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– a great resource that is essentially impossible to reuse, or a really poor resource that you can easily reuse

an interest in providing teachers real-time suggestions about the best way to use their next 10 minutes, are relatively new areas for me.

• Online Self-Organizing Social Systems. http://opencontent.org/docs/ososs.pdf

I would like to invite students to reflect on the practical impact on people they would like to their educational technology / educational research work to have.

So what does engagement with technology mean? First, I would suggest, it acknowledges that the changes afforded by new technology are not peripheral but fundamental to all aspects of scholarship.

In his 1973 paper on the stability of ecological systems, Holling defined resilience as ‘a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables’.

Hall and Winn (2010) have applied the concept of resilience to education and open education in particular.

It is undoubtedly the case that the vast amount of online content means that people now conduct a lot of their learning informally, using free resources. Combined with financial pressures, this creates a pressure or an alternative competition for learning that is new to higher education.

defining an “open educational resource” in terms of copyright status is that the definition implies that all OER belong to the universe of copyrightable things. This explicitly precludes ideas, concepts, methods, people, places, events, and other non-copyrightable entities from being OER. (This helps us avoid some of the nonsense that went on with “learning object” definitions.)

onsequently, every community, individual, or institution’s ideal OER will be different, and it is important that we pause and acknowledge this.

Below, I work from the position that “an ideal OER would help every person in the world attain all the education they desire.” In this specific context, I believe the ideal OER would have three characteristics. It would: 1. Be always, immediately, and freely accessible by every person in the world 2. Grant the user the legal permissions necessary to engage in each and every possible usage of the resource with no restrictions whatsoever 3. Effectively support the educational goals of the user

The notion of access, and whether or not a specific OER is accessible, is highly context-dependent.

If a digital artifact released under a CC BY license is posted on a public website it would qualify as an open educational resource for everyone with internet access. However, if a teacher downloaded a copy of the OER and placed it inside a learning management system it would suddenly cease to be an open educational resource – even though the resource hadn’t changed.

Note, however, that a student with access to the high school library and enrolled in the class using the LMS still has access to these materials, so those copies of the resources simultaneously are OER to her while they are not an OER for others.

some definitions limit OER to “high-quality” materials. However quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

it is meaningless to talk about OER being “high quality” without simultaneous reference to the user

much of what makes an OER ideal is context specific

ideal to whom, for what purpose, to be accessed in what way, to be used in what fashion, etc