Imagine my delight at seeing Open Educational Resources (OER) near the top of the list!

For those of you who don’t know much about OER, they are materials used for teaching and learning that are free from copyright restrictions or are publicly licensed for anyone to use, adapt, and redistribute. OERs are distinguished from other digital and/or free materials by the fact that they are open, meaning that they can be modified and redistributed freely by anyone.

Here’s a short backgrounder with more information.

OER is where I’m spending a lot of my time these days, because I believe this is a key component to helping teachers and students to have more control over differentiating their learning experiences with mobile technology and other tools. And it is certainly a nice side benefit that this movement could redirect a lot of funding that currently goes to textbooks (unused in many classrooms) to other more fruitful uses, like professional development, coaching/mentoring, etc.

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In these sessions, we’ll be exploring open licensed photos, clip art and music; looking at open wiki-based textbooks; using an an open licensed kids dictionary; and creating and improving other OERs. Here are the times:

Open-Licensed Content: The Missing Piece
[Formal Session: Open Source Lab]
Monday, 6/29/2009, 8:30am–9:30am WWCC 152 B

Open Educational Resources: Share, Remix, Learn
[Formal Session: BYOL]
Tuesday, 6/30/2009, 12:30pm–1:30pm WWCC 151 B

I’ll also be in the 21st Century Media Center Playground on Mon. from 12-2 showing mobile technology tools that can be used to differentiate instruction and in the Open Source Playground (Mon. from 2-4 and Tues. from 2-4) showing open content and talking about how you can use this free resource in your school.

Hope to see you in DC!

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If you can’t attend this conference, there are lots of opportunities to participate virtually. A list is below. In fact, I suspect that those who take advantage of these online resources will gain far more than those who just sit in sessions. I know that I’ll be digesting all this stuff for weeks to come.

• NECC ning (social network)
• NECC Live (streaming video
• Edubloggercon
• Hitchhikr feed (aggregated blog and photo feed)
• Twitter stream (If Twitter can get it together, that is. It’s been a tough week.)

Technorati Tags: necc08 necc necc2008

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The session focused on various characteristics of the Net Gen and the consequences of those for schools. Here are some observations I took away from the session:

– Doug reeled off a long list of statistics of how the Net Gen is different from boomers or even Gen X. This made me feel old, but also to be happy to be living in a time of so much excitement, energy, and positive change.

– Students in the Net Gen WANT TO LEARN. They just may want to learn different content and with different methods than schools traditionally offer.

– It was suggested that the Dewey Decimal system is losing relevance. (This inspired defensive indignation in the crowd of mostly library media specialists in the audience.) Doug talked about user/student-generated tags as a more relevant system of organization. This is definitely a trend at NECC this year. Are organizations beginning to tag analog content like library books?

– Like others here, Doug encouraged us to be more flexible in allowing students to bring electronic devices, like iPods, handhelds, and even cell phones, to school. Again this is a theme here this year. Doug suggested including students on school and district planning committees to help administration understand the new paradigms of learning of this generation.

– On the subject of filtering, Doug says, “Safety comes from education, not blocking.” Doug’s site and handouts give some thoughtful ideas for how his district is handling these issues.

– Physical place is important. Schools need to be more comfortable and even fun environments. It strikes me that this could be done for little or no cost. I was at a university earlier this week that has done a lot of things like adding nicer student spaces, etc. while simultaneously generating revenue for the school. An associate dean there pointed out to me a Starbucks in the library and said that, while students love it, the librarians were not so happy with it.

– Librarians have a central role to play in information literacy and learning in the future.

See his web page for more thought-provoking details.

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– With wikis, some people are hesitant to add because they think they might be “wrong.”

– School 2.o was too radical of an idea for many. [My note: I started out there for just that reason; I was looking for a group with some ideas that were “out there.” It was a little lonely though. I moved over to Classroom 2.0, but sometimes find that much of the discussion there is not really 2.0-related.]

– There may be a need for a more database-type approach for creating/storing/accessing 2.0 curriculum resources that’s more structured than a wiki.

* There needs to be a set of tags that identify educational grade level, content area, and even national standards correlation. [My note: This is a really big idea, I think. There are so many great resources out there, but there needs to be consistent tags so they can be accessed easier.]

– There was a discussion of issues related to blocking of Google video, YouTube, etc. If more people licensed content under Creative Commons though, this content could be “harvested” off of these sites and put on other more “education-friendly” sites.

– Relevant links: Classroom 2.0 ning, School 2.0 ning, Classroom 2.0 wiki, Creative Commons licensing

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The next show will feature similar copyleft visual content (photos, clip art, videos). I’m also presenting a session called “Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate and Enrich Instruction” at NECC. This presentation will include how to create and use this kind of content. If you’re at NECC, stop by and say hi!

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