Sharing Nicely

i am thinking about open educational resources, and need to start dumping thoughts — so why not do so on this blog, and maybe someone will pick it up.

new teaching / learning scenarios:

* the personal electronic tutor, someone who manages the students learning, reminds him/her by email, is available for discussion, very knowledgeable of the subject at hand, this role could be filled by certain graduate students
* charging for access to the discussion – the educational resources are available freely, but access to the discussions that happens around them requires payment of a fee, the discussion group would need to be vibrant, interesting, and have sufficient expertise injected by tutors/mentors to make it worthwhile
* certification providers, that only test knowledge in certain areas and point their students to existing OERs for preparation, how about an MIT OCW based degree from another organisations, would take time to build credibility, but could be done
* life education – similar to life music, life education draws value from the process of education, rather than the creation and protection of education materials (recorded music), the educator is a performer, who facilitates the development of a student’s knowledge [does this sound to 70s california hippie?]

what are the key components in open learning that are needed by a student:

* good, reliable, accurate background materials
* real life examples for the application of the learned content
* good questions with answers to test progress
* access to a knowledge community (other learners, experts, people who took the course previously)
* (maybe certification)

related areas of interest:

* how do we find open educational resources?
* how do we determine quality (trust) open educational resources?
* this leads me to think about the growing importance of the intermediary (the blogger)
* are these intermediaries people with large numbers of weak ties (to access diverse knowledge networks) or large numbers of strong ties (to have fast access to a dense knowledge network)?
* there is a qualitative difference between foss programmers (who take pride in reuse of existing code) and educators, for whom, somehow, using other people’s resources is frowned upon

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