To: Article “Open Educational Resources: What they are and why do they matter” by Ilkka Tuomi
OER will be a global impact in sharing, learning and developing ideas of people coming from developing countries or high-income countries. The spread and developement of knowledge is fast and will change the whole world systems. In the run-up to it we should consider the concept.
The fact of openess in open educational resources:
The developement of open science can be achieved by social benefits by reanalysing and adding to existing knowledge. It is a fair progress. Besides the social open-aspect there is just the economic problem: to get a payment for their achievement.
For the realisation of OER it is needed to transform the systems of the institutions, of learning, practising, teaching. It will be integrated into the educational practice system of nowadays and there will be the transformation to new practices through new approaches in managing education and learning in a qualitatively way.
The future learing environments will change from national systems to global knowledge networks. New technologies as simulations, games, platforms, audio and video will give the possibility to give and get informations. Therefore creation and learning management systems will be redesigned to form an optimal application for the users. The usage will be optimal for young and old people. Every person of every age will be able to use OER. It is just a question of information and communication technologies. The speed of change will be enourmous; as example there are the existing systems of Wikipedia, Skype or YouTube.
The technical possibilities will be the basis and the reason for the level of speed of the developemnt of knowledge.
As we see the learning will be increasingly networked. To be creative and innovative are the keywords. The students will construct the knowledge and the teachers handle and organise the education and learning.
Open source is called open because of the possibility of “copy, modify and redistribute”. No paying or fees are demanded. The interesting fact of open source for educators is described in fast developement, low costs (just for computer and network costs; but no fees or contracts), high quality outputs and the potential of open source which can be adjusted specifically.
So the openeness in open source means in a social point of view that the people have the freedom to use, contribute and share knowledge. In a technical point of view technical systems are mostly created in a constructive character. System designers must find components for interfaces and protocols that fit into the system. An essential facilitation is the standardisation which helps technicians to develop (e.g. ISO, RFC).
It is important that indepently developed systems match. A certain part stays in the “black box” and is not modifyable but the open part, interfaces and protocols, makes it possible to solve the puzzle.
Open source systems in this technical realm offer “white, transparent and open boxes” which means that the openess is defined in partial openess and full openess.
-I hope that all of the users respect the act of developement and none of the them play on the honest achievements.