Two kinds of open educational resources (OER)

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Posted on 15th November 2008 by Judy Breck in Connective Expression and Open Content

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The advent of the cloud has fundamentally changed the meaning of “open” content. Open used to mean opening doors to your content so that visitors could come in and use it. Open now means placing your content “out there” in the cloud where it is integrated into the global whole.

An example of the first kind of open content is when a university places a course, for example a syllabus and lectures on French history, on to university webpages — letting anyone online visit those pages to study its course materials.

An example of placing content into the cloud is for the French history professor to write a post on her blog with a new nugget of knowledge from her research into Napoleon — and then to publish that post. By publishing the post she releases it as a node into the open cloud where it can network with all the other Napoleon nodes out there.

For OER to be open in the cloud, it must be unbundled with its cognitive content linkable at the node level. I would bet my beret that the opening into the cloud, like the Napoleonic nodes example and their connected patterns, is the Waterloo of education assets held closely to the chest by academic institutions.

Image: The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, Jacques-Louis David, National Gallery.

Children today have their heads in the cloud

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Posted on 5th September 2008 by Judy Breck in Mobile & Ubiquitous and Mobile Learning

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Children have their heads in the cloud because that is where what they are tasked to learn by education is now. In the image above, Dell illustrates its new Inspiron Mini 9 with a child viewing a pagoda. That pagoda is not on the hard drive of the device displaying it. The pagoda is in the internet content cloud.

The image on the left shows my iPhone G3 in the hands of my eight-year-old great niece Melinda. Using the iPhone, she can display the same pagoda from the cloud. Children the age of those in the images would be hard put to find anything in their analog experiences that would provide knowledge remotely as complete and compelling for a pagoda as they reach in the cloud.

In announcing Fizzbook, another mini laptop competitive to the Inspiron and available soon in the UK, Silicon.com explains:

With its inspiration coming from the One Laptop Per Child initiative, Intel has teamed up with Zoostorm to launch a budget laptop for school kids in the UK.

It is based on the second generation Intel Classmate PC – part of the One Laptop Per Child initiative, and is called the Fizzbook. It includes a fully functioning Windows XP operating system and comes with the Intel Atom chip processor.

The mini laptop can be used for learning activities as well as general computer tasks such as surfing the internet, playing media and, of course, games.

In the early stages of personal computer device development, a fundamental assumption was that the device had to have a big memory so what its owner would use it for would be available on its hard drive. If you wanted to learn about pagodas, you had to feed your computer CDs to download an encyclopedia with an article about pagodas. If you were a school library, you had to buy digitized knowledge resources for students to learn from. Those were the old days.

People who are children today will embrace the subjects they learn in the cloud, which is the open online network of what is known by humankind. The cloud abounds with mathematics, sciences, humanities, technologies — liberal arts, business studies, skill training — what is known about these subjects is already out there in the cloud. For example, if you are learning about pagodas, just about every pagoda on earth is in this network.

A key question for educators: It is the 21st century, do you know where our children are? For the part of the answer about where their minds are, the answer is: in the cloud.