Open seminar on Open Content

September 14th, 2009 by Graham Attwell

The debates around the themes I talked about in my report on AltC last week have not gone away with a weekend of fantic blogging and twittering. This week I will try to write a series of posts expanding on the ideas being discussed. But first I have to get some administration done.

So here are just a couple of quick catch up points on some of these memes.

As I said last week, Open Educational Resources are hitting the mainstream, raising issues of institutional approaches and strategies. Should publishing as OER be prescribed for academics? What are the business models for supporting OERs? How can resources be discovered and reused? What is an ‘open scholar;?

Tonight is the first of a new series of Evolve / Educamp open online seminars on open content with presentations by Martin Weller and Martin Lindner.  The seminar takes place on the Elluminate platform – just click this link to access it – at 20.00 Central European Time, 1900 UK time.

Martin Weller will “explore the ways in which the term ‘open’ has changed in usage over the years since the founding of the Open University, and consider what ‘open’ principles such a university would be founded on now. The practice of being an ‘open scholar’, and the benefits and issues involved will be examined.”

Martin Lindner’s contribution is entitled ‘Open Content: Non Learners Anonymous;. His abstract says: “More and more, people get frustrated by training and education that is overly formalized, expensive, stealing too much lifetime or simply not producing usable learning results. On the other hand, the Web is presenting a plethora of free and open content for many subjects and fields. And we have new stunningly powerful tools for collaboration and knowledge that cost nearly nothing. But still people are not able to take full advantage of these possibilities, feeling to be left on their own with the ambitious task of “self-learning”. I would like to share and discuss some thoughts from a working group thinking about how we could set up self-organizing groups, where “Non-learners Anonymous” can use Web 2.0 tools and practices to break with the painful habit of non-learning.”

So how can we help creating self-organizing groups that can systematically take advantage of the “open content” in the web? What templates, tools and what rules should we arrange so that they can easily form, set up their project and their goals and then work collaboratively in a given time frame toward some tangible results.”

And for those of you interested in the “Is Twitter killing Blogging?” debate,  there is an interesting dicussion continuing on the Cloudworks site.

Cloudworks also hosts another page bringing together many of the contributions around “The VLE is Dead” debate.

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