Your dreams depend on a change of culture James and that change can only
happen in an atmosphere of security. Positions in the F.E. sector have been
under threat for so long now that it is understandable that people do not
want to share. Unfortunately certain "gurus" in the E-Learning field are
making it worse by putting forward the falaceous hypothesis of all students
sitting at home in their rooms playing edutainment games and being
"facilitated" by non-expert teachers. These "experts need to get to know
some of the students they are talking about.

If we want to encourage sharing we need to make people feel secure in their
positions instead of making them feel they are working towards their own
demise.

Currently the sofware industry sees education as a plum ripe to be picked
and they will say anything to convince ministers that they should spend
education budgets on software not people. They have been very clever at
doing this often funding, so called, independant organisations to produce
research to back their claims.

E-learning has a lot going for it and sharing will make it happen faster,
however, that sharing will not take place all the time we have stories about
teacherless classes and kids sitting at home with a computer.

If you want to see the truth about computer games and learning look at the
work done by Angela McFarlane at TEEM

-----Original Message-----
From: Virtual Learning Environments [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf
Of James Clay
Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 2004 11:25 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VLES] Share resources


There is also the current thinking within a lot of influential bodies that
if e-learning is to succeed then teaching model needs to be more like the
research model.

In a previous posting someone mentioned secrecy and in another competition.

In the research model, no researcher would get anywhere unless they shared
previous research, used previous research and shared results of research.

Imagine a teaching model where teaching resources are built upon the
foundations of previous work by teachers, and resources produced are shared
across the sector, reused and repurposed and shared again...

One can dream...

Reality, even in a single institution, resources are not even shared within
and across curriculum areas, or even reused from year to year, or passed
onto new staff...

James Clay
Director Western Colleges Consortium
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
www.westerncc.ac.uk

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Virtual Learning Environments
>[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of S. Ambrose
>Sent: 07 April 2004 10:35
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: [VLES] Share resources
>
>
>Dave raises some interesting points in his posting...
>
>My personal view is that content sharing is more likely to
>take place within a single institution or consortium than
>between 'competing' institutions. Particularly where it is
>possible to identify core components common to many schools or
>departments. Research Methods is one example where
>organisation efficiency and quality standards might benefit
>from a core curriculum that could be used in conjunction with
>'bolt on' specialist contexts.
>
>Having said that I have found that vested interest, pride, etc
>do sometimes get in the way of collaboration and sharing and
>satisfying organisational goals will be challenged by
>proponents of educational determinism.
>
>I believe that interoperability will become important for
>authors who move on to other institutions and wish to take
>some or all of their work to be reused or repurposed and for
>those institutions or consortiums supporting more than one
>corporate VLE or needing to migrate content from one e-system
>to another.
>
>Buying-in content is always a difficult one due to the
>perceived uniqueness of course aims and objectives and can be
>difficult where accessibility issues for instance have not
>been taken into account by the originator. Recent Learning
>Object models (Powell, 2004 and Malkovic & Zeilman, 2004)
>suggest that the more complex the Learning Object becomes the
>more suitable it is for selling or using "off the shelf" but
>less suitable for repurposing.
>
>Shirley
>
>
>
>Date sent: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 09:03:37 +0100
>Send reply to: Virtual Learning Environments
><[log in to unmask]>
>From: Wright Mr DN <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: [VLES] Share resources
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>> I am curious about how practitioners see this sharing of course
>> materials developing. Assuming content exchange standards and
>> mechanisms continue to develop and be adopted as they clearly are,
>> will there be the widespread sharing of content between what
>might be
>> considered to be competing organisations? Can we see, some
>time in the
>> future, institutions obtaining (free or purchased) content
>from other
>> institutions to avoid having to author their own or will
>there forever
>> be issues of secrecy, IPR and (for want of a better word)
>pride which
>> will prevent this?
>>
>> Purely in the interests of debate, I would suggest that with the
>> ever-increasing likelihood of variable fees and the opening up of a
>> true higher education "market", the kind of mechanisms being
>discussed
>> here could be put to use to add value to courses while
>perhaps keeping
>> costs down. By buying in content, education providers can
>focus their
>> efforts on guiding and supporting their students.
>>
>> Can we ever see this being a realistic model for FE/HE (or any other
>> education sector, for that matter)?
>>
>> Dave
>>
>
>____________________________________________________
>Shirley Ambrose BA MSc FIITT
>Academic \ Curriculum Support Coordinator
>Information and Library Services
>University of Greenwich
>Room 113, Riverside House
>Beresford Street
>London SE18 6BU
>Telephone: +44 020 8331 9164
>E Mail: [log in to unmask]
>
>Home page: http://www.gre.ac.uk/~as13
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