http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/mocsl/
So Day 3 at Open Ed 2007 is underway. DJ RSS just rocked the mic with a free form exposition on openness, free tools, mashups and remix culture.
The conference has been really worthwhile on a number of levels – opening my mind to how the needs for localization might be reconciled with the ongoing divergence of needs between leanrers from developed and developing world, and opening my heart to the moral imperative that is OER.
But there was one low point for me, which was learning that funding for COSL’s “Making Open Content Support Learning” toolset had not been renewed in this current round of funding.
Funders will fund what they fund, not much I can do about that; I just wanted to write this post so that I could say publicly what I’ve said privately to a number of folks here, which is that I am really sad to hear about this, because I think these tools and this effort were really promising and important, because they focus on individual learner empowerment in the networked world of OER resources, something you can probably tell from the short movie on client-side tools that I released yesterday, I believe to be an important aspect of improving the chances of OER content efforts to effect learning across the internet as a whole. Funded or not, I plan to continue pointing people to these tools, evangelizing them and their like, and finding my own ways to continue working on these kinds of learner-centric tools. And hopefully this post is understood in the spirit it was written, simply the honest words of an often impolitic blogger . – SWL