Today, the UNU Media Studio participated in an online seminar with the Pan-Pacific Distance Learning Association. We were talking about Open Content, Open Software and Open Learning. The presenters were Paul McKimmy from the University of Hawaii, Scott Belford from the Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation and myself from the UNU.

We used Elluminate to connect everybody and as a presented it was a really interesting experience. I am pretty comfortable now making presentations over video conferencing. However, with Elluminate you really need to multi-task since there is are plenty of options for audience interaction.

They can raise their hands for questions, give you a smiley face or thumbs down, or you can poll their opinions. It is all pretty seamless, but takes some getting used to.

We were looking to have excellent moderators from the UH College of Education – Peter Leong and Adam Tanners – who basically kept an eye on things. Thanks so much fro this valuable experience!

Are you curious about the notion of open educational resources? Is it just another way of saying open courseware or open content? There is a new report from Susan D’Antoni and her team at UNESCO that goes some way to answering the above questions. There is an online version that you can explore and edit.

The report is the output of deliberations by a community of 600 interested stakeholders from across the globe who corresponded via a mailing list between 2005 and 2007 (how time flies!). The UNU was one member of this community.

I am really impressed by both the report and the way that UNESCO has developed this project – it is community based, interactive and uses open technologies, such as wikis. In my view, this is a good model for other United Nations sponsored projects.

I borrowed the slide from the Open Content Holistic Research Environment blog.

When I first read Brian Lamb’s post on easy and inexpensive course hosting, I missed the link he made to a presentation by Jim Groom and D’Arcy Norman at the Open Education 2007 Conference.

But I just followed the link and I am impressed by the way they went about presenting the idea of building courses in Wordpress (and hosting them at Wordpress.com).

They are right – developing and sharing open content should not be rocket science. In the past, I had come across another interesting presentation by D’Arcy, Lamb and Levine back in 2004 entitled Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, which was equally inspirational.

John Seely Brown and Richard Adler have a really fascinating article in Educause Review with the title

“Minds of Fire; Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0.”

I especially like the circle of knowledge building and sharing diagram on creating, using and remixing that forms part of an open knowledge exchange zone (see picture)!

They also argue that we are witnessing the emergence of emergence of “new kinds of open participatory learning ecosystems that will support active, passion-based learning: Learning 2.0.”

The continue by stating that ..”this new form of learning begins with the knowledge and practices acquired in school but is equally suited for continuous, lifelong learning that extends beyond formal schooling. Indeed, such an environment might encourage students to readily and happily pick up new knowledge and skills as the world shifts beneath them.”

It is really exciting to see that David Wiley has been experimenting with Wordpress to re-publish his course on “blogs, wikis and new media.” Here at the UNU we have been building courses in Wordpress for some time now and we have published three so far. In fact most of our websites at the UNU Media Studio are built in Wordpress. So it is good to see others exploring this impressive tool!

Oh yes, we have been customizing existing plug-ins like polyglot (for multi-lingual blogs) and building new ones to handling quizzes and slideshows. We are going to post them soon as a contribution back to the Wordpress community. We have also made it possible for people to download the entire course, upload it to their own Wordpress site or just run it locally. This allows them to totally customize the course.

I like the related comment regarding the use of Wordpress for course development from
Brian Lamb in his posting “Ridiculously easy and inexpensive course hosting will never fly.” He writes “This approach is fatally flawed in a number of respects and it will never catch on. For one thing, it is far too cheap, and can never justify escalating technology infrastructure budgets. Worse, instructors and students could adopt this technology with minimal assistance or oversight from instructional technology specialists. In this profoundly unserious framework, there is nothing to prevent students from previewing courses before they take them, or reviewing courses later on. Indeed, some “learner” might benefit from this content without being an enrolled student at all!.”

All very good reasons to continue with this approach to course development.

What Japan Thinks has just published the results of the goo survey on Opencourseware in Japan. The survey was conducted in December 2007 and covered 1,000 members of the goo Research monitor group and focused on materials available from universities within the Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium (the UNU plans to join JOCW in March 2008).

The respondents indicated that the main benefits of universities sharing their lectures where that universities would become more open (58%), it would be possible to compare courses (44%) and that this would raise interest in universities within society (43.5%).

Nearly 93% of those surveyed considered Opencourseware to be an extremely good or good thing, and a similar percentage indicated a desire to use the materials for either personal interest/education or as part of obtaining a qualification.

Educational materials that the respondents wanted to see most online where lecture notes/reference materials (70%) and lecture video recordings (57%). The fields of study that were of most interest were economics, information technology and business studies/marketing.

The main concerns regarding Opencourseware was that the lectures should be easy to understand (29%), should include a rich selection of courses (20%) and interesting lecture themes (19%).

I subscribe to the Creative Commons blog and was recently excited to see two posts on Cinema 2.0. The first post introduces the idea of reusing footage from one film to create a new work with an entirely different purpose through the use of Creative Commons licenses. It is a topic that has been playing on our minds here in the UNU Media Studio as we struggle to produce documentaries under the existing scheme of things (i.e., respecting the copyrights of others) and try to do so in a open way.

The second post presents a collaborative film project in development called A Swarm of Angels. Team producing this film have developed 7 rules for open source media which I think are really useful. I have summarized them here and you can see how by adopting these rules it may be possible to collaboratively build and share digital media. They cover both the development process and the form in which you make your content available. So what are the rules?

1. Freely accessible
Available to stream, or download without a fee.
2. Freely available
Permanently available without DRM. The end user able to share the work without restriction.
3. Freely viewable
Available in multiple formats, and to be converted freely.
4. Giving source files
Source media, such as rushes and raw graphics files should be archived and available for other creators to work with.
5. Allowing remixing
Materials should be licensed explicitly to allow derivative work for at least non-commercial/artistic purposes.
6. Reveal the process
Allowing access to not only the final source media, but work-in-progress material and software files, adding another layer of transparency and documentation.
7. Open contribution
Adding ways to influence and participate in the creation of the original work through various types of community/audience involvement.

This approach is called Open Plus and is discussed more fully at the Swarm website.

I have to confess that I am somewhat surprised to see the confusion that the Cape Town Open Education Declaration seems to have caused. To be honest, I am just happy to see something like this emerging out of Africa, although some people seem to object to the fact that the declaration was initially put together by a relatively small group of people. The declaration is fine with me.
For some insights on the discussions surrounding this declaration take a look the critique from Stephen Downes and the response from David Wiley. They are both visionaries in their own right and leaders of the open educational resources movement, so this discussion is very important and very interesting.

By the way, I signed the declaration. Why don’t you?

Lawrence Lessig spoke at the March 2007 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference and explained how creativity is being strangled by the law. This is a very thought provoking presentation and although the focus is on the impact on younger generations and business, there are obvious messages for the global development community. To solve the world’s problems, we need to get creative and we need to be able to share knowledge.