Week 9 of CCK11 was about openness and transparency. There are huge discussions and debates nowadays about open movement: open source, open content, open access, open educational resources (OER) and so on and especially what they can bring to our educational and learning practices. How all content and information could be freely accessible to all? Who pays for them? What are the roles of educational institutions in moving towards openness and are there any benefits for them to make contents and materials closed or make them open?
On Wednesday live session on Elluminate (March 16th), Zaid Ali Alsagoff talked about: Sharing to Connect, Interact and Learn . He was an active participant of MOOCs (PLENK2010, CCK11) whose insightful reflections and perceptions of openness and connectivity were shared in the session with other participants of the course. The discussion was all great and inspired me to ponder more about these issues in my research also. Here is his presentation on Slideshare and the entire session as Elluminate Recording and as MP3 Audio.
This quote as a conclusion of this discussion makes us think of the value of openness in education:
“Embrace openness because it’s a great way to connect and interact with amazing people and experience awesome learning”!
I think for being open and transparent in learning and collaboration, some tools like blogs, Twitter, Slideshare, YouTube, Google, Bookmarking tools etc. can help us for aggregating, organizing, remixing and sharing our content and artifacts. Perhaps Twitter and blogging have more values for openness and visibility and to promote connectivity.
On Friday, the facilitator’s discussion continued by Siemens and Downes on the history open movement in education. Siemens referred to the first initiatives of open source movement and how they were reacted at the time. It was in 1998 that the ‘Open Content License’ was introduced: http://www.opencontent.org/opl.shtml
Here are some links related to open movement and openness in education:
George Siemens, Free and Open Source Movements
George Siemens, Open Source Content in Education
Stephen Downes, Open Education: Projects and Potentual (slides and audio)
George Siemens & Kathleen Matheos, Open Social Learning in Higher Education: An African Context (video)
Stephen Downes, The Future of Open Educational Resources (video)
Alan Levine, Amazing Stories of Openness
Stephen Downes, Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources
Stephen Downes and David Wiley, Downes-Wiley: A Conversation on Open Educational Resources
Open Education: Moving From Concept to Reality by G. Siemens: http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/OE_presentation.htm
It was mentioned in the discussion that there are three phases of open learning:
- Open Content, e.g. open educational resources (OER) , open course ware (OCW)
- Open Courses, e.g. CCK11, PLENK2010, EC&I831, PLEK12, DS106, …
- Open Assessment, which is also very important among topics of openness in education. What does that really mean? How it can be applied in the context of open education. Who can assess learning? Who are the stakeholders in the process of open assessment?
The Elluminate recording of the session will be soon available.
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