Archive for the ‘Collaborative content development’ Category

Open innovation topics have always seemed to me to be very relevant to open educaitonal resource development, especially as they move away from open source software into other fields. Open Innovators in doing a series on 12 recommended open innovation books, the first four of which are:

• Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future
  - by Patricia B. Seybold
• Motivation in Open Innovation
  - by Robert Motzek
• Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology
  -by Henry Chesbrough
• The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
  - by Chris Anderson

I found Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation to be really helpful in thinking about how open innovation might occur with educational materials. I won’t be surprised if it appears in future posts.

Here’s a great summary of articles posted in the not-too-distant past in Terra Incognita addressing the relationship between open source software and open educational resources. Here is the abstract of the summary:

In March 2007, a group of authors wrote short articles about the impact of Open Educational Resources and Open Source Software on education and engaged in dialog on the topic. The articles were posted on Terra Incognita. Several themes surfaced from the 11 articles, which included the roles of common-based peer production as an emerging economic and social model, organizational enablers and challenges, the critical nature of localization for reuse, and Learning Design as a form of Open Source Teaching.

People’s Open Access Education Initiative is an intriguing new project, one of a few I’ve seen emerging that I call “second generation” in that they don’t create OER from scratch, but instead build on the open resources already made available by others. In this case, the project intends to use a collaborative development model to localize public health content for developing regions. Here’s an excerpt from their About page:

The inspiration

The open source software movement provides an inspiration for an affordable and credible solution - Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS), ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS . Many hundreds of individuals have contributed to the development of high quality software which is freely available on the Internet.

In the education field, there are now parallel developments of Open Educational Resources (OER), with an ever expanding range of high quality on line resources that are freely available through the Internet. (http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=Main_Page).

Our solution

Develop educational context around freely available open educational resources on the Internet – Peoples-uni.org. This is an open activity, to be developed in partnership across the global and digital divides. We are in development phase, and hope eventually to m ove towards the establishment of a ‘ Peoples Open Access University’.

Organisation

We do not plan to have a centralised organisational structure and are calling on various individuals and organisations to undertake various of the required tasks. We are calling this ‘Volunteersourcing’ – a variant of ‘Crowdsourcing’. While many of these tasks might be performed by volunteers, others will require funding (such as accreditation).