Seeing Through New Eyes

The reading this week Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources brought out some good points for me. This is certainly something I'm going to need to read a couple of times to pull out all the useful information for myself and my work. The first point that caught my eye said, "OER projects can expand access to learning for everyone, but most of all for non-traditional groups of students, and thus widen participation in higher education. They can be an efficient way of promoting lifelong learning, both for individuals and for government, and can bridge the gap between non-formal, informal, and formal learning." I hadn't really thought of OER's doing all of that. Of course I knew that an OER is great for expanding dissemination of a resource and/or the information in that resource, but the lifelong learning point hits home to me since that area of research interests me and fits right into an idea I am researching at this moment, problem...

In your opinion, is the "right to education" a basic human right? Why or why not? In your opinion, is open *access* to free, high-quality educational opportunity sufficient, or is it necessary to *mandate* education through a certain age or level? The "right to education" as a basic human right is a sticky situation. The readings for this week introduce this idea as one that is important to consider. I believe everyone should have the right to be educated, but how to do this throughout the entire world is complicated for many reasons (one of these reasons being that the people of the world do not all agree on what a basic right is). As Tomasevski says we must look at the economic, political, and cultural impacts this question opens. Of course one of my first reactions to this question is that everyone in this world deserves to be educated, but educated in what? Their culture, the world, politics, reading and writing (in what language?), some curriculum that has been...