23.1 Amee godwin - on doing oer  (Page 2/5)

The recent addition of the Library of Congress’ historical image collections to Flickr, which are appropriately tagged with the word “commons,” is a red-hot example of “doing OER.” The images are not formally licensed, but are shared under the terms “no known restrictions.” It is this type of engagement opportunity—i.e., the encouragement of communal tagging—that OER is meant to achieve.

Another example of doing OER is the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium’s use of problem spaces . In contrast to static collections of data or lessons, problem spaces are dynamic workspaces where teachers and students share their work. Rather than using a more traditional lab approach where the students—who in this case are college instructors or pre-service teachers—may be asked to follow highly structured procedures, problem spaces emphasize the development and exploration of student questions as they come to understand biological principles, analytical procedures, and the formulation of data-based inferences. By collecting and displaying the work of others, problem spaces contextualize scientific inquiry within a community of practice where meaning is negotiated and problems have a history across multiple researchers.

Publicly available datasets, inquiry-based models for learning, collaborative tools and environments for sharing—these are the building blocks for “doing OER.” At ISKME we support ways for teachers to benefit from existing practices of online communities. This includes facilitating their ability to create and share “microcontent,” or smaller pieces of information drawn from multiple platforms (e.g., wikis) that can be augmented, revised, and re-combined, and engaging them in the use of web-based tools, such as OER Commons , which allow them to attach their own tags to online content, thus creating meaning from the bottom up as opposed to that which is predetermined by content experts.

One of the things common to doing OER is that of crossing boundaries of traditional roles. Stepping into new collaborative processes creates opportunities for participants to move beyond established roles—by, e.g., providing spaces where teachers and students and teachers and their colleagues can co-create content. But such opportunities may also pose risks to a teacher’s professional status. What benefits are there for teachers to share their content online?

How can teachers work within the frame of institutional structures that do not yet support collaborative ways of working, and do not reward teachers for the time and resources spent? Especially for the K-12 arena, these questions have yet to find answers. Several hundred K-12 teachers using LeMill.net are, in fact, creating and posting content for anyone to see and adapt; yet, teachers on the whole may need support in stepping into new roles such as that of OER author or online collaborators.

At ISKME, we have just begun a pilot project with 18 middle school science teachers in four countries to see how they find and adapt resources, use available tools, and collaborate with each other and with their students around issues related to climate change and ecology. Creative remixing of teaching and learning materials will likely find its place here, but we expect to see challenges in cross-cultural, multi-lingual online sharing. We’re interested to understand how much support and facilitation the group might need, and whether OER materials can be produced with relative ease and with minimal difficulty and risk on the part of teachers.