Show-me-day Open Educational Resources

A Show-me-day « Creation of Multimedia Learning Modules form Open Content » was offered by the Cologne Bazaar team at the Edumedia conference in Salzburg, April 16, 2007. The major aim of the workshop was to inform teachers about where open content is already available and how it could be used. While creating their own learning modules the teachers should learn what has to took into consideration when using open content for their own learning material.
15 teachers from four countries attended the workshop.

The « Show-me-day » was hold as a four-hour session. In the first part the participants were introduced to Open Content and what ideas are behind this concept. Manifests and political implications of Open Content were presented, but also about the tension between Open Access and Intellectual Property. The participants learned about popular Open Content licenses like Creative Commons and GNU FDL and how to use these licences for own created content and what has to take into account when using contents of others.

During a second part there was talked about how one could use Open Content for the own teaching. The following tools and resources for finding and sharing contents were presented briefly: Flickr, Internet Archive, Connexions, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, CC Search and CC Directories. Other resources were mentioned as well. For every of the presented tools or resources some minutes were reservered for exploring and trying out. The participants discussed also practices for re-using Open Content and didactical and organisational aspects of the re-use.

In the hands-on-tutorial after a coffee break, teachers created multimedia-enhanced learning module using Open Content found on the Internet. Some teachers have cooperated in groups, others preferred working by their own. One suggestion for the practical work was to create a short module about Open Content for their colleagues. Also a tool for creating the modules was suggested (OpenOffice with eLAIX extension to export a document as multimedia module to the LMS ILIAS). But some teachers preferred to work with their own environment and tools which was accepted as well.

The working atmosphere was very intense and all participants have tried out several tools and resources to find appropriate open content for their modules. During the entire workshop participants could ask for additional information or clarification. Most of the questions raised by the participants were about how marking an open content item with a licence correctly. Several participants asked for the easiest way to find open content lincenced images or textes. Most of the participants were astonished about the variety of resources the might use. But several of the german speaking and teaching participants were disapointed about the small amount of open content in German.

The evaluation of the event showed that open educational resources are not yet that important in daily work for the participants as their own produced materials. The majority of the teachers do not control the property rights of the content they use. And they pay only seldom for copyright. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of knowhow about IPR handling amongst them. But even if the knowledge about open content licences was different, the majority of the participants declared to invest further time to learn more about these licences after the workshop, even if they feel secure or partly secure in using open content licences. So the « Show-me-day » stimulated the participant’s interest in this issue - which can be seen as another step for establishing the use of open educational resources in e-learning.

Add comment May 2nd, 2007

Open Educational Resources and Content Creation

This week I am participating in an on-line conference organised by JISC in the UK on the use of Web 2.0 for content sharing in learning and teaching. Its an interesting conference. I was much taken by a comment on the Web Forum by George Roberts who said “I am musing as I listen.

We are distributed, listening to someone speak and with whom we largely agree. It is a lunchtime seminar so we eat our sandwiches quietly. The slides are variously beautiful or informative. We share an aside with a colleague. So far so the same. Different: the presenter can see our aside so we censor or heckle with intent. We are online so we multi-task: a little e-mail, a quick f2f chat with a colleague who assumes I am listening to music and therefore interruptable, a comment here, a quick search on Flickr for a May morning image.

My question is whether we are simply using new technology to do what we have always done in the way we have done it? Or, are we doing something new? The distribution is new. What else? Maybe distributed co-presence is enough.”

That has started quite a discussion which I will try to come back to tomorrow.

You can view the slides from my presentation. And here is the audio.

Add comment May 2nd, 2007