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"Who is using Open Educational Resources? This post marks the official open-on-the-web style start to our JISC funded OER Impact study. The key tasks of the study being: * The investigation of patterns of behaviour around the use and reuse of OER. * Examining the impact of these behaviours on teaching and learning strategies from institutional, tutor and student perspectives. Our methodology is distinctly qualitative, focusing on the 'why' and much as the 'what'. Why you might be using OER rather than why they should exist. "

"The National Research Council of Canada's Institute for Information Technology (Learning and Collaborative Group) has started a research and development project exploring the Personal Learning Environment. The project researches how new technologies can be used in a personalized informal learning environment and focuses on two dimensions. The first dimension is the pedagogical: given the new affordances offered by web technologies, how can access to a wide variety of learning opportunities best be managed in an online environment? The second dimension is technical. Given a set of desired types of connections, what technologies can be assembled to best provide seamless access to a large variety of educational resources and services? Existing learning management technology (such as the Learning Management System) is centered on the institution that owns and operates it as enterprise software. With the increase of lifelong and student-centered learning, individuals are more frequently enrolling in learning opportunities from multiple institutions and have a need to manage their learning through an entire career. Thus there is a need for a type of application that is centered on the learner and would constitute the person's personal learning record, portfolio, business and educational contacts, communications and creativity tools, library and resource subscription management, and related services. Stephen Downes, the project leader:"

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David Wiley & John Hilton's opening article for the Openness and the Future of Higher Education special issue of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL).