OLDaily, by Stephen Downes

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October 21, 2010

Scholarly Communications Action Handbook
Curtis+Cartwright Consulting Ltd, with Charles Oppenheim and Naomi Korn, JISC, October 21, 2010.


From the web site: This JISC Scholarly Communications Action Handbook provides guidance and suggested actions, in an effort to address researchers' scholarly communication concerns and improve current practices. The series of actions were created in consultation with the community and should help to establish change. The masterlist of actions is extensive (90 different actions), and is best navigated by starting at one of the following access points: stakeholder groups, activities, concerns or hot topics, as seen below." The individual descriptions are brief, and supported with a reference to an external resource.

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School change: how we organize high schools makes no sense
Steve Wyckoff, What's Become Clear, October 18, 2010.


This is one of those analogies that really could have a lot of traction (I just wish it wasn't a basketball analogy, because I hate basketball). Accordinmg to the post, "n high school were responsible for teaching basketball this is how we would organize the learning experience for students.The typical student schedule would look something like this. 1st Hour – Dribbling. 2nd Hour – Shooting..." You get the idea. "In addition we'd have them learn basketball by sitting and listening while the teacher explained and demonstrated in the front of the room." Funny. But too real.

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Openness: From Sharing to Adopting
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, October 17, 2010.


The recent UNESCO discussion on open educational resources turned eventually to the question of adoption of OERs, and as David Wiley suggests in this post, raised the need for people to start adopting them. As Wiley says, "hose leaders who think of themselves as being on the cutting edge of the open education movement need to start walking the walk / becoming living examples / modeling the desired behavior of adopting others' OERs." He is locked into the idea of them being adopted by instructors and merged into course packages. But I still think he has the wrong model.

Here at OLDaily, I have been 'adopting' open educational resources for ten years, linking to a half dozen or so of them every week day, a total of some 16,000 in all. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people have used them. No, maybe not instructors. But who cares? Similarly, our Connectivist and PLENK courses have been using OERs, hundreds of them. No, we don't upload them and merge them into prefab course modules. Who needs the grief? We link to them and let learners use them directly. Change the model and you'll see there's no problem with the adoption of OERs at all.

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Copyright 2010 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca

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