[Oer-community] OER mapping - Let's eat our own dogfood

[Wayne Mackintosh]

Hi Susan, and open mapping enthusiasts

1.   *Would a world map to visualize the global OER landscape be useful?*


I think that visualising geographic data of the OER landscape would be
useful and I'm very supportive of the concept. I think we need to be clear
about the purposes for the geographic visualisations we aim to generate.
 As mentioned by Steve Foerster, international peer-collaborative and
networked open education projects present unique challenges in terms of
geographic associations and activity.

By way of example, the Open Content Licensing for
Educators<http://wikieducator.org/Open_content_licensing_for_educators/Home>
(OCL4Ed) free online workshop initiative may illustrate some of the
challenges of where or how to place the pin on a world map. We have another
iteration of OCL4Ed starting on 3 December 2012. Registrations are
open<http://wikieducator.org/Open_content_licensing_for_educators/About>and
already +33 countries are participating. With reference to geographic
locations for the OCL4Ed initiative as a global OER project:

   - *Original funding* support for developing the materials was provided
   by the UNESCO Office for the Pacific States. As a regional office, should
   we attribute the location to all the Pacific States on the map?
   - *Course development* was done openly and collaboratively involving
   volunteers from the WikiEducator community (International), Creative
   Commons (International), Open Courseware Consortium (International). Do we
   restrict the mapping locations to the individuals who actually contributed
   to the development or the geographic reach of these international
   organisations?
   - *Operational funding *as an ongoing longitudinal initiative. We are
   now presenting the fourth iteration of the OCL4Ed series of free workshops.
   Each iteration we have volunteer facilitators from different regions of the
   world participating. The major sponsorship in terms of funding is provided
   by the OER Foundation. While our registered headoffice is in New Zealand,
   we work internationally but source membership contributions from 20
   different countries.
   - *Global reach of participating learners*   -- while we have only
   served 2000 learners so far -- our data indicates that participants have
   come from +90 countries.

OCL4Ed is just one small OER project building capability in Copyright, OERs
and Creative Commons licensing, but it has a wide international footprint.
Placing a pin in Otago in New Zealand because the headoffice of the OER
Foundation is based there would hardly tell the story.  I'm sure there are
countless international OER projects where the layers of complexity in
terms of visualising the geographic data will increase by an order
of magnitude.

In dealing with this level of complexity, I think we should eat our own
dogfood <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food> and find
rough consensus on the core principles which could underpin a global OER
mapping exercise, for example:

   - Open data -- for example, all participants contributing to the
   mapping exercise should dedicate the data to the public domain.
   - Open licensing of the visualisations - the outputs should be freely
   available with the 4R permissions.
   - Open APIs and standards -- contributing data sets which adhere to open
   APIs and open standards to maximise reuse
   - Open source -- Where possible to use visualisation technologies which
   would not exclude users who can't afford non-free software or choose not to
   sacrifice their freedoms regarding technology choices
   - Open innovation -- ie where we might promote an open process for the
   global community to innovate multiple ways to visualise our collective data
   -- rather than prescribing any particular visualisation.

Agreeing the foundational principles will assist in taking decisions about
technologies, approaches and solutions later down the track.

We also need to think carefully about privacy issues with reference to
tracking geographic information without express permissions from those
contributing the data.

In short, as an open community - -we should eat our own dogfood and build
on open foundations.

Cheers
Wayne

-- 
Wayne Mackintosh <http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg>, Ph.D.
Director OER Foundation <http://www.oerfoundation.org>
Director, International Centre for Open Education, Otago Polytechnic
Commonwealth of Learning Chair in OER, Otago Polytechnic
Founder and elected Community Council Member,
WikiEducator<http://www.wikieducator.org>
Mobile +64 21 2436 380
Skype: WGMNZ1
Twitter <http://twitter.com/#%21/Mackiwg> |
identi.ca<http://identi.ca/waynemackintosh>
Wikiblog <http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg/Blog>
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