(2012-04-13) Oer As Cocreation Ecosystem

OER as Co-Creation EcoSystem: *The richest exchanges on day two of the Hewlett Open Educational Resources Grantee Meeting came from those who challenged the fundamental premises of the meeting. In designing the meeting, Berkman staff imagined three groups: Learners, Facilitators (teachers, librarians, coaches, educators, etc.), and Builders. They assumed a kind of "supply and demand" model of OER where builders create stuff and distribute it to learners, sometimes through the mediation of facilitators (wholesalers, I guess?).

But the entrepreneurial educators in the audience, from Joi Ito of the MIT MediaLab, to Vicki Davis of Flat Classroom, to Jon Bergmann of the Flipped Classroom movement cried foul. "We don't want to be the recipients of your pre-packaged Learning Object-s," they declared (I'm paraphrasing), "we want to be partners--along with our students--in co-creating the learning experience."*

What this means to me is that any Learning Object standards/tools should stay very lite/open, more like WebLog engines (and RSS) than CMS-s, so that everyone is encouraged to plug into it. (Contra SCORM)