Openness: A Common Property? #h817open

This is my final submitted digital artefact for the Open Education MOOC course (#h817open). The images and music used in this presentation are all Creative Commons licensed content. This is a reflection on the notion of “openness” and what interests me the most is what is this thing called “openness” and how and why is […]

The Open Learner #h817open

In 2006, my institution took part in a joint Higher Education Academy (HEA) and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) venture called the e-Learning Benchmarking and Pathfinder Project (HEA, 2008). Our project was called Digital Experience Building in University Teaching (DEBUT) (Westerman & Barry, 2009) and we had identified quite early on that digital literacy was going […]

The Way of the Rhizome #h817open

This is not my first foray into the realms of the “rhizome metaphor“, I was aware of Deleuze & Guattari’s (1988) rhizome metaphor which was introduced to me as a student on the MSc in e-Learning with the University of Edinburgh (yes, I know, another shameless plug). The rhizome metaphor was used in the context of […]

Big OER, Little OER #h817open

In Martin Weller’s 2012 paper, he explores the nature of open education resources (OERs) and suggests that there currently exists two “flavours” of OERs. The first he calls “big OERs” which are the “large-scale, externally funded  projects”, like MIT’s OpenCourseWare and the Open University’s OpenLearn (ibid, p. 7), who have developed large repositories containing a […]

The Three Challenges for Open Educational Resources #h817open

The term Open Educational Resources (OERs) was first introduced at a conference hosted by UNESCO in 2000, which broadly defined it as: The open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for noncommercial purposes (UNESCO, 2002:24). However, since then others have attempted to […]