Brian Lamb, via Abject Learning, reflects on whether information scarcity should still be the driving force for OER, and grapples with what the OER movement should emphasize to remain relevant:
… higher education is still conducting its business as if information is scarce when we now live in an era of unprecedented information abundance. That we in the institutions can endlessly discuss what content we deign to share via our clunky platforms, while Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, TED Talks, the blogs and other networked media just get on with it… That I might not be able to legally reproduce much of the copyrighted media on the web, but I can link to it, maybe embed it, or simply tell students to search for it. This is not to suggest that sharing more of the presumably high quality content that higher education produces would not enrich the store of available information… but that the world is not waiting for us to get our act together and become a relevant force on the web. The world is moving on without us.
Brian’s post generated many comments. Here are a couple of them:
D’Arcy Norman: … Content is the least important part of education. What is far more important is what takes place between and among the students. The activities of the community of learners. What they actually DO with the content and with each other.
Great content IS important, but only if there is also a functioning and active community working together to learn, create and share. Otherwise, all that takes place is content dissemination. And that’s not education, open or otherwise.
Alan Levine: I’d push back on that question- even if we are in an era of Information Abundance, I’d argue you can never have too much. Or taking it another way, since people have been creating music for thousands of years, do we stop and say, “we have enough music, there is no need to create new or re-interpret.”
And one might look at what you are calling “content” or “information”- at some atomic level, we can now and even in ways coming cannot imagine, be creating new “musical” interpretations or mixes of info.
… I see no conflict of recognizing the growing abundance of information– is higher ed really tapping into it? Why is more content/info not a desirable goal?
