Opened – Week 12

Answering some comments to my last post.

@ Anto

Andreas, I do not completely agree with you about “control and hierarchy seen in opposition to open resources.
In the case of LOs, “control” may simply mean “technical specifications”. Also in the Open Source software there are several examples of standardization but open sofware remains… open! …

I understand that in some contexts LOs may be useful but it is difficult for me to associate them to OER. Usually, the great open phenomena we have seen in Internet in the last years had an explosive nature, well described by an exponential behaviour. In this course I learned that there has been a great deal of discussion about LOs but I do not see any explosive growth in their use.

My thoughts resonate very much with Karen‘s ones, on this subject:

My primary thought after doing this reading is that if all the time spent discussing arcane definitions of learning objects and complex formulations of common sense observations was instead spent developing some useful educational resources, the world would be a better place.

@ Emanuela

The metaphor could be: a travel (OER) could need a car, but a train or a bike too. (LO or another resource)

May be cars (LOs) are so difficult to drive or so expensive that few people use them? Then, why should we talk about so much? OER are meaningful only if they are used in massive context, or am I wrong?

@ Catia

Well, as for judging the value of a resource I would say that it depends on the context. I think that no resource is better than other per se, but it depends on the fact of being suitable for the learner in a particular situation.

I agree perfectly, Catia. The problem is that in education the context may be extremely variable. Therefore, I’m afraid the adaptation work may be so relevant to make the need of a LO questionable …

Tchau 🙂

@ Rob

We may have to compare some notes, since I’m involved with computer literacy as well.

Oh yes! 🙂

Your experience in that class sounds great. So you need to listen to students, integrate their ideas, allow them to be active, and provide immediate feedback. That sounds wonderful, no matter where your content comes from.

Oh yes, I like this experience so much and I owe a lot to some on line communities such as LTEver and Open Ed.

Besides more technical issues, what I like most is that the students tend to feel more comfortable because they are quite familiar with these tools. Therefore, they tend to express themselves, to share their interests, to aggregate. This is great for the teacher, I know many students much better than with the conventional classroom system where a classroom is no more a classroom, may be with one or two hundreds of people listening to you! I believe that to know your students is very important. Do you agree? In this first experience I’m learning that the best system is to mix the blogging activities with physical presence. When the students want to discuss a new idea or they need explanations they ask for a meeting. Everyone is positively motivated and the mood is usually very good.

You point out an important difference between software development and teaching, where the comparison of open source software to OER development does not exactly match, with software QA testing following a bit of a different model than evaluating learning materials. I’ve written about how they’re similar, but as you bring up, they are not always similar.

Yes, I liked very much your post and got me to think about the analogy between software development and teaching. Analogies are quite useful and it is also useful to see where the analogy breaks up.