Recent advances in ICTs have enabled educational and cultural institutions to rethink and experiment on the ways in which they conduct learning and by using social media and open source software and networking tools. At the same time, several well-known – yet distinct – initiatives within elearning purport a mission of education as a ‘public good’, through the provision of Open Educational Resources (OER). In parallel, current thinking as well as emerging UK and international policy agendas in the field of education, have changed the emphasis from the provision of free content, towards the notion of creating ‘open participatory learning ecosystems’ (cf. Smith and Casserly, 2006; Seely-Brown & Adler 2008). At the core of these evolutionary trajectories of OER mediation, the notions of ‘educational and learners’ communities’, ‘self-directed and lifelong learning’ as well as ‘participatory pedagogy’ become more complex.
Combining notions of ‘mediation’ articulated by activity theory (e.g.Engeström, 1993; Engeström et al., 2003) with sociocultural perspectives (e.g.Thompson, 2005; Silverstone, 2005; Livingstone, 2009) the paper considers the meaning of Open Educational Resources (OERs) as participatory learning media (cf. Dalsgaard, 2008) in a global context. Drawing on a number of interviews with stakeholders from higher education institutions, policy advocates, members from ‘informal’ community initiatives, and, users of open resources from OECD countries, an overview and a working typology of OERs are proposed, putting forward at dimensions of institutional mediation, genre specificity and cultural understandings or uses. It is argued that the multiple articulations of ‘mediated learning’ and (global) ‘learning media’, framing the socio-technical and pedagogical affordances and OERs, hinder many tensions pertaining a) the definition of openness, b) the nature of participation and indeed c) the purpose, and the legitimacy and quality of such resources.
Panagiota Alevizou is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Open University's Institute of Educational Technology working on the Open Learning Networks project (Olnet). She has been engaging with numerous stakeholders and projects in the OER community to develop a working framework on the nature of openness and collaboration that characterizes the mediation of open resources, while addressing the opportunities and challenges relating to participatory interfaces, emerging pedagogies, adoption and (re)use.
Prior to her current position she was an LSE fellow at the Department of Media and Communications. Her broader background is in media and communications with a particular emphasis on new media, knowledge systems, learning and literacy. She has researched and published widely on collaborative communities, UGC and knowledge media. Her forthcoming book is The Web of Knowledge: Encyclopaedias in the Digital Age (Cambridge: Polity).
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