Yes, I know I regularly extol the virtues of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL). That’s because it’s good, very good. Its latest special issue (Vol. 14, No. 2, 2013) has just been published, and you can view it all (you should know by now that it’s open access) at Open Educational Resources: Opening Access to Knowledge.
Whatever’s your take on Open Educational Resources (OER), you’ll find something here to indulge your interest. If you want to know OER are used in a university, go straight to Ives and Pringle’s Moving to open educational resources at Athabasca University: A case study. If mobile technology’s your thing, there’s a couple of great articles (one of which is on mobile authoring of OER), and if you’re more into policy and planning, again there’s two insightful contributions.
Not surprisingly our old mate Terry Anderson contributes, this time with Open access scholarly publications as OER, wherein he builds on his rich experience as an open access journal editor to discuss ‘the production, use, and re-use of peer-reviewed, scholarly articles as open educational resources’.
The final two articles are a timely Exploration of open educational resources in non-English speaking communities, and the final one presents Visualization mapping approaches for developing and understanding OER.
Is this visualization mapping?
What does that mean? As the author Teresa Connolly explains,
‘This article sets out to examine how a variety of visualization mapping methods have been realized in a range of OER scenarios. It examines four specific issues: firstly considering how visualization mapping can be employed at a strategic macro level in terms of OER institutional planning; secondly outlining how visualization mapping can be employed at the meso level concentrating on the design and production of OER materials; thirdly, how visualization mapping can be used at the micro level as a navigating interface to OER assets; and, fourthly, how this can also enable learners and researchers to make sense of published OER materials.’
To be honest, that doesn’t make it overly clear to me, so we’d all better read it in its entirety to make sure we’re not missing anything important.
Before I leave, don’t forget of course that there’s another open source ODL journal published in Canada, the bilingual (English and French) Journal of Distance Education. It’s well and truly due for a new issue (the latest as of today is from last year, 2012), so I hope it’s not in decline, as over the years it’s had some marvellous contributions.
photo credit: opensourceway via photopin cc
photo credit: Ernesto Lago via photopin cc
