By Amee Evans Godwin

Last week I presented a conference session together with Leslie Rule, project supervisor of KQED’s Digital Storytelling and a maven of geo-tagging. Our interactive session entitled, Placeholding: Location-Specific Metadata and Context for Open Content, was a brief take on “localization” of learning content, the theme of the 2007 C()SL conference in Logan, Utah, through the lens of “place”. Considering the importance of being local, of being required to go outdoors, into one’s community, and observe the here-and-now, guided our thinking about the reuse of learning content.

Whether called metadata or tags, descriptive terms make materials searchable across the web. Tags let anyone connect and collaborate through relating together or enabling the mash up of content. At OER Commons (www.oercommons.org), we focus on making resources richly described. Why? Reasons are to give people easy entries to learning materials and to facilitate people contributing to learning materials themselves. When you tag something, it does someone else a favor by adding a new possibility of reuse.

Through the OER Commons project, I learned about Quest, a program from Bay Area’s PBS station, KQED. I was excited to learn about their involvement with content and tagging where original nature footage is geo-tagged with GPS coordinates. The digital video camera has the capability to add the exact place where the footage is shot to the video file. The intention is to make footage open and available for students and teachers to make their own videos. This is part of the promise of OER, or open educational resources, and of technology that makes learning anywhere in and outside of the classroom possible. Resource reuse can be connected to place, and facilitated by new mobile devices, like GPS-enabled handhelds and smart phones that anyone could use.

In our session, for example, Leslie revealed the numerous metadata fields available now in iPhoto, fields waiting to be filled with placed-based data. In general, photos, video, audio, data, and documentation of any kind can easily be linked to place. Datasets can be correlated by time and place to support scientific investigation. Near the end of the session, attendees were asked to join in an exercise. We input participants’ comments from observing the landscape into a file embedded in Google Earth, at the spot where the session was taking place. We captured the learning moment and made a new geo-tagged reusable resource.

It was nearly impossible to say which was hotter: the passion in the room for open access, compatible licensing, and peer production, or, the wilting temperatures recorded at the recent iCommons Summit 2007 held Dubrovnik, Croatia in June.

ISKME showcased OER Commons in the Open Education Track's participatory sessions, where traditional panel presentations and passive viewing were banished. Researchers, administrators, legal experts, and educators from many countries held heated discussions on the issues involved in creating, localizing, and sharing content across borders and legal challenges that accompany the internet freedom movement and information sharing generally.

In a pre-conference one-day workshop, Lisa Petrides and Amee Godwin of ISKME, and Joanne Boulle of Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) facilitated an interactive discussion around the importance of open educational projects assessing their current practices and sharing what they’ve learned within and across project boundaries. Specifically, we heard from Joanne Boulle about challenges and successes in the collaborative process of creating free, open-licensed math and science textbooks especially for high schools in South Africa.

During the other exciting three days of the iCommons Summit Education Track, break-out groups brainstormed about training teachers with OER, bringing students into authoring, and using learners to improve learning content. The activities culminated in next-step visioning for facilitating "next-generation" learning, to remove barriers from learning what you want, when you want it.

Contact amee@iskme.org about OER Commons and the iCommons Summit 2007 Open Education Track.