Open and Collaborative Resources

June was Cape Town Book Fair month. Mark Horner participated in a poster session where he presented some of our ideas on print aggregation. The presentation was very well received, with some saying the poster ’stood out for its sheer gumption’. We’ll keep you posted on how this plan unfolds.

Philipp Schmidt (Rip-Mix-Learn, UWC), Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Eve Gray (OpeningScholarship, UCT) have been sharing their findings and learnings from Rip-Mix-Learn and OpeningScholarship with the broader education community.

On 24 June Philipp and Cheryl (UCT) offered a pre-conference workshop on OER at the International Conference of e-Learning (ICEL) 2008. The workshop wiki will be on-going for at least a month after the conference.

On 27 June Cheryl presented a paper, Paradox, Promise and Problem: A Social Realist View of the Potential of Open Educational Resources at the University of Cape Town, at ICEL 2008. This paper was based on findings from the OpeningScholarship project.

Also on 27 June, in a different continent, Eve presented a paper on African Universities and the knowledge economy at ELPUB 2008 in Toronto.

Philipp attended the MIT Open Courseware Consortium (OCWC) meeting in April in China with our support. At this meeting Philipp was elected to the board of the OCWC. As part of our desire to share as much information and ideas as possible, Philipp wrote a blogged about his experience there and ideas for the future.

The Foundation along with partner OSI just launched Open Education News, a group blog, lead by David Wiley, which gathers, sorts, analyses, synthesises and disseminates news related to open education, much like Peter Suber’s Open Access News does for open access.

Peter describes Open Education News as a “welcome development. The Open Ed movement has needed this for a long time.” David’s introductory blog on Open Education News and Peter’s blog on the launch highlight the growing momentum in this area.