Open educational resources and globalization

Event title: Open educational resources and globalization See a video of the event

Open educational resources - open space event takes place in the Wikimania conference on Thursday July 17th, 2008.

Open educational resources and globalization panel discussion is part of the Wikimania conference program and scheduled on Friday, July 18th. The time and space will be released in the Wikimania 2008 schedule page.

Abstract
Open educational resources (OERs) are a global phenomenon. In fact, potential behind OER as a 'global' movement is huge. The Wikimedian and the Wikimedia Foundation’s approach of emphasizing every single human being’s right to share his/her knowledge is clear, but also problematic.

Would Wikimedia play for or against preserving cultural diversity? The answer is not evident, given that there still exists a wide "digital divide". If not accompanied with adequate measures, this educational mission may actually strengthen cultural deprivation and marginalization, and at the same time speed up non-sustainable globalization, harming the diversity of cultures.

However, Wikimedia's grassroots activity has mobilized many stakeholders to offer their services and resources in a "global marketplace". This opens up the question how could the OER movement promote a fair economy and ecology of OERs that will benefit every single human being.

The event will be a 40 minutes panel discussion with four representives of the OER movement. Each will give a 5 minutes talk following Q&A and discussion with the audience.

Panelists / Participants
Teemu Leinonen, Panel moderator
 * University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland
 * Wikiversity user Teemu
 * Teemu is a researcher, designer, and educator working mainly in academia. His areas of interest and experience covers computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL), online cooperation, learning software design, educational planning and educational politics. Since 1998 Teemu has led the Learning Environments research group (http://legroup.uiah.fi) of the Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland. Teemu is somehow active in Wikiversity and several other free, libre and open educational initiatives, because he thinks that they may help us to achieve badly needed global educational reform.

Mohamed-Nabil Sabry
 * Université Française d’Égypte, Egypt
 * Prof. Mohamed-Nabil Sabry is in charge of the Continuing and Distance Education Center of the Université Française d’Égypte. He has long been involved in the OER movement since the incipience of its 'name' in a UNESCO meeting in Paris 2002. He was in charge of the first project launched in this framework gathering a group of African and American Universities about OER usability improvement. He has participated as a consultant in many projects both at national and international levels and has been an invited speaker in many related conferences.

Nadia El Borai
 * Researcher, educator, Wikideducator user:
 * Nadia is an Egyptian researcher, educator as well as an ikebana master living in Japan.

Kim Tucker
 * Meraka Institute, CSIR, South Africa]
 * Wikiversity user Ktucker


 * Researcher, software libre, libre knowledge thinker.

Melissa Hagemann
 * Open access, open educational resources, open society
 * United States of America

Cormac Lawler, Panel moderator
 * Wikiversity / University of Manchester, UK
 * Wikiversity user Cormaggio
 * Cormac Lawler is a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester (school of education). He has been involved with setting up Wikiversity as a 'sister' Wikimedia project, and continues to work on developing Wikiversity, which is the focus of his research. His interests and experience range from media to education to human development, and is passionate about creating an open and accessible system of education through various initiatives, including Wikiversity, which is both a repository of OERs, and a space for open learning.

Hempal Shrestha
 * FOSS Nepal Community, Kathmandu, Nepal
 * SAP International, Kathmandu Nepal
 * Hempal is a Program Officer at Bellanet Asia (www.bellanet.org) based in Kathmandu, Nepal. His primary intrest area is Open Development including Open Source, Open Content and Open Standard. He is an active facilitator for promoting and advocating for FOSS and Open Content among development community especially through use ICT in South Asia. He strongly believes in FOSS and Open Content and had been actively involved in creating and facilitating FOSS Nepal community (http://fossnepal.org/), a community of FOSS enthusiast in Nepal and south Asian countries. and also, Asia Commons: Asian Conference on the Digital Commons (http://www.asia-commons.net/).

Leigh Blackall
 * Otago Polytechnic New Zealand
 * Wikiversity user: Leighblackall
 * Wikieducator user: Leighblackall
 * Leigh has been leading his tertiary education and training organisation into using and developing OER. Wikieducator is the primary wiki being used, but gradually staff are reaching out into Wikibooks for text book authoring, Wikispecies, Wikinews, and Wikipedia. Leigh has been exploring models of open access learning using OER, but in a way that does not compromise fee paying services.

Salvor Gissurardottir
 * Iceland University of Education / University of Iceland, Iceland
 * Wikipedia User Salvor
 * Salvor teach at the Iceland University of Education (currently merging with University of Iceland). Her field is Educational Technology and use of computers and Internet in education.

Abbas Bazargan
 * Faculty of Psychology and Education, University of Tehran, Tehra, Iran

Taan Chaib
 * Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Educational Consulting (TAGEC) Member of Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization, Beirut, Lebanon

Hago Elteraifi Mohamed Dafalla
 * Faculty of Engineering and Technology, University of Gezira, Wad Medani, Sudan

Kathy Kikis-Papadakis
 * Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, Foundation for Research and Technology, Greece

Paul W. Little 
 * School of Learning Innovation, Red River College of Applied Arts, Science and Technology, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Rwagasana Gerald
 * Center for Instructional Technology and the AVU Learning Center, National University of Rwanda

Lila Rajabion
 * Lawrence Technological University, Michigan, U.S.A

Topics for discussion
The following are some themes that we could talk about in the session - please add ideas of your own...


 * Access - are OERs really accessible to all the people of the world? (Does everyone have the internet access/bandwidth/software/hardware to access them?) If not, how to improve on this?
 * Relevance - are OERs appropriate to different cultures? If not...?
 * What can be done to help, improve accessibility and help in skills for contributors.