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H817 Week 12 Activity 22 An Open Educational Technology

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  • Write a short blog post suggesting one additional technology that is important for open education, either from the role of a learner or a provider. The technology can be one that has been significant, or one that you feel is going to become increasingly relevant.
  • What you include as a technology can be quite broad: for instance, it can be a general category (such as social networks), a specific service or a particular standard.
  • In your post briefly explain what the technology is, and then why you think it is important for open education. The emphasis should be on open education in particular, and not just education in general.

Open source software and standards are important for open education and have been for some time. Open source underpins the online technologies which make open education accessible to more people while at the same time IT developer users model open practices in action (for example use of GitHub (GitHub, n.d.) for reviewing and hosting open source code for reuse by others, working with the open source community to make better code). This community review of open code and contribution of open code to the code base is an example of Wenger’s Community of Practice (Wenger, 1998) as different projects request community involvement in new code features they propose which helps to ensure that shared code is checked and thoroughly discussed by a wider range of people with varied perspectives. This open scrutiny usually results in better, more robust and well thought out software code, a benefit to open education and education generally.

Open source code underpins Open Access journals, such as the Open Journal System code base, which make academic research more widely accessible and transparent (Public Knowledge Project, n.d.). The open source community uses and contributes to open standards for software development, such as the Web Accessibility Initiative standards guidelines (W3C, n.d) and the educational technology learning tools interoperability (LTI) standards recommended by the Instructional Management System project which became IMS Global (IMS Global, n.d.), a membership organisation offering IMS certification of innovative code and systems for educational technology generally. Although IMS certification is for educational technology generally, the benefit for open source software in particular in a world which often equates ‘free’ with cheap and unreliable is the trustworthiness recognition such certification can bring. This helps to show that while Open source software is free to use, this does not mean it is unsafe or unreliable when developed using open standards and practices.

References

GitHub (n.d.) Code review, GitHub features [online]. Available at https://github.com/features/code-review/ (accessed 18 April 2021)

IMS Global (n.d.) https://www.imsglobal.org/ (accessed 18 April 2021)

Public Knowledge Project (n.d) ‘Open Journal Systems’, Public Knowledge Project [online]. Available at https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/ (accessed 18 April 2021)

Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (New York, Cambridge University Press)

Wilson, S. (2014) 5 lessons open education resources can learn from FOSS, OpenSource [blog], 28 April. Available at https://opensource.com/education/14/4/5-lessons-open-education-resources-can-learn-foss (accessed 18 April 2021)

W3C (n.d.) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) guidelines, Web Accessibility Initiative [online]. Available at https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/ (accessed 18 April 2021)


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