[Oer-community] A reflection

[bnhaw at tm.net.my]

Dear Zaid and fellow colleagues of OER group,

 

The issue of objectively to meet one goal is always encouraging. I find that Zaid had pointed out some of the useful awareness points. Perhaps we may adopt these suggestions as a start to gearing our effort in becoming fruitful results through certain strategies to meet the objective view point.

 

However, there are uncountable subjective points are available in this OER universe thus it has different level of agenda in supporting the OER platform challenges from this complex society. Therefore, whether our ideas worth for consideration by all the OER community or even concern authority as well as non OER community is not an important factor at least we must dare to demand in order to make improvement of the OER initiatives to become a sustainable project. Especially the advancement of the past, present and promising future world, many things in this world are keep on changing because everyone hopes to excel the present model even though the primary goal has not yet achieved but we are still talking about the one stop solution to safeguard of various interest in single activity. Sound great! Come and leave is a kind of common nature of participant attitude in any volunteer services unless contributor pay high responsibility with passion and commitment to making OER a great success otherwise it will be merely another kind of discussion in the virtual world through this acid test.  

Over the last few years many have faced challenges from the state of the economy or an increased number of natural disasters and changing weather patterns. I've noticed that those who have most successfully weathered these storms and overcome adversity all seem to share a common belief that something positive can come out of difficult situations.

Finding the positive and building on what's important may not be easy, but it is certainly helpful, when we face serious challenges in our lives. If we only focus on the negative when challenging things happen to us, we make our situations even worse. We've all heard stories about people who have lost everything they own to fire, hurricane, tornado or other disaster, but who surprisingly are able to talk about being grateful. That's because they've shifted their focus from what they've lost to what they still have—their lives. As long as there's life there's hope. Those who are able to move past the worst of times have discovered how to accept the fact of a difficult situation and move past it.

As a Founder cum Chairman of Ansted Social Responsibility International Award, I wish the OER implementation a great success as together we can make the world a better place to live in. Thanks for reading my thoughts in this aspect. 

 

Roger Haw

    

 

 

From: oer-community-bounces at athabascau.ca [mailto:oer-community-bounces at athabascau.ca] On Behalf Of Zaid Alsagoff
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2012 11:01 AM
To: oer-community
Subject: Re: [Oer-community] A reflection

 

Dear Susan & Colleagues,





Trying to keep track with all the great ideas and might be repeating what has been said with this:





It would be great if the global OER map had multiple layers (different views) to meet multiple needs to promote awareness and empower us to find what we want (if there).





A great learning organization or community don't search for something that has already been found :)





 If the OER map functioned as a wiki, means that at least members (approved) can update it, and that would help (but we would need some rules (metadata) to ensure some quality standards).





However, for the OER map to be self-sustaining it should be organic and self-updating, meaning it should support RSS feeds from all OER projects (where possible), and Having a Twitter hashtag to support the discussion would be great.





Finally, it would be great if we could sometimes to conduct polls in this discussion to get some patterns of agreement or disagreement, besides people replying just on yes or no (with no further understanding overall).





For example Linkedin or Facebook Groups/Pages have polls that empower you to suggest new ideas, while being able to vote for the good ideas at the same time. Simple polls would also do (e.g. Polldaddy). 





Overall, we have great discussions in this group, but we hardly ever get the overall opinions in an organized manner in this awesome OER group, and by doing it in such a manner is to me not constructive enough to move forward in a more effective and efficient manner. Sometimes, it feels like everyone is trying to make his or her points, but only strong opinion leaders are being read or approved. The current format is good already, but personally I think we need some innovations to get more involvement by the lesser 'names' here.





Just sharing my honest thoughts.





Thanks and warm regards,





 

Zaid Ali Alsagoff
E-Learning Manager
International Medical University   
No. 126, Jln Jalil Perkasa 19, Bukit Jalil,57000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
DID: +603 2731 7327 <tel:%2B603%202731%207327>  

 





Thanks and warm regards,





Zaid


Sent from my iPad


On 15 Nov 2012, at 01:10, Susan D'Antoni <susandantoni at gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Colleagues,

 

This has been a most energetic start to our discussion of mapping the landscape of OER initiatives.  To see this OER community spring into action again is such a pleasure after being in contact with many of you since 2005.

 

And like our colleague, Saul Fisher, I too was at the 2002 meeting at UNESCO when the Term Open Educational Resources came into being and like him “find the progress in OER over the decade "beyond my wildest hopes". 

 

Maps are "powerful representations for creating, representing and visualizing open knowledge” (Ale Okada) but no, there has been no decision taken anywhere that we will create an OER world map (Sandra Schosn concern).

 

In the discussion so far, there have been a number of points made about the potential benefits of a visual map of the OER landscape – such as – 

 

*   serve as a gateway

*   make more initiatives visible beyond the well-known ones

*   identify initiatives operating in different languages

*   help find OER

*   identify the OER community

*   foster new collaboration and cooperative efforts

 

But there have been some concerns expressed – such as – 

 

*   it is a big task so it needs to be a simple map

*   it needs to be self sustaining

*   It is tempting to collect too much data

*   it needs to be carefully structured and organized

*   we need to define or classify initiatives

 

The point about sustainability and the need to keep it simple are good points to bear in mind.  I had the privilege (because I was not trained as a statistician) of working at Statistics Canada, a fine statistical agency.  I learned a lot, but one thing that stuck with me was the extremely high cost of collecting information and the importance of “essential” data, not "nice to have".  It truly is a temptation to want more and morre information.  But if we aimed to describe the global OER landscape, then the amount of information to begin building an OER world map might best be what we consider absolutely essential.  Discipline!

 

Let’s keep the two lists of pros and concerns in mind as we continue this train of discussion.  Then let's move on to considering what essential information might be for an initial mapping exercise.

 

Lovely conversation,

 

Susan

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