David Wiley has a new post lamenting the lack of open educational resources being adopted in comparison to the number being shared. From the post:
A sustained program of giving becomes pretty pointless when it’s clear that no one is willing to receive, regardless of how impressive the scale of would-be giving is.
Also, a post by Paul Stacey on “Not-Invented-Here” syndrome.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged e-learning, ocw, oer, online learning, open content, Open Education, openness, remix, reuse
iThenticate has a new post discussing the case of author Michel Houellebecq who “plagiarized” Wikipedia.
Brandon Muramatsu at MIT has a new blog post suggesting the use of plagiarism software to detect OER reuse. Muramatsu mentions the idea originating at discussions at COSL, and was mentioned in Sean Duncan’s recent dissertation on OER reuse. From the blog post:
I propose that a new metric to evaluate the use of open educational resources (OER) is to look for use by running a plagarism-style detector against the web. In this case, Plagiarism is Good™, very good. The idea is to build on the idea of plagiarism detecting software, like TurnItIn, to find occurrences of text that matches the text of documents in open educational resources. Since most OERs are licensed to permit copying and modification (with attribution), it should be relatively easy to find additional occurrences on the web at large.
Thanks to Smart Marbles for the repost.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged Internet, oer, open content, Open Education, open learning, reuse
David Wiley has posted a response to criticisms of Sean Duncan’s dissertation on reuse within the Connexions repository (original OEN article, OEN article linking to one critique). He responds to “apologists” who would suggest that much of the OER reuse isn’t readily trackable by comparing it to the “dark matter” concept in Astronomy. From the article:
Rather than accepting the message of data which indicate that reuse is occurring only very infrequently, the apologists imagine an unobservable space offline in which reuse must surely be occurring. With the irrational zeal of the too often caricatured believer, members of the Church of Reuse seem rather resilient in the face of data.
Stephen Downes commentary on Wiley’s post.
David Wiley, in a recent blog post, relates the results of research conducted around reuse with the Connexions repository. The findings indicate that only 15 modules were reused 5 or more times. From the blog post:
To me, this study begins to confirm the “dirty secret” of OER – that the reuse emperor has no (or only very scanty) clothes.
