Open Educational Resources – anonymity vs. specificity

December 18, 2006

Open Educational Resources are a recent concept in regard of the organisation of world wide sharing of educational materials and tools. This concept is oriented at the model of OpenSource software production or Wikipedia. Also for institutions like the UNESCO or the OECD, which are interested in the development of OER, it is the main question how OER can be used on a scale as global as possible, and how relevant international co-operation and usage can be initiated. However OER are having some problems to reach a similar grade of effectiveness, because there are some crucial organisational and interactional differences to these successful open networks. One main problem is the tension between the openness and anonymity of digital information and the specificity of educational resources, which are usually made to fit into a specific teaching/learning context.

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