26.1 Evolution to education 3.0  (Page 9/19)

If you interpret OER, not a term I would use as I prefer FORE (Free and Open Resources for Education - to emphasize Freedom), as being everything including the learning then accreditation will certainly play a role. Currently, accreditation rests with the institutions or national bodies that accredit them. So the alignment of an institution to a framework of freedom and openness, which would include its processes for recognizing learning, would to me be the basis for such accreditation. The role of the resources per se is irrelevant except that they exist and can be used.

The reason that I say accreditation of the resources however defined will reduce velocity is that every hurdle is impediment that will result in less resources being produced. I say it is absurd because attempting to do something that cannot be done is absurd, if you don’t believe me spend some time trying to throw a tennis ball over the Pacific Ocean from Vancouver to Hong Kong. It is of dubious benefit because even if it were possible, it would add no value. However, if we are talking about accreditation of learning, then that is another matter. Thats where we need to get to!

regards, Derek

12. derek keats - june 3rd, 2008 at 12:51 pm

Just a quick reply to Ken before I go, just a small part of Ken’s post. I think replied to some of Ken’s considerations in the other posts before I read Ken’s contribution.

it might be helpful to have some method to identify OER (define this as broadly as you like) that is most “usable” and “useful,”

Is this something that needs a third party involved? We are in the age of the read-write web, social content, folksonomies, and kudos. Let the community decide what is useful. Accreditation in this context is an old fashioned, aggregative, scarcity mentality concept. When you have communities, the communities themselves are the best judges of what is useful.

Take a simple example, what are the most viewed presentations on Slideshare? What are the ones that are bookmarked the most? What are the ones that people have added as their favorites? What are the ones that are most often embeded? There lies the basic means with which newcomers can get a sense of the usefulness of something. And in a world of abundance, there is always another resource to fill the gap. interestingly, my presentation on Quality in Education 3.0 on there got over a thousand views in one week, so there must be quite a few people thinking about these concepts.

Oddly though, the proponents of new ways of doing are still aggregating, nogal? Is that not a bit weird?

13. wayne mackintosh - june 3rd, 2008 at 3:31 pm

Hey Derek,

Knowing the values underpinning freedom and what freedom means, is going to be the cornerstone of future success of FORE — as RMS says, we need to know what freedom means because “freedom is easily lost.”

Thanks for the link to Archbishop Tutu’s opening at the Digital Freedom Exposition. By way of example I’ve attempted to illustrate the velocity of free content growth. Thanks to a CC-BY-SA license — WikiEducator is able to enrich the learning experience of our community by incorporating the video into our tutorial on free content .