Open educational resources and web services: confusion in the debate
22-May-2007
The seems to be some ideological confusion creeping into discussions around Open Educational Resources
There seems to be confusions creeping into discussions about the use of third party services and different formats for Open Educational Resources.
Three things are important about Open Educational Resources - that they can be found, that they can be repurposed and that they can be used for learning.
First lets talk about file formats. I have spent a lot of time promoting and supporting Open Source software. But in terms of ease of access word and powerpoint are probably the most accessible and easily editable standards. Personally I tend to provide RTF version of files which can be edited in word or in Open Office. The one format I think is particularly useless is PDF.
Now on to services. People having been saying to me we shouldn't trust our data to third party sites. They might go out of business, the financial model may change, we cannot trust commercially driven providers. Therefore we should convert presentations into Open Office and host on our own wiki.
The big thing for me about services like Slideshare and Flickr is is that they make Open Educational Resources available. They make it easy to find presentations and pictures and through the provision of open APIs make it simple to incorporate in our own blogs and sites (and the tools are well designed and simple to use). And lets face it, not much of what I trust to these sites is 'mission critical'. If slideshare goes out of existence tomorrow I have everåything on my computer anyway. I just have to upload it again - a nuisance but no more than that.
So lets not get too hung up about who owns service providers sites and concentrate on the important things like providing free quality e-learning opportunities for everyone.
Three things are important about Open Educational Resources - that they can be found, that they can be repurposed and that they can be used for learning.
First lets talk about file formats. I have spent a lot of time promoting and supporting Open Source software. But in terms of ease of access word and powerpoint are probably the most accessible and easily editable standards. Personally I tend to provide RTF version of files which can be edited in word or in Open Office. The one format I think is particularly useless is PDF.
Now on to services. People having been saying to me we shouldn't trust our data to third party sites. They might go out of business, the financial model may change, we cannot trust commercially driven providers. Therefore we should convert presentations into Open Office and host on our own wiki.
The big thing for me about services like Slideshare and Flickr is is that they make Open Educational Resources available. They make it easy to find presentations and pictures and through the provision of open APIs make it simple to incorporate in our own blogs and sites (and the tools are well designed and simple to use). And lets face it, not much of what I trust to these sites is 'mission critical'. If slideshare goes out of existence tomorrow I have everåything on my computer anyway. I just have to upload it again - a nuisance but no more than that.
So lets not get too hung up about who owns service providers sites and concentrate on the important things like providing free quality e-learning opportunities for everyone.
