Hi Michael, Alison On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 5:31 PM, virtualMV <mverha...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> >> Sometimes I think the most successful content developed in the wiki is >> set up as a complete project (e.g. Learning for Content and Open >> Content Licensing for Educators - which are very well developed >> courses), but interestingly they usually only require minor tweeks >> after they have been set up. Those that are started with the hope that >> the community will continue to develop often remain incomplete. >> > > I do agree -- OER developments which are setup as projects have historically resulted in the most successful collaborations. We have also seen that institutions who have adopted open IPR policies are better at open development than others.
I also note and concur with Alison's point about opportunities for continuous improvement -- a unique feature of OER. You can't do this with closed content. We've gained valuable experience with these collaborative developments. We get the usual list of suspects who add their names to lists as collaborators, largely to to be "seen" in the community and then do nothing ;-) Fortunately in open communities there is a digital footprint - a history of individual actions or non-actions in the community and we get to know who the WikiEducator family can rely on in achieving our mission of providing free learning opportunities for all students worldwide! The experience from these collaborative developments is helping the OER Foundation in developing its strategy for supporting and helping to grow the WikiEducator community in productive and meaningful ways. Let's set aside the mechanics associated with "learning to share" for a moment and focus on the cultural aspects. (There is a dire need to teach educators how to share -- because many don't know how to do this as evidenced over the last 5 years work in WikiEducator). My observation is that there is a culture of non-collaboration in the formal education sector when compared to the experience of open source software development and other communities. In jest, it seems to me that in the open source world there are only few "rock stars" -- but in education, every contributor wants to be rock star :-). Within the formal sector, as managers and leaders, I think we are partly to blame for this state of individualism and non-collaboration because our systems reward individual work above collaboration. The way to resolve this problem is to make collaborative OER development part of an educator's official job. Strategically, this is the approach the OER Foundation is now adopting to facilitate the mainstream adoption of OER in our education institutions. We are going to make collaborative OER development the official job responsibility of educators engaged in selected OER courses -- it will become part of the day-to-day duties of these educators and job performance is easily evaluated because in a wiki we can see what folk are doing and how they are doing it. We are setting up the OER university -- We now have seven post-secondary institutions from 5 different countries who have signed up as founding anchor partners to facilitate the development of OER courses and credentials. Over the next few days I will update members of the WikiEducator family on recent developments featuring our founding members. Just to confirm -- the OER university is not an exclusive or closed group - if your institution wants to be part of designing and developing sustainable education futures, you can join our innovation partnership today. We will be hosting the meeting of founding anchor partners on 9 & 10 November 2011 -- so still time to join up. More information is available here: 5 Things you should know about the OER university network plan <http://wikieducator.org/images/7/7d/OERu.pdf> Exciting times and more productive futures for the WikiEducator family. I speculated that 2011 would be a quantum shift year for the mainstream adoption of OER -- Watch this space .... Cheers Wayne -- Wayne Mackintosh <http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg>, Ph.D. Director OER Foundation <http://www.oerfoundation.org> Director, International Centre for Open Education, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand. Founder and elected Community Council Member, WikiEducator<http://www.wikieducator.org> Mobile +64 21 2436 380 Skype: WGMNZ1 Twitter <http://twitter.com/#%21/Mackiwg> | identi.ca<http://identi.ca/waynemackintosh> Wikiblog <http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg/Blog> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
