Some commentary and reactions to the dialogue from yesterday. Jared Stein writes, "Downes goes all socialist and argues that financial incentives discourage variety because the bland textbook sells more." Conviviality writes, "Unfortunately for the OER innovators and early adopters, what needs to happen to move the OER approach ahead is a lot more focus on the how, rather than on the what and why parts of the argument. A phase change really needs to take shape – one that involves actual practitioners, people who teach courses, normal humans, real instructors." Light in the shadows: "Two guys talking for 3.5 hours." [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Open Educational Resources, Books]

Jared Stein is collecting a list of university-based OER projects. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Open Educational Resources, Project Based Learning]

This post would be useful even if it only summarized the seven OER projects, but it also assesses them from the perspective of reuse and remixing. The post was undertaken as a "rogue quest" for David Wiley's OER course. projects summarized include OpenLearn, Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, MIT OpenCourseWare, Stanford Engineering Everywhere, Open Yale Courses and Rice Connexions (I can't help noticing how these are all branded to major institutions, which creates the (false) impression that on ly these institutions are producing OERs). [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Connexions, Open Educational Resources, Project Based Learning, OpenCourseWare]

Good post on the sustainability of OERs that reaches what was effectively my own conclusion when I studied the same issue a few years ago: "Unlike purchasing computers or licensing an LMS, with OER we are not buying a solution, we are building a solution. In doing so we are investing in the people of the institution, and can obtain a new kind of ownership: a grassroots, shared ownership of the learning materials cultivated by access to and encouragement of open and shared learning resources." [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Open Educational Resources, Online Learning]

More content coming from participants in David Wiley's course on open educational resources (OERs). This post reviews two major OER projects, MIT's OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) courses, and CarnegieMellon's Open Learning Initiative (OLI). "MIT OCW are like Polaroid snapshots of authentic MIT courses, scanned in and uploaded to bear the MIT brand; Carnegie Mellon OLI are more akin to digital photos, planned, staged, shot, enhanced, and sequenced for online learning, and specifically created to define the OLI project (not the other way around)." [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Open Educational Resources, Image Software, Project Based Learning, OpenCourseWare, Online Learning]

David Wiley's game-style course on open education has started, and students in the open course are doing the first 'quest' - to read about, and summarize, some documents on the history of open education (I confess, how this 'quest' resembles a game, and not, say, some course assignment, is something that completely escapes me). The responses make for interesting reading. Jared Stein offers this post as well as background info on open education. Dan Coleman describes learning ancient history for free (this might not be part of the course, but it's a good related post). Sara Joy Pond offers a vivid and colorful account of the history of OERs. Michael Feldstein links to the sources and offers a brief survey. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Open Educational Resources, Traditional and Online Courses, Open Content]

OpenShare basically turns Moodle into an Open Educational Resources platform "by allowing instructors or designers to mark all or part of their Moodle courses as open (public) or closed (enrolled students and teachers only)." More from Mike Caulfield. Related: International OER Update. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Open Educational Resources, Web Logs]

I've seen many similar posts, but Stein's has been recently added to the pile about the whole Edupunk movement/mission/vision/whatever. "My problems with "edupunk" have been ... I have a hard enough time converting faculty to use edtech as it is; a label like "edupunk" will only further alienate those faculty. And as John Krutsch suggested, "cliques suck, especially when you are on the outside"." But seeing value in the other side as well, "the DIY, question-authority aspect of edupunk is not only attractive to me, it resonates with my daily activities to an extent." It's a short post that likely sums up the feelings of many Ed-Techers, it's much more about a world view and much less about a new group to join. -BD [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: Edupunk]

Personally I'd rather see the 64 ideas he rejected (and to know why) rather than 16 of the 35 accepted (a part two to the article is promised). Still, this review of Patti Shank's The Online Learning Idea Book: 95 Ways to Enhance Technology-Based and Blended Learning is worth a look. [Comment] [Direct Link] [Tags: none]