Personal Blogs

Technologies for openness

I believe open educational resource repositories will become more and more important for open education in the future because they are not only a source of materials that are vital for the sustainability of open education, but they are a starting point for those who wish to become providers of OER.  It is also vital that the quality of the materials provided by these sources remains high, and this is another important role that can be played by supporters of the OER movement.  

When we define open learning, it is not always effective to do so in terms of the principles that underlie open education – education for all, empowerment of the disenfranchised, addressing inequality and stimulating educational achievement for individual self-efficacy and self-development  and economic development through education (i.e. a more able and employable workforce), especially among women, the disabled and discriminated-against minorities.  Nor should we just define open education as being education that is free, globally accessible and fulfilling the 5Rs of (able to) Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute.   We should also define OER in terms of its resources and technologies – ‘the 4 Qs’ (Robinson 2020) Where can we create it? How can we create it? Where can we get it and How can we get it?

Today, I want to focus on these in terms of the technology. To quickly summarise some of these….

HTML allowed the enriching of any site with the capacity to link seamlessly content with other content, whilst remaining in simultaneous touch with the source. One of the main components of what we call ‘web 2.0’.  HTML coul be especially useful in edu-blogs for sharing educational content.

Blogs and its community of ‘edubloggers’, attracted to this format as a way of bypassing formal, rigid and it could be argued, antiquated forms of publishing on a global level to establish an academic identity. Blogs became popular as an OER because of its similarity to print sources – through which most educational materials were shared.

Social networks enable users to share personal ideas, thoughts, news and information through virtual networks and communities through messaging. One of their features is combining of multimedia to distribute documents, videos, and photos via computer, tablet or smartphone using downloaded to your devices or via web-based software or web applications.  Beyond blogs, social networking tools exist in many more formats.; for example, Slideshare and YouTube each represent a different visual format extension of educational print dominated sources such as Twitter or Scribd.

MOOCs and VLEs can act as explicitly open education sources because they act as virtual classrooms or academies, while all the others are often used for many different purposes – not just educational, like entertainment. They can combine with any of the above to enrich the educational or training learning environments they represent.

OER repositories are an additional technology that is important for open education, from the role of both learners and providers because they can help establish academic identity like a blog, as they give a voice to the provider to express their philosophical basis for providing the source and the materials in the source itself can be tailored to a specific audience, that the provider wishes to speak to.  This can be enhanced if the provider is a producer him/herself of the materials, not just a conduit for the creators.  A network or academic community of creators and users can be established via the repository.  Some examples of OER repositories include: Citizendium, CommonSpaces, Curriki (K-12), Gooru (K-12), Internet Archive’s OER Library, Knowledge to Work, MERLOT, OER Commons, WikiEducator (Open Education Global 2020). As, in many circles, education becomes more and more commercialised and less accessible, it is important to mark the distinction between education in general an open education.  As an example, Open Education Global (the provider of my edited list of repositories it names on its website) states its mission ‘improving education access, affordability, success and quality for all’ (Open Education Global 2020).