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Tuesday, 12 September 06 :: half baked thoughts.

i'm working on a project to look at the effectiveness of open courseware. hmm. but, honestly i don't like the design of the course we're using. it simply isn't appropriate for the audience. it needs to be good instruction.

hmm.

and then there's the idea of reuseability. and good instruction. hmmm.

i guess this falls somewhere on the contiuum wiley showed us the other day. hmm. because the course is not good e-learning, but it can be changed around pretty easily. and it can be printed and read in book format. and maybe thats the purpose?

but what is the purpose of ocw? (open courseware) is it instruction? is it a course? what is instruction? what is a course? wiley posed these questions to me today. well, not posed to me directly, but that was a conversation we got into.

so, by taking the course that i'm going to use for my research can i say that its open courseware? can i say i'm evaluating the effectiveness of it? and at the open content forum that was held, what do they mean when they write about wanting to promote the open education resource movement, what do they mean when they say

"groups to analyze the uses and the effectiveness of OER, to identify gaps in the knowledge base, to raise research questions, to refine methodologies, and to propose guidelines for further OER development;" what does effectiveness mean? does it mean when its delivered in its raw format? or ? when people simply find it and use it? or ? could we say that the study i'm going to do is pure oer? and if it isn't, how can we study it? i want too! and i think it will help drive people to it, when its n ot just this whacky idea by higher education (and we can do press on it as well).

my advantage is that my major professor was a part of that forum, so i'll ask him.

anyhow, i'm going to chew on this whole 'what is a course' and 'what is instruction vs information thing,' who knows what i'll come up with.

posted by brooke at September 12, 2006 08:22 PM

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about
i'm brooke, born in '73. i am currently a phd student in instructional technology. this is the blog where i capture all the neurotic, and the few non-neurotic, moments that seem to come with being a phd student (if you want to read less neuroses and more professionalism go to: oer's, dl's, reuse and culture: it's about a phd student researching digital resources in a multicultural world). i have been from eugene, oregon for a long time.. 8 years specifically (its my home now, but i grew up in southwestern virginia), but now i'm here in logan, utah at utah state university. after finding my roots in eugene i never could have expected that i would leave that liberal oasis and head to utah. but i did and there are days when its a blessing and days when i'm tempted to go back to oregon and beg the folks at lost valley educational center to let me move in. but i won't leave because there are days when this process is better than any kind of high i could ever imagine. what else? i collect things, i have 2 cats, 2 kayaks, 2 laptops (i'm a geek - one mac, one pc). i can be emailed at brookesblog@rivervision.com.