Find a “niche» and make it big.

In my experience, any idea worth doing is always overwhelmed by the feeling of impossibility, only money or time can help me to get there… This way of thinking of who is worth millions to big companies/institutions is the challenge for a person who works for big players and has big ideas and then wants to do its own way.

Exploring OER issues

After careful reading of the OER Research Hub evidence report and its 11 OER evidence hypothesis I was trying to understand what they were talking about, mostly because it seems to me that OER definition by UKOER* is a very vague at best and very wide to say the least.

So before jumping on the issues in hand, I had to come to terms with a few things:

This particular activity happened to be very interesting for me.

Not because of the readings in itself which provide a range of views on the subject, nor was the problem of being fairly dated readings a problem that I see more often than desired on the course design, but the tone and nature of the papers provided an eureka moment connecting an old idea I had when I did my postgraduate degree in philosophy and religion.

I had several attempts to do courses over MOOC platforms, Coursera, Udemy, Pluralsights and a few more that I don’t remember…

I tried different types of courses, from philosophy, design and programming in Phyton or IOs.

I would take  the «Place Based Learning, pg 33 Innovation pedagogy report…» As I think combine both points, the need to renew a workforce with specific skills and what it means to educate at work.

My company is a startup that produces courses in a fairly traditional e-learning format, with the mission of bringing new technologies into the mix.

It was a difficult reading, mostly because I agree more with the criticisms that what the paper defends or even justify. The paper in itself is dishonest as does not attempt to discuss or examine, or even outline, what’s most important in any theory its “philosophical and epistemological issues” furthermore he states “..the is beyond the scope of this article and it will therefore [the paper] concentrate on outlining the main areas of criticism.”

I am on the middle of a fight of activity 10, while reading of Vygotsky or Piaget or Freire or many others, i tend to find in the critics to each theory a narrow and quite literal understanding of the theories…

No one seems to see beyond the context where they wrote, mostly those who come from countries that are ideologically & politically at odds, hampering the theories, misjudging, underusing, understating…

Even if this can only be attributed to an unconscious level, s very annoying as it seems a real freedom from thinking has been cut, undermined, obliterated in academic compliance!

end of rant

When I was doing some HE studies in philosophy and religion I remember a lecture where on an Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who argued that if we remove the concept that life is sacred, many of the problems on difficult ethical discussions of today such as abortion, euthanasia, inequality, climate change etc. will be lifted from our thinking and we can see the problem from a different ethical perspective to maybe find a solution.

The case of the Mexican OER:

I own a small company that provide contents and services around learning innovation in the Mexican private sector, I and a small group of people we decide how the learning experiences should be made, and we have a fairly good level of freedom in the design of learning experiences, the main limitation is money.

How would you judge OpenLearn in terms of your definition of innovation?

My view of innovation does not differs much from the view set up by the module, in that regards Open Learn is an educational OER made coherently within this idea with the advantage that its made with the backing of a huge educational institution, Open University, which stands on the word open as a mean to reach any person who wants to study and wants to have higher education quality for its studies.

First thing strikes me from the paper is a very naive? notion that “The recent growth in interest in OER has several drivers, ideological, political and economic, none of which in itself explains how learning will be supported or help us to develop effective models and learning design:” while the main example is OpenLearn, an institution build thanks to the OU platform who is a serious driving force in Open, Distance and education for more than 50 years…

After reading Seely Brown and Adler (2008), Minds on fire: open education, the long tail and learning 2.0. from the innovative projects he mentioned; 

Terra Incognita,
Digital Study Hall,
CyberOne: Law in the court of public opinion
Faulkes Telescope project,
Hands on universe,
Bugscope project
The Decameron Web

I find that the practice of writing a journal as described by Park does not differ from the old stoicism practice from two thousands years ago where, as common practice for an old stoic was, to write every morning and every night his reflections of the day he will be facing or the day it has had or any other relevant experience or thought in his life.

Hello everyone,

This is the replica of my first blog post for the H817 Module at the Open University blog tool.
I decided to duplicate here what I wrote there
Keep you posted!