Thursday 28 June 2012

UNESCO OER World Congress

So I have just returned from the UNESCO OER (Open Educational Resources) World Congress. It was 10 years since the term OER was conceived at the UNESCO Global Forum 2002. The purpose of the Congress was twofold; to adopt the 2012 Paris OER Declaration and to showcase some of the best OER projects and initiatives from across the globe.

CC BY Willem Van Valkenburg

It was great to meet so many people doing positive things in OER and there was general feeling that we had moved from a state of "Why should we do this?" to "Why aren't we doing this?"

Another theme that arose was around the contextualisation of OER. A lot of institutions were moving from consumer to producer and in that process started to think about context, how to re-contextualise OER.  A lot of this projects talked solely about translation but some went further into re-representing the content from a cultural point of view. Just to re-enforce this the declaration itself was translated into Spanish by the delegates before the end of the congress.