At the heart of the movement towards Open Educational Resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Worldwide Web in particular provide an opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse it.
(UNESCO Conference 2009)
Welcome to COERLL’s brand new blog, Open Up, devoted to conversations about open education in language learning. Here, educators can get informed and dream together about dynamic, community-driven open educational practices in language learning.
As you know, blog comments include like-minded voices as well as new perspectives to help us broaden our understanding on a topic. So please participate in the conversation. Open Up advocates progress toward a better future in language learning. As such, we ask you to keep your comments constructive, useful, civil, and in all other ways sociable. We’ll launch new blog conversations twice a week, and you can stay in the loop by subscribing through the options listed at the top of this post.
To begin, we’d like to devote this conversation to your questions and thoughts. Take a look at our categories (at the top menu). Which do you want to know more about? Let us know! We look forward to moving into the future of language education together.
Congratulations on launching the blog! I found this through the newsletter, FYI — I’ll subscribe, and look forward to being in the know 🙂
Thanks, Sean! And let us know if there’s a topic you’d like us to cover.
I’d like to know more about what ‘remixing OER’ means. Do you have examples of good remixing?
Hi Sally,
Remixing refers to taking open content from several sources (say, two different open textbooks) and putting it together in a new way. For you to remix digital content, you must have permission and that is where Creative Commons copyright licenses come it. They allow you to share and remix content legally! Check it out: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Remixing is really big in the music industry as you might imagine. People love to mix different melodies and songs to create something new. Here is a page that gives examples: http://creativecommons.org/legalmusicforremixing
I’d add, too, that assembling various articles and book chapters into a printed course pack is a great and common example of remixing, except that it’s done through a combination of fair use, individual permission, and royalty payments by the school to a copyright exchange.
For OER, the remixing of texts and other media is done under explicit license, which can make things much simpler.