Open Learning Network

When we stare at our televisions in the evening maybe we don't think of them as places were we could use Open Educational Resources (OER). After all, this is a world where you have to be a big organisation to produce and transmit content, and for most people their involvement will be limited to passive consumption. Until now that is. Many changes are happening that mean people are taking control with their remotes. Opportunities are even emerging to experiment with shifting OER from the laptop to the living room, and it is not as difficult to get involved as you might think.

One of the ideas in the world of Open Educational Resources (OERs) that can be a bit strange to grasp at first is the idea of “remixing”. When I first joined the OLnet project and was telling people about it, a mention of remixing would often prompt people to ask “why would I want to do that?”, a perfectly reasonable question as many will have just experienced education as courses they learn from, but wouldn't actually change. Often OERs are just thought of as free courses, but remixing creates a much bigger opportunity. So I thought I would draw on the collective wisdom of the OLnet team and compile a list of twenty reasons to remix an OER.

The OpenLearn project offers a lot of courses that you can take for free, or even remix. When you have the time to sit in front of your computer this is great, but what about those other times you can't spend time looking at your computer, but the opportunity to learn might brighten up your day? These times might include occasions such as a long car journey, when you are off jogging or waiting at a bus stop.

If you are a regular user of Twitter and follow folk who go to conferences you might have noticed that they have a tendency to highlight points they feel are noteworthy. It is a real change from just taking notes and communicating them to people upon return, now you can follow a conference even if you are not there. The information arriving in your Twitter stream though is raw, unsorted and delivered unevenly over time. What if you wanted to make some sense of it? One of my favourite tools to help with such a challenge is FreeMind, which is open source software that deals with mind maps. The only problem is getting the information out of Twitter and in to FreeMind. So why FreeMind and not another mind mapping tool? In the end it comes down to preference, you might just be able to use another tool you prefer here, it might even make your life easier. The reason I picked FreeMind though, is that it is quite an easy way to get into mind mapping techniques, it is fairly easy to use and, rather significantly, it is quite easy to generate files that it can use. FreeMind cannot read directly from Twitter though, so we need something to search Twitter and make those results into a file that FreeMind can use. Once we have the results in a mind map we can delete the ones we don't need and rearrange the others to get a coherent picture of what was said.