On 22/08/14 13:20, Pat Lockley wrote:
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> 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