Open as an element of findability

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Basics:

To be findable, content must be open in the one Web global commons, with no barriers of cost, subscription, or copyright.

From a special issue on Opening Educational Resources of Educational Technology Magazine November 2007:

Open Educational Resources Overview The term "Open Educational Resources" was first adopted at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries. Open educational resources (OER) are the efforts of a worldwide community, empowered by the Internet, to help equalize the access to knowledge and educational opportunities throughout the world. They are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or customization by others. It is the granting of freedoms to share, reprint, translate, combine or adapt that makes them educationally different from those that can merely be read online for free. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

Resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world's knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the World Wide Web in particular provide an extraordi- nary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge. Significantly moving OER into the mainstream, the Hewlett Foundation Open Educational Initiative supports:the development and dissemination of high-quality content; innovative approaches to remove barriers to the creation, use, re-use, and sharing of high-quality content; and projects that seek to improve understanding of the demand for openly available content.

The theme of this special issue of Educational Technology magazine is the active phrase: Opening Educational Resources. Our authors describe what has been done and is being done as this educational phenomenon has emerged in the 21st century.

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ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons which is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources (OER). Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.