The Capetown Open Education Declaration

Reading through my feeds yesterday I picked up on John Connell's post about The Capetown Open Education Declaration.

It begins:

Unlocking the promise of open educational resources
We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.

While I recognise the potential and intent of the declaration there are all sorts of questions that tumble into my mind as I read the rhetoric.

To begin with I am struggling with the definition of 'resources' and my mind flicks back to the English government's attempt to build a database to store the available resources during the 'eLC' bonanza. It was called 'Curriculum Online' and cost millions of pounds sterling but (as far as my knowledge and research tells me) did not reach the parts that it was supposed to reach in spite of considerable publicity. The Year One report in 2004 painted a sketchy picture from a sketchy survey but the conclusions were not optimistic that the money had been well spent. The final report was equally unenthusiastic about the use of the portal by 'ordinary teachers'.

With the coming of Learning Platforms and VLEs there are various groups who are valiantly trying to get content together and share it. One of the main groups to come forward in this regard is the National Digital Resource Bank ( pity it is national but it is a good start). NDRB works on the basis of a content sharing community, members can contribute in a variety of ways, the key ones being contributing content that they own and supporting the work of mapping and SCORMing harvested content.

This is what the Regional BroadBand Consortia have been trying to do with various amounts of success for some time now. It will be interesting to see how GLOW and Learning Northern Ireland deal with the matter of content and how their concept will fit with the Capetown Declaration.

But this is all about content and not resources ... or is it? As I have said I am confused by the definitions. It could easily be argued that many of the resources on Internet can be used in an educational context.

What I really want, and wanted to read, is about the making available of powerful, motivational tools to author and document the knowledge so that it becomes accessible to a wide variety of people in the widest possible way.

Looking down the list of organisation signatures leaves me with the feeling that there is one group missing ... the people who have, on the whole, got us this far, the software producers. What of them in this plan?