Cathedrals on the Bazaar?

I like the idea of having a more participant-led discussion tomorrow at the conference in Utrecht. To have at least a basis of discussion about the authoring & development of open educational resources I prepared a mindmap or personal cognitive map how I see this topic.

I am looking forward to discussing this topic with participants and to see if we have an overlap of thoughts on this topic. There is also a shared mindmap anyone can edit here.

One often repeated aim for educational technology projects is the aim to enable teachers and trainers to reuse existing material and to “remix” it with other educational resources. This target seems to be quite easy to solve on a first sight but the problems occur when we look at how much detail about licensing one must know before s/he can make an informed decision what resources can be remixed. One the one hand creativecommons have an enormous impact on a kind of “personalized” licensing between public domain and traditional intellectual property rights. On the other hand this freedom in licensing brings so much complexity into the authoring process that it is not easy to choose appropriate educational resources for reuse and remix. Take a look at the following picture:

This picture shows the many possible combination of material with a cc-license and the ability to remix this material (see a live combination wizard here) . Maybe intelligent technological solutions like a license specific search and retrieval of material helps to reduce complexity. But maybe the solution to this problem is much easier: Just do not choose a very restrictive license for your own material.

Although the topic of authoring of open educational resources has many perspectives (like the social “motivational” perspective, the technological perspective, the legal perspective etc.) one of the most important aspects is how the widely distributed open educational resources can be accessed within authoring environments. In this regard I see the example of the eXe editor as a best practice example for open educational resources: Within eXe so called iDevices (instructional devices) allow to access and load articles from many different Wikipedia projects or from Wikieducator into the authoring environment for easy reuse of this material. Similar to the creativecommons search engine this could be the basis to integrate many different open educational content repositories and to allow users also to search for material that fits to their purpose of reuse (commercial, non-commercial etc.).