I am thoroughly elated but again, feeling a sort of enlightened embarrassment. How could it be that I, a peer-described techy, who has worked in the Alternate Education sector for the last decade of my 25 year career (a place that by mere necessity requires those leading learning to be innovative especially in the area of resource acquisition) can be so out of the loop of a movement in my field that, by the looks of it, is changing the landscape of what it means to be educated in the 21st Century? I’m not so sure though that it is just me that seems to be in an OER fog. When I query learned colleagues of mine about their understanding of Open Educational Resources, many exceptional at leading high school students through learning, I receive a blank, barely quizzical stare.
I suppose I could be comforted by the fact that I am far from alone in this seemingly over-abundance of ignorance in this area, but I am not. I realize that moving my school and district forward in the OER direction, is a moral imperative. Students deserve to have materials that are up-to-date, edited to be relevant to their community, alive with vibrant colour and peppered with images that are available with the technologies we now have! As important, teachers deserve to be working with these kinds of materials.
So how now brown cow, to make inroads to intrigue my colleagues into taking the risk to follow me as I explore the world of online, open, educational resource use? The best I have at the moment is to lead by example with one caveat: make sure to show people around me not only the resources I have found, but how I have used (or imagine using) them.