation).

What is difficult is the workflow. even using Apple software (designed with a services layer for interoperability between different applications) workflows are clunky, each project seems to be different and require advance thought with alternative ways of doing things. the result if that even simple projects become extremely time consuming.

Why is this? Large file sizes don't help. Sharing files can be difficult - they often will not fit on a memory stick. More than that no one seems to have thought out what the software might be used for in the real work. Instead it is designed to a technical specification - for ideal type uses by specialists - not by educationalists, teachers or researchers as one part of a busy workload.

Technorati Tags: multimedia, technology

This is a trailer.

At almost every meeting I have been to lately - and I have been to a lot of meetings - the issue of data ownership and access to data has arisen.

Yes Web 2 is great for allowing mash ups and integrating services to produce rich and interactive web sites. But the reliance on external services from mostly commercial companies does raise a whole series of issues. Can we trust these people with our data? will we still have access to this data in the future.? What is to stop them data mining for their own purposes?

These concerns do not limit themselves to commercial companies. What happens to an e-Portfolio after a student has left and institution. At least one UK university is considering charging ex-students for continuing access to their portfolio.

Later this year, the Bazaar project will be holding a seminar around these issues. We will be issuing a call for position papers. If, in the meantime, you would like to be kept informed about details of th seminar please send me an email.

Technorati Tags: e-learning, education and training research, eportfolio

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | A sidestep in the right direction:

I love the creativity of the new breed of projects seeking to use geomapping technologies of open content. In the UK the main mapmakers are the Ordnance Survey, now a privatised concern, who guard their copyright over data. Now there is a new initiative to create maps in the public domain.

It is also raising interesting questions about how we look at maps and other forms of digital data and how up to date data needs to be.

"Steer is taking part in an attempt to map the Isle of Wight's roads in one weekend for OpenStreetMap.org, a website that helps create maps free for anyone to use for any purpose (See http://tinyurl.com/ny84m). If Ordnance Survey and other national agencies will not make their data freely available, then OpenStreetMap, developed over the past two years, will re-collect it from scratch."

Technorati Tags: Copyright, Open content, Open source

The absolutely central thing to understand here is that production logic of the industrial era is changing from centralized (central IP control, centralized production, controlled distribution, few developers) to decentralized (decentralized production, distributed costs, lots of developers, IP in the commons). The driver here is that as you benefit from the commons, you are likely to contribute something back to the commons. This is technically enabled by the licensing, which often requires that you give the next person the same rights you received in the first hand. It’s a gift economy, but driven by economical benefits. It supports free markets by creating an open market, rather than a closed market.

IP in an Open Source Society; who is paying who? - FLOSSE Posse

There are two ways of looking at this. One is to argue that Open Source and Open Content represents 'merely' a new form of market organisation under capitalism. And of course for many companies that is what it is - I am unsure mind that IBM licensing under the GPL represents a 'gift economy'.

On the other hand a lot of the work done on Open Content and Open Source is freely given and is undertaken in peoples own free time. I don't think think this is part of a capitalist market economy at all. Is this possible under capitalism. It seems to me there have always been instances of meaningful and socially valuable activities undertaken in the period of capitalism but for which no market value as such has been asked for or ascribed.

The big move in the last 10 years or so has been to attempt to place a market or exchange value on everything - including, critically knowledge. It is juts this move which has driven the attempts to extend IPR.

We should celebrate activity which takes place outside the bounds of the market, rather than try to recognise market value. (Incidentally this is why I disagree with those trying to introduce LETS systems - or barter systems for software and content development. these represent a market economy using time as cash - rather than cash itself for exchanging goods. But it is the same thing at the end of the day).

Would welcome any other opinions on this.

Technorati Tags: Open content, Open source, OSS

I have only read the abstract for this paper but am sufficently interested to have printed the whole paper for weekend reading (curious that I still prefer reading on paper to on-screen for anything but shortish newspaper articles).

However I think there is a very important point made here. I fear that the so called open access movement for journals - which effectively switches who pays - but not the fundamental economic relations - is doing a disservice to the wider open content movement. Scientific content should be freely available and can be through electronic publishing.

Jean Valsiner says:

I claim that what is called "open access" is actually a transformed form of traditional ("closed") access, and is "open" only by its obviously appealing label. As a re-organizational move of institutionalized kind, it benefits the economically powerful—usually "first world" based—research groups and corporations, and leads to new economic limits for the publication of innovative research emanating from less affluent researchers and laboratories. By shifting the costs of scientific publication from the recipients (journal subscribers) to the authors of published articles, "open access" creates a social scenario of one-sided information flow rather than a new form of "openness" in scholarly communication. By monopolizing the sources of scientific communication the "open access" initiative defeats its stated purpose.

Jaan Valsiner: "Open Access" and its Social Context: New Colonialism in the Making? in FQS 7(2)(Review Essay)

Technorati Tags: Open content

I am getting more and more excited by the potential of multi media through the web.

Dave Tosh introduced me to Dave Cormier who has set up the Webcast Academy - I love the pedagogy behind this.

"The goals of the Webcast Academy include

• increasing the number of people who are capable of producing live, interactive webcasts
• applying the open source community approach to skill development
• creating a place that formally recognizes proficiency, excellence, and innovation in these new media skills."

And Dave showed me the WebheadsinAction site - this is indeed cool stuff.

"Webheads is a world-wide, cross-cultural, and vibrant online-community of educators with an open enrollment for anyone who wants to join. Webheads in Action was created in 1997-8 by Vance Stevens, in Abu Dhabi, Maggi Doty in Germany, and Michael Coghlan, in Australia, for ESL learners and facilitators as a student-teacher community. It has expanded to encompass a myriad of educators involved in e-learning in TESOL EVOnline (Electronic Village) and other language or cultural-based curricula. Webheads meet online regularly to explore the latest synchronous and non-synchronous communications technologies, including video and voice, to adapt and demonstrate new innovative ideas for e- learning and classroom curriculum. These educators also display a deep warmth and dedication to helping others. They are evolutionary and enterprising scholars who are harmonious and know how to have a lot of fun."

Technorati Tags: communities of practice, edublogs, Open content, Open source, podcasts

Interesting s series of posts by Tom Hoffman who is looking at the idea of seeking to have the Pacesetter English curriculum released under an open content license, such as a Creative Commons license.
Tom says "The most obvious question is "Why?" What would the goals of this project be?
The most direct goal is to save the curriculum from oblivion. Pacesetter English represents untold thousands of hours of work throughout the 1990's by many of the leading experts on English instruction, as well as classroom teachers who helped develop and test the work. .... Since all the contents of Pacesetter are proprietary, everything that was learned in its creation and embodied in its texts will simply be inaccessible, lost to the world. This would be a tragic waste."
I think the issue goes further than not wasting the effort of the curriculum developers. It raises questions about what we are trying to achieve in developing Open Content for education. Of course Open Content learning materials and multi media are a boon to teachers. But there is some doubt over how prepared and easy teachers are in using other peoples learning designs.
But Open Content materials on their own do not provide a learning programme. I have written much on informal learning and learner driven(or auto-didactic) learning. However there is a case to say that learners - even those motivated to learn in their own time out of need or interest, need some form of guidance in developing ideas and knowledge. Such guidance has traditionally been contained in curricula.
A big issue - and one that Tom begins to explore - is what form an Open Curriculum might take, How far is a a guide to teachers in help them structure their teaching programme - and how much might it be a guide for learners to assist them in structuring their own learning?

Technorati Tags: edublogs, Open content, oss_education