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"The First World OER Congress will be held 20-22 June 2012 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France. Organized in cooperation with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), the Congress aims to influence educational planning worldwide and to encourage governments to support the development and use of open educational resources."

The Open University's peer reviewed Journal of Open and Distance Learning, Open Learning, has devoted its first issue of 2009 to the theme of Open Educational Resources (OER).The issue provides an introduction to the emerging OER movement and its implications for education systems and institutions, educators and learners. The articles describe a range of initiatives and issues, and articulate the vision of some of the most committed and passionate champions of Open Educational Resources. Together they communicate the energy and dynamism associated with this new movement, and its potential to extend learning opportunities worldwide.

So, you want to know how to edit Wikipedia? There's a course for you. We are delighted to announce a new round of our free online course, "Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics & Beyond" (#WIKISOO). The course runs from 25 February - 8 April 2014, and is now open for enrollment. As many of you know already, WIKISOO teaches the nuts and bolts of Wikipedia. We focus on building and improving articles related to Open Education. Enrollment is open to all. We'd especially like to invite past students to re-register: your knowledge and experience will be valuable to your fellow students, and it's also a great opportunity to deepen your learning about Wikipedia and OER. WIKISOO students learn about the values and culture that have driven hundreds of thousands of volunteers to build Wikipedia. Through your work in the course, you will join an effort that has generated millions of free articles in hundreds of languages since 2001. The course covers the technical skills needed to edit articles, and also offers practical insights into the site's collaborative norms and social dynamics. You will graduate with a sophisticated understanding of how to use Wikipedia both as a reader and as an active participant. Sign up is free.

The Personalized Learning system now in Beta by Rice University and being piloted around the country that links open resources with students to personalize learning. Here is the information on the portal.

While most teachers will not understand what this means, an API is something that lets other websites interact with a main website. OpenEd has released an API to allow others to interact with their resources and find things based on standards or keywords. What this means is that OpenEd is going to be a very useful tool for all of education in the future because of this technological tool. It also means that if you're developing for a state or for an organization that provides educational resources, you should tap into this for a huge repository of almost a quarter of a million standards aligned resources that your teachers can search. This is great news.

Companies fight for their future but we may be accepting a dependence we will regret according to this insightful article covering adaptive learning and open education resources s two opposite choices in the future of education.