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On 22/08/14 13:20, Pat Lockley wrote: > > It feels that there's is a big disconnection between innovative / > trendy areas of open education and the coal-face work of outreach and > implementation. I guess that's the conclusion of the article above. > I'd be interested to know more about projects working to address this. > > I feel there is a real problem with statements like this though. > > Are innovative / trendy areas not also implementation? Are they not > "coalface" enough? Seems the use of coalface suggests a criticism that > other work isn't proper work? > > If the argument is, a lot of academia tends to theory and not praxis, > that's true in almost all parts of it. OER research will be no > different. Inevitably as research tends to need to be new to be > published or funded, academia will inherently move on to new areas, > MOOCs being one. OER research, where funded is obvious to meet certain > funding aims or goals, so the area in which that work is applied may > not give time or scope for engaging and outreach. > I hear what you are saying. That sentence about the coalface does seem a bit 'chippy' when I read it back. But, in fairness, I think the work you are doing is in danger of giving MOOCs a good name. My understanding is that you are making those links back to the advances made by OER. I guess this chippyness serves to show that there are different interests and strands at play here. I tweeted Soenke at xm-labs to get his input as he really made me think about this issue when we were doing the Open Video workbook sprint. He came back with a couple of tweets. https://twitter.com/xmlab_news/status/502736325486051329 "tough one, as different (and contradictory) political strands exist w/in oer, some of them linked to social movement agendas" & "pol import of oer in rel to the agendas its serves - economic / environmental justice (right to know etc), tax justice etc" I guess a lot of us are familiar with tensions between activists and academics in many circles. But maybe this is getting to the heart of the issue here. Maybe something becomes a movement when there ARE different strands and agendas that end up pulling in the same direction. Differences are put aside and things start to get a bit difficult, complex but also interesting with lots of synergies. I agree with you and Lorna, that this is still happening but that it seems to be moving on. As you say that's in the nature of academia, but I feel a frustration about it that I think goes beyond activist chippyness but I'm struggling to explain why I think it's valid. Thanks for your thoughts, Mick