UNESCO releases Paris Open Education Resources (OER) Declaration:

OERs are teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with an open license that allows for free use, adaptation, and distribution. UNESCO has long been a champion of OERs and continues to promote them through its Education, and Communication and Information Sectors.

“Based on the Paris OER Declaration, a comprehensive UNESCO OER Programme and strong global partnerships, we hope that at least 12 Member States will adopt national OER policies by 2015,” said Abel Caine, Congress organizer and UNESCO Programme Specialist for OER.

Here is the full text of the Paris OER Declaration
:

2012 WORLD OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (OER) CONGRESS UNESCO, PARIS, JUNE 20-22, 2012
2012 PARIS OER DECLARATION
Preamble
The World OER Congress held at UNESCO, Paris on 20-22 June 2012, Mindful of relevant international statements including:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 26.1), which states that: “Everyone has the right to education”;
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Article 13.1), which recognizes “the right of everyone to education”;
The 1971 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty;
The Millennium Declaration and the 2000 Dakar Framework for Action, which made global commitments to provide quality basic education for all children, youth and adults;
The 2003 World Summit on the Information Society, Declaration of Principles, committing “to build a people- centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge”;
The 2003 UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace;
The 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression, which states that: “Equitable access to a rich and diversified range of cultural expressions from all over the world and access of cultures to the means of expressions and dissemination constitute important elements for enhancing cultural diversity and encouraging mutual understanding”;
The 2006 Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (Article 24), which recognises the rights of persons with disabilities to education;
The declarations of the six International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA) Conferences emphasising the fundamental role of Adult Learning and Education.
Emphasizing that the term Open Educational Resources (OER) was coined at UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on Open Courseware and designates “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work”;
Recalling existing Declarations and Guidelines on Open Educational Resources such as the 2007 Cape Town Open Education Declaration, the 2009 Dakar Declaration on Open Educational Resources and the 2011 Commonwealth of Learning and UNESCO Guidelines on Open Educational Resources in Higher Education;
Noting that Open Educational Resources (OER) promote the aims of the international statements quoted above;
Recommends that States, within their capacities and authority:
a. Foster awareness and use of OER.
Promote and use OER to widen access to education at all levels, both formal and non-formal, in a perspective of lifelong learning, thus contributing to social inclusion, gender equity and special needs education. Improve both cost-efficiency and quality of teaching and learning outcomes through greater use of OER.
b. Facilitate enabling environments for use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT).
Bridge the digital divide by developing adequate infrastructure, in particular, affordable broadband connectivity,
widespread mobile technology and reliable electrical power supply. Improve media and information literacy and encourage the development and use of OER in open standard digital formats.
c. Reinforce the development of strategies and policies on OER.
Promote the development of specific policies for the production and use of OER within wider strategies for advancing education.
d. Promote the understanding and use of open licensing frameworks.
Facilitate the re-use, revision, remixing and redistribution of educational materials across the world through open licensing, which refers to a range of frameworks that allow different kinds of uses, while respecting the rights of any copyright holder.
e. Support capacity building for the sustainable development of quality learning materials.
Support institutions, train and motivate teachers and other personnel to produce and share high-quality, accessible educational resources, taking into account local needs and the full diversity of learners. Promote quality assurance and peer review of OER. Encourage the development of mechanisms for the assessment and certification of learning outcomes achieved through OER.
f. Foster strategic alliances for OER.
Take advantage of evolving technology to create opportunities for sharing materials which have been released under an open license in diverse media and ensure sustainability through new strategic partnerships within and among the education, industry, library, media and telecommunications sectors.
g. Encourage the development and adaptation of OER in a variety of languages and cultural contexts.
Favour the production and use of OER in local languages and diverse cultural contexts to ensure their relevance and accessibility. Intergovernmental organisations should encourage the sharing of OER across languages and cultures, respecting indigenous knowledge and rights.
h. Encourage research on OER.
Foster research on the development, use, evaluation and re-contextualisation of OER as well as on the opportunities and challenges they present, and their impact on the quality and cost-efficiency of teaching and learning in order to strengthen the evidence base for public investment in OER.
i. Facilitate finding, retrieving and sharing of OER.
Encourage the development of user-friendly tools to locate and retrieve OER that are specific and relevant to particular needs. Adopt appropriate open standards to ensure interoperability and to facilitate the use of OER in diverse media.
j. Encourage the open licensing of educational materials produced with public funds.
Governments/competent authorities can create substantial benefits for their citizens by ensuring that educational materials developed with public funds be made available under open licenses (with any restrictions they deem necessary) in order to maximize the impact of the investment.
2012-06-22

From The Guardian’s Higher Education blog, comes this post called Branding in higher education – just how feasible is distinctiveness? by Eliza Anyangwe.

At last week’s CASE Europe conference on distinctiveness in higher education, co-hosted by the Distinct Project, it quickly became clear that universities are in a bit of a pickle: they have to be able to stand out in a marketplace where all the others competitors offer the same basic service – teaching and research. And they have to make the case that they’re doing their own thing when the entire system for measuring excellence (which, in turn, influences student choice) sets out to compare one institution to another.

Tuesday’s conference set out to share the outcomes from a two-year investigation into what distinctiveness looks like, both within and beyond the HE sector. Led by Oxford Brookes University and funded by the Higher Education Funding Council (Hefce), the research defined distinctiveness as “the vehicle which enables an organisation to achieve many of its strategic goals through being memorable, authentic, and clearly articulating what it has to offer to the people that are important to it”.

The crux of the matter is that the very survival of universities rests upon their ability to be clear about who they are and then to use that knowledge to attract students, partners and ultimately, funding. Internally, a distinctiveness strategy is also credited with improving staff motivation and loyalty.

The Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings (aka the Finch group) of the Research Information Network just released a report recommending that open access to scholarly publishings was the best method to increase access :

The internet has brought much better access to research results for members of the academic community. But the full benefits of the digital and online revolutions have yet to be realised, especially for business, the professions, and the general public. Many people have expressed the ambition for a worldwide open access regime. The key policy questions are how to promote that shift in an ordered way which promotes innovation and maximises the benefits while minimising the risks.

The report recommends actions which can be taken in the UK which would help to promote much greater and faster access, while recognising that research and publications are international. It envisages that several different channels for communicating research results will remain important over the next few years, but recommends a clear policy direction in the UK towards support for open access publishing. This means that publishers receive their revenues from authors rather than readers, and so research articles become freely accessible to everyone immediately upon publication.

The Final report contains over 140 pages and an interesting bibliography.

See also this recent report from the Royal Society on Science as an Open Enterprise, which focuses heavily on data stewardship and sharing.

I recently blogged about Jim Duderstadt’s opening plenary talk at the Spring 2012 Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
– well it seems that the report he mentions is now available on the National Academies Committee on the Future of the Research University website.

As I mention on Culturelibre.ca (my other blog), Jennifer Howard writes on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s «Wired Campus» blog about the very interesting report dealing with ebook publishing strategies by University presses in the USA.

The Association of College & Research Libraries has just released an updated bersion of its Characteristics of programs of information literacy that illustrate best practices: A guideline.

Worth a read: this survey of open education resources from C&RL News. It lists course initiatives, curriculum sources, databases of objects, etc.

Stephen Laster, Chief Information Officer, Harvard Business School, delivers his Viewpoint in the most receny Educause Review. Insisting on the dire financial situation of students and Universities alike, he stresses that technology offers an opportunity to solve these issues. The Learning Management Systems (LMS) as a plat-form or in the cloud….

Other articles present the top 10 technology issues Universities face as well as some functional requirements of technology applied to education.

In closing, see this article about 2012 top ten trends in academic from C&RL News.

A colleague of mine told me about Eric Mazur‘s Peer Instruction (PI) technique, recently presented at Dawson College in Montréal.

Professor Mazur teaches physics at Harvard and is also keenly interested in the effectiveness of teaching methods, such as peer instruction or just in time learning.

Here are short bibliographies generated from Library sources.

EBSCO’s Business Source Complete from peer-reviewed journals. The search query was simply for the terms “video games” industry. I picked the most interesting that touched upon “indie games” or labour issues for the past 5 years, 7 articles from about the first 40 hits.

Title: Under the radar: Industry entry by user entrepreneurs.
Authors: Haefliger, Stefan shaefliger@ethz.ch; Jäger, Peter pejaeger@ethz.ch; von Krogh, Georg gvkrogh@ethz.ch
Source: Research Policy; Nov2010, Vol. 39 Issue 9, p1198-1213, 16p

Title: User Communities and Social Software in the Video Game Industry.
Authors: Burger-Helmchen, Thierry, Cohendet, Patrick
Source: Long Range Planning; Oct2011, Vol. 44 Issue 5/6, p317-343, 27p

Title: The orchestrating firm: value creation in the video game industry.
Authors: Mikael Gidhagen; Oscar Persson Ridell; David Sörhammar
Source: Managing Service Quality; Jul2011, Vol. 21 Issue 4, p392-409, 18p

Title: Computer Hobbyists and the Gaming Industry in Finland.
Authors: Saarikoski, Petri1 petri.saarikoski@utu.fi; Suominen, Jaakko1 jaakko.suominen@utu.fi
Source: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing; Jul-Sep2009, Vol. 31 Issue 3, p20-33, 14p

Title: The business of playing games: players as developers and entrepreneurs.
Authors: Chazerand, Patrice1 patrice.chazerand@isfe.eu; Geeroms, Catherine1 catherine.geeroms@isfe.eu
Source: Digital Creativity; Sep2008, Vol. 19 Issue 3, p185-193, 9p, 1 Chart, 3 Graphs

Title: Work and Employment in Creative Industries: The Video Games Industry in Germany, Sweden and Poland.
Authors: Teipen, Christina1
Source: Economic & Industrial Democracy; Aug2008, Vol. 29 Issue

Title: Digital Consumer Networks and Producer–Consumer Collaboration: Innovation and Product Development in the Video Game Industry.
Authors: ARAKJI, REINA Y.1; LANG, KARL R.2,3,4
Source: Journal of Management Information Systems; Fall2007, Vol. 24 Issue 2, p195-219, 25p, 1 Diagram, 1 Chart, 1 Graph

Books from CLUES, Concordia University Catalogue, search on “Cultural Economy”:

>Creativity, innovation and the cultural economy [electronic resource] / edited by Andy C. Pratt and Paul Jeffcutt : Creativity, innovation and the cultural economy [electronic resource] / edited by Andy C. Pratt and Paul Jeffcutt

The cultural economy edited by Helmut K. Anheier, Yudhishthir Raj Isar ; Annie Paul, associate editor ; Stuart Cunningham, guest editor : The cultural economy / edited by Helmut K. Anheier, Yudhishthir Raj Isar ; Annie Paul, associate editor ; Stuart Cunningham, guest editor

The Blackwell cultural economy reader edited by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift : The Blackwell cultural economy reader / edited by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift