Open Educational Resources, Reuse and Sharing

Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu, Jun 27, 2011
Commentary by Stephen Downes

I'm linking to this item to make a simple point. Graham Attwell writes "Grainne Conole in her introduction to the workshop had posed a series of questions including why there appears to be so limited reuse of resources and secondly how we can guarantee quality." These to me seem to be the wrong questions. If not interested in reuse, I'm interested in use. The whole 'reuse' dialogue presumes some sort of publishing-teaching paradigm that is at odds with the real value of open educational resources. In the same way, I'm less interested in quality than I am in process. What are the mechanisms for creation and distribution? How do people use open resources to communicate with each other? If nobody reuses a publisher's OER (which cost time and money to create) it's a disaster. If nobody reuses my OER, it's no big deal, because the learning as in the creating and communicating.