Beginning thoughts from Open Education Conference 2009

I have been meaning to write about my experience at the 2009 Open Education Conference, but haven't gotten to it. So, here is one of my thoughts (building from David Wiley's thoughts here: Feeling out of place). There were some ideas floating around the conference about the meaning of open educational resources. The one that caught me off guard was someone saying that to be truly open a resource must be reusable (meaning derivative works allowed). Wow, so that means some of the creative commons licenses can't even be used with that definition. I found that the definition of what open really means is changing, and in my opinion not always for the better. As David said, there were some radical ideas coming from many people and that scared me just a bit, mostly because I don't want to see people no longer respect the Open Education Movement. I think it is very important, but it needs to be handled creatively and carefully. At the end of the session by Chris Mackie I was chatting with some people who were saying that the Open Ed Movement needs to step up and be the leaders in changing higher education. I totally agree that the people in Open Ed could do this, but I hope that if and when they do, they approach it carefully. From what I took away of this session, Chris was saying we should be moving towards changing the pedagogical approaches to learning and incorporating open educational resources with it. Yes! I totally agree, but as he did in his presentation, he didn't really talk about OER until the end. I think most people in higher ed need to take some things a step at a time.

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