[Oer-community] Wrapping up the conversation

[Paul Silva]

In responding to Fred Beshears responding to Douglas Tedford’s question; I would like to make the following observations and statements:
 
1.                  This particular OER community came together through UNESCO, IIEP partnership with the Hewlett Packard Foundation, which in themselves exemplify how the public good and commercial interest can coincide.
2.                  “The several distribution coalition” mentioned by Beshears actually and always co-exists in capitalism however one defines their relationship. Therefore, the real issue for the OER Movement in view of what it brings to education and training is either to subscribe to the limiting twin-causes of improving the quality of education and reducing its cost as identified by Beshears, or to develop a platform that will include these objectives, but that will also include an unequivocal support for free education and training. Yes, even if it means that some beneficiaries of the “free” in education are seen as “free riders”. I do not think that it is wholly possible to accurately describe people as “free riders” in education and training when informal learning and teaching are taken into account. I think the spurious arguments advanced by elitist educators of the 19th and 20th centuries have already turned on
 their heads in the 21st i.e. the 19th C. British Education Curriculum in which apart from Mathematics and Astronomy anything else there was to serve the status of the privileged. Education and Training are fundamental human rights! The imposition of Western Value systems on world education with its ills and good can be reasonably argued now necessitates Education and Training as basic human rights. And the 21st C. Information Age with the introduction of world wide web and current advancement in ICT have transformed the otherwise bigoted church-led education in which the “western” model was premised on supplanted histories and philosophy undermining the true and factually verifiable sources of antiquity and knowledge.
3.                  The importance of the MIT OCW to the broadening of the OER in itself shows why it is healthy to have all the mixtures to form the most aggregated models. Education and Training are both human rights and commercial considerations.
4.                  The most basic objective of the OER movement, in my view, will be to actively promote, encourage and facilitate ICT literacy worldwide before untold millions are impoverished by being left behind, which would happen in the next fifty years should mass-illiteracy in ICT persists!
5.                  When the OER Movement has succeeded more in influencing governments in and around the world of the mutual benefits of the OER in terms of sharing skills and knowledge and how and what to pay for and not pay for as necessary interaction upon which our collective peace, prosperity and stability depend; the OER Movement will have established a long term meaningful goal, which IMHO will lead to a more equitable development of the global knowledge storehouses to be utilised by all in fairer measures as all regions of the earth will be contributing to it and it will be truly shared knowledge and complimentary growth; the divisive weapons of destruction will have been beaten into ploughs. 
6.                  I believe as Beshears has stated that people will not join the OER Movement if it offers them nothing, but then as I had argued in previous post accessing today’s ICT illiterates to ICT Education and Training is something as enhancing the levels and knowledge bases of current ICT literates and practitioners. Besides, OER Health, OER Languages, and OER anything that will promote world peace and prosperity is the way forward.
 
Paul A. SILVA PhD
Professor of Literary Studies & Education
www.uie.edu.es/moodle

 


      
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