With the advent of the Internet, access to information every day is more what has changed the way we think about the educational process. The movement toward open content reflects this change and prioritizes the learning process over the transmission of knowledge. Today, what matters is learning how to use information rather than own it. With the availability of free educational content, students are learning not only material but also skills related to the search, evaluation, interpretation, and redirection of resources they are studying, in collaboration with their teachers. According to Wikipedia, which represents an area of open content (In English open content, open source analogy) it is a concept coined by David Wiley (University of Utah, USA) in 1998 to describe any content (articles, pictures, audios, videos, etc..) published under a non-restrictive and in a form that explicitly allows copying, distribution and modification. It is a new educational perspective, focused on knowledge and the sharing and reuse of learning academic content. The open content idea is to use internet as a platform for global content distribution and collective knowledge, and designing learning experience that maximize their use. The challenges to share, change the format of presentation and re-academic work is related to discussions on intellectual property, copyright, and student-student collaboration. Projects such as Creative Commons, Academic Common, and Science Commons work performed taking into account the need to meet these challenges.
According to the community that supports open content, the advantages in the learning process includes the development of essential skills in any discipline and the ability to find and evaluate and use new information, the expansion of learning modalities as well as learning and leisure. Connectivism theory of Siemems based open content development. Connectivism recognizes that learning is in a group of individual opinions. Knowledge is sought and in the process helped build the knowledge of others.
In the following links can be found open source content:
“Creative Commons” (http://creativecommons.org/),
“Profesores sin Fronteras” (http://www.teacherswithoutborders.org)/
“Folksemantic” (http://www.folksemantic.com/).
The following are some examples of open content:
American Literature before 1860
http://enh241.wetpaint.com/
Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative
http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning
Connexions
http://cnx.org/
MIT OpenCourseWare
http://ocw.mit.edu/
Reference:
Johnson, L., Smith, R., Levine, A., Stone, S. (2010). The 2010 Horizon Report: Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.
Wikipedia. (n/d). Open Content. Retrieve from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content#References
