Webinar 601 - The
Role of Open Educational Resources in Personal Learning
12:00 pm – 1:15 pm MST, Adobe Connect
Keynote presentation by Stephen Downes
With major announcements in the world of open educational
resources, such as the funding of college OERs announced in the U.S., or the
creation of OER-University being supported by WikiEducator and the Commonwealth
of Learning, as well as with the success of the OpenCourseWare consortium and
other initiatives, attention is now turning to the development of OERs, the
role that they play, and how the process should be managed. In this talk,
Stephen Downes argues that rather than think of OERs as contenmt objects,
containing knowledge and information intended for transfer to the student, OERs
should be thought of as the raw material a learner works with through the
practice of managing their own learning. More specifically, the
role of open educational resources is to function as a vocabulary of multimedia
‘words’ with which learners converse with each other and with experts in the
field. The main emphasis of this presentation was to speak of the role of OERs
in the development of learning networks - these networks that are the
characteristic result of conversations, and in which our academic and
scientific communities are contained.
