User talk:Whiteknight/BookPlan

This is a good start - thanks Andrew. :-) I think the first thing I'd like to clear up is the broad scope of the book - without needing to specify a title, what is the book about? An overview of/introduction to the Open Educational Resources movement? Open Education: past, present, and future? I'm presuming we're making links between theory and practice - and not simply describing what's out there? The second thing I'd like to discuss is my feeling that we should be critical of the OER world/movement, as well as singing its praises. For example, there are many tensions in making content available to the world - do people have some sort of 'ownership' over materials they have created? What are the conflicting implications of making content openly editable? By encouraging students to participate to OER sites, are we expecting them to say in public what they would prefer to keep within a closed or smaller group? These are all issues I would like to see addressed in such a book - and I feel that "challenges and opportunities" should be a running theme within the book. Or would there be a benefit to having a chapter devoted to challenges? (Would that absolve other chapters from discussing challenges, or create redundancy?) Thoughts? Cormaggio (talk) 09:43, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Excellent points, I think, Cormaggio! I feel that we are onto something really powerful with some serious practical and theoretical implications for all sorts of educators. As you mention, the notion of challenges and opportunities is a very important central theme. Rather than including these in one chapter, I would make this a standard section within each chapter.

As for the focus of the book, I know that (given sufficient research) my colleagues and I could survey the landscape and describe the past and present. The future, though, is something of which I would imagine Wikibooks admins like you and Andrew have special knowledge. It would be nice to capitalize on this special knowledge in a meaningful way--to prepare educators for "the next big thing(s)". Pete (talk) 17:24, 17 November 2008 (UTC)