By: Scott Leslie

Scott Leslie — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 18:21:06 +0000

I’m only following the course through a few of you posting about the readings in your blogs, so haven’t done the readings and don’t even know what the topic was. But I wanted to respond to these notes – I think much of what you identify as the benefits of the OER approach over the previous learning objects one is correct, but for me the big reason why OERs will succeed in fulfilling the earlier promise of learning objects is that they do not break the paradigm of the web. In that they are by definition ‘open,’ they can be shared simply via a link (or should be able to be!). They do not need to be removed from their context of use (as content does in the LMS/LCMS paradigm, which then becomes the self-perpetuating folly of “content packages” and “metadata” as content becomes something that is plugged in, private, not just there on the network). So google, social tagging and all of the other cool methods for discovery and reuse that are simply a fundamental part of the web as we know just ‘work’, while those of us still needing to support the LCMS/CMS paradigm fight so many rearguard actions to reinvent this context of use information. This is also why, as I’ll try to show with my open ed ‘demonstrator’, it remains critical for OER providers to (keep) do(ing) some basic things that greatly enable OERs fulfilling this promise: like you ay, web-based standards where you can, especially clean XHTML, non-crufty (and even better, sensible) URLs, REST not SOAP, RSS…. (more suggestions appreicated, I’m not trying to make the list complicated, just what are the base practics that enable serendipitous linking, remixing and mashing to happen). Sorry for the brain dump/rant, cheers, Scott

Comments on: Open Education Course: week 2 reading

By: Scott Leslie