5.1 Wikieducator: memoirs, myths, misrepresentations and the magic  (Page 12/21)

Speaking from experience - I know that many educational organisations are uncomfortable with their content sitting on an open web-server. Why is that? Native (X)HTML is far more efficient than plugging all this stuff into the LMS database. W3C is a mature open standard. We can significantly reduce server load on the LMS by simply referencing free content from the LMS itself. What is the obsession to embed content within the LMS? As you’ve pointed out - the LMS is an aggregation of tools that facilitate interaction. I sense that there is a “political correctness” among some organisations to say that they’re involved with the OER movement - yet they haven’t bought into the philosophy. Take a look at the proliferation of non-free content licenses under so-called OER projects!

Don’t worry too much about syntax of wiki’s - we’re going to get this sorted with our Tectonic Shift Think Tank next week :-) . I hope you can help us with a vision statement. We’d love to have you on board as a remote participant.

As always - good post Richard! You’re making me earn my “money”. Pity I can’t buy you a beer.

7. richardwyles - april 5th, 2007 at 9:29 pm

Thanks for the invite. I’m afraid I’m totally flat tack on another wee initiative here - not a tectonic shift but a small step in an aligned direction ;-) That’s why I’m working during Easter and unfortunately need to pay myself pretty much these days, not always easy ;-/

“For example, lets say I plan this big OER project and I embed my resources in Moodle. There is a considerable effort and cost required to reconfigure those resources for another environment.”

True and actually we are doing just that, well sort of. But we are using Moodle to simply showcase courses that have been built in a modular fashion. The “source files” are entered into an open access repository and can be pulled out and used anywhere. The degree of modularity mitigates the problem of pedagogical structures - to a degree. There is effort involved in porting across, for sure. We’ve been using a few analogies so I’ll throw in another. I often describe our OER project as like kitset housing. We’ve got a showhome but really what you get is the kitset to put together the course and extend or edit as you feel fit. There’s effort involved in doing that and some pros and cons with the approach.

You’re absolutely right that this approach is not conducive to self-organised collaborative authoring. If doing it again we might do some things differently but overall I’m happy with the progress. The target constituency are Moodle and Blackboard users. They want, quizzes, forums, group activities, case study scenarios etc. and they also want courseware with an embedded QA process. In this model there is a quality assured ‘official’ release of course materials. Anyone is then free to take that release, reduce it, extend it, edit away etc but there will still be that core release. This is similar to how many open source software communities operate - there are moderator(s) to ensure quality of the code.