Opening spaces, open learning

I'm enjoying the workshop on Open Educational Resources (OER) here in Windhoek, Namibia. It took me almost 24 hours of travelling to get here, via London Heathrow, and Johannesburg. But now I'm here, it's a beautiful country, the skies are clear blue, and the hotel we are staying in is excellent. The conference venue here at the Safari Court Hotel is purpose built, and continually hosts events sponsored by the likes of UNESCO, UNICEF and other UN organisations. Today, the workshop for Quality Assurance Agencies is addressing the concept of OERs and how they can be quality assured. Inevitably, under this banner, we are also discussing how content can be standardised in terms of its delivery, design and licensing. Creative Commons and IPR issues have already been raised, and this afternoon we continue round table discussions with representatives from a number of African countries, and delegates from Holland, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia, Canada and Malaysia.

We have had excellent speeches from Sir John Daniel (Commonwealth of Learning), Jenny Glennie (South African Institute for Distance Education) and Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams (University of Cape Town) all of whom are positive about OERs, but also cautious about how open courseware, open content and user generated content can, and will be evaluated and used. Later this afternoon, I'm giving an invited talk on the CONCEDE Project (CONtent Creation Excellence through Dialogue in Education) which I am involved in.

Sir John Daniel spoke this morning about the barriers to Open Content and listed three. 1: The 'not invented here/by me' sydrome, 2: Adaptation of materials is often tiresome, and 3: Intellectual Property issues prevent repurposing of content. Sir John argued that OER addresses the last two barriers, and that the first is a psychological/cultural issue that needs addressing. Comments coming in from the Twitter stream suggest that IPR issues may take a long time to address fully, because very few people fully understand how Creative Commons functions. The workshop online forum can be found at this link. I will come back to discuss some of these issues more fully when time permits. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the event, the great company and the excellent weather here in beautiful Namibia.

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Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.