OCWC announced an invitation to all to submit paper proposals for the OCWC Global 2009 Conference, which is organized under the theme “Content, Infrastructure, and Creativity”. The event- to be held in Monterrey, Mexico from April 21 to April 24 – is expected to bring together participants from across the world. Excerpt from the Call for Papers:
Creativity is often viewed as freedom of the imagination from the restraints imposed by economic necessity, convention, law or any number of other factors. Yet creativity also requires provision for the material and means of production. Establishing a solid foundation for informed creativity is one of the primary goals of the open education movement.
How do we, as educators, designers and developers, present content so as to unleash, inspire and enable creativity on a variety of levels? How do we measure and build upon our successes, the most satisfying of which may be a long time coming to fruition?
Meanwhile, infrastructure has traditionally been seen as the set of lower-level services and physical architectures which make the delivery of higher level services possible — pipes, roads, power grids, and server farms. It’s been suggested that open content itself, and not just its attendant delivery systems, can be seen as infrastructure. It has also been suggested that the role of the OCWC is to provide infrastructure for its members.
What are the consequences of seeing open content as infrastructure? Are there historical precedents are there? How could a concept of “content as infrastructure” inform what we do — or, for that matter, lead us astray? How does this view affect our attitudes toward what flows through the pipe, over the wire, or on the road?
These are the issues we will address together as we gather for the April 2009 meeting of the OpenCourseWare Consortium. We invite you to consider the ways in which these issues inform the way you participate in OpenCourseWare and the larger Open Access Movement.
