ICTlogy

These days is taking place the virtual forum of the UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar. OER: Institutional Challenges.

My colleague Julià Minguillón (and, BTW, now assistant director of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute: congrats!) pointed the participants in the forum to Carmel McNaught’s keynote speach at Webist 2006, entitled Are learning repositories likely to become mainstream in education? (3.19 Mb)

Her main conclusions are that successful learning repositories:

• are developed out of a genuine need within a
  community
• have a core of committed promoters with
  sustained enthusiasm
• articulate a clear direction and focus
• consult with their user community(ies)
• establish a good management process
• are open access
• facilitate easy addition of resources
• have suitable granularity in searching

conclusions which, as it usually happens, have strong resemblances with the ones of a successful open source software project, as stated, among others, by Eric S. Raymond.

Could it be that it is not a matter of what are we opening, but whether we are opening it?

If you need to cite this article in a formal way (i.e. for bibliographical purposes) I dare suggest: