Open Access, Open Content, OER: Towards the future of scholarship and research

This week is the 'Open Access' week, a movement which has started few years ago to raise the importance of openness and free sharing of information and content. This is to highlight the significance and the potential of open/free educational resources in academia in different disciplines from science to humanities and for the global society on the whole. Open/free access promises for more democratic opportunities to “the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – and has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted” (OC page; http://www.openaccessweek.org/).

There are various activities and events this week to promote open access in a global level. Some of them are listed in the page above which is a network dedicated to enhance this movement. Of which there are some webinars by the Athabasca University in Canada that I am following:  October 24, 2011: Fun and Fear in Open Spaces, October 25, 2011: Post Secondary Leadership and the OER Movement , October 26, 2011: Making Sense of Complexity in Open Information Environments , October 27, 2011: Panel on Moving to Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University , October 28, 2011: OER's and Sustainable Innovation: Low Cost, Low Risk but High Impact.

David Wiley , an open educator who has been contributing a lot to the promotion of open content and openness in education had also lately a discussion week on this topic in the #change11 MOOC.

This week of #change11 MOOC is about OER facilitated by Rory McGreal , UNESCO/COL Chair in Open Educational Resources at the Athabasca University.

I found an interesting article of Wiley here in EDUCAUSE Review 2010: Openness as Catalyst for an Educational Reformation  which is worth reading.  It is part of the EDUCAUSE Review V. 45, N.4 on "openness".

Here is David Wiley's talk in TED2010 about open education and the future.

Open, Digital, Networked: The scholarship in the 21st century!

Image: http://tinyurl.com/338dja

#Change11 MOOC ( open online course) keeps going well with good discussions and facilitators each week but for me it’s an unfortunate, due to being very busy with my research, that I cannot participate in the activities and in many live sessions. However, I am trying to follow the weekly activities at least on Twitter, Facebook Group and live session as much as I can.

The week three of the course was with Martin Weller from the Open University UK about “Digital Scholarship”.  (Here is the recording of the session).

He has been researching and talking on this topic for years and recently he has published a book on it entitles: The Digital Scholar: how technology is transforming scholarly practices  

The argument is that how new emerging digital technologies have enabled us to form a kind of scholarship (learning, teaching, collaborating, creating contents, sharing …) which is open, digital and networked. I really like these three words: open, digital, networked. In my research I am also investigating open, digital and networked learning. That’s the reason this kind of learning and scholarship is my personal and professional convictions!  

Although, there is a debate on this that how these technologies have changed or could transform our academic practices and traditional teaching-studying-learning processes? How their impact on our today’s scholarship is really feasible? It was also debate on digital and traditional scholarship between Weller and Antonio Dias de Figueiredo in Ed-Media 2012 conference in Lisbon.  

Here in his blog Weller talks about how digital scholarship can also change the way we do research or at least has the potential to alter the way we conduct research and to add some new tools to the toolbox.

Starting the academic year with two open courses!

I have been busy with some work on my research and data analysis in the summer and I haven't written something since July. However, I am not regularly blogging but I try to keep writing from time to time!

I am starting this fall with the open online courses (MOOCs) I am interested in following if not actively participating. I have been participating in some Moocs already and I don't think I have time in this very busy moments of my research to spend in MOOCs in spite of my willingness though.

Following the previous open courses by George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier, they have been planning after #CCK11 to offer a new course as an inclusive of all #MOOCs to discuss various issues relating to open and digital scholarship, networked learning, open education, PLE, and all stuff that has been covered in other courses. So, they came up with  #change11 MOOC; Change: Education, Learning and Technology to discuss all those important issues and to answer some crucial questions also about the future of education  as posed in the course page:
"- How does learning change when formal boundaries are reduced? 
- What is the future of learning? 
- What role with educators play in this future? 
- What types of institutions does society need to respond to hyper-growth of knowledge and rapid dissemination of information? 
- How do the roles of learners and educators change when knowledge is ubiquitous?" 

This is a 36-week course starting this week and lasts until May 2012. Each week with an innovative educator, researcher or scholar from different countries to discuss all of the above issues of present and future learning and create a global understanding and learning experience.  Here is the course schedule with the list of the topics and speakers.


Another open course is EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education , #eci831, offered by Alec Couros from the University of Regina, Canada starting this week and lasts until December. I have attended last year this course and I liked the whole learning experience and interaction,s and I am going to take part again as much as my time allows . Especially because Alec is an inspiring open educator and creates such motivating learning environments in his courses.

The structure of these MOOCs are almost the same, distributed across the web, using various tools and platforms by the participants to collaborate, communicate and create learning reflections and artifacts in different forms on blogs, wikis, FB, twitter etc. augmented by a number of live weekly sessions which bring together people to discuss their ideas and negotiate different topics of interest which all make such a ubiquitous, rich, self-directed learning.