What I loved about the event was that panelists and audience members had an opportunity to really dig into the challenges OERs present, as well as to come up with a body of policy recommendations that will be submitted to the European Union regarding OERs and the public domain. Topics discussed included:
- Sustainability—OERs are free to the user, but they aren’t free to maintain. How do we encourage governments to invest in global open knowledge repositories? Or, how to we get entrepreneurs to develop revenue-generating applications on top of open content repositories?
- Copyright—Creative Commons has done a tremendous job at making the issue of digital copyright transparent and easy-to-understand for both creators and users of digital content, but what happens in countries that don’t recognize/enforce the legality of CC licenses? How do we harmonize digital copyright licenses and laws across borders?
- Search—Without proper metadata and content aggregation efforts, OERs can be hard to find. Add in the issue of language (searching for OERs in English versus Turkish versus Chinese) and it is no wonder search continues to confound even the best developers! Learn what one Communia member had to say about search here.
- Culture—How do we encourage academics to “open up” their research and writing when time constraints and university policies encourage the opposite? In places where the media is censored, should policies be created to encourage culturally sensitive OERs? Who should set such policies?
To see what Communia participants had to say about the issues above, as well as others, visit the Communia website, Facebook, and Twitter search feed. To read more about past Communia discussions regarding the digital domain, click here.
To the global digital commons!
An update from Curriki abroad,
Curriki International Consultant
Note: The image of Istanbul above is by Oberazzi and is available under the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.
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