One of the advantages I have from the JISC TechDis environment is to witness the differing approaches from non-HE providers and the relative lack of latency with adopting more open practice with new emerging 3^rd party tools (e.g. open practice with dropbox, googledocs, apps etc.), and the paths that students actually tread with their technology. However, they too appear to lack support to collaborate on common needs, and when it does arise it risks being mothballed under budget cuts.

See http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/12458479/Mobile%20Learning%20-%20MoLeNET for a “criminal waste” of community effort (40,00 students, 7,000 staff, £13.5m funding) on better practice with mobile technology outside HE.

 

IMHO, the non-HE community likes the open idea but gets quickly put off with the jargon and the theoretical approach in comparison to using tech for maintaining a successful professional network which can crowdsource quite effectively. This practice is also more slash and burn resistant as many are sceptical of big content repositories. A site which develops communities in context would be very valuable.

 

The above is my opinion and not necessarily the views of my employers yada yada….

 

Terry

 

PS: Perhaps it should be able to search the JISCMail archives and its EU equivalents which have been doing what this also seeks to achieve for many years.

 

Probably worth a gentle reminder that the EU project is not an exclusively (or even primarily) an HE OER initiative.

Alastair


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