The only complexity within this is that ICT has created one specific new form of contact, which is not easily classified as either face-to-face or distance. Online communication allows students and academics to remain separated by space and time (although some forms of communication assume people congregating at a common time), but to sustain an ongoing dialogue. Online asynchronous discussion forums, for example, reflect an instance where the spatial separation between educator and students is removed by the 'virtual' space of the Internet, but where there remains temporal separation. As a discussion forum allows sustained, ongoing communication between academics and students, it is clearly a form of contact, not a form of independent study. Thus, there may be cause to introduce a new descriptor for educational methods of direct educator–student contact that are not face-to-face, but are mediated through new communication technologies.
While the pedagogical potential of OER is deeply tied to the concept of resource-based learning and its origins in well-designed distance education course materials, it would simply not have been conceivable before the ICT explosion. This is because the network of connected digital devices that is the Internet has made it possible to share information globally on a scale and at speeds that were largely unimaginable before the 1990s. The ease with which digital content can be created, shared online and copied by others, however, also introduced problems regarding copyright and intellectual property protection – problems that have affected, and continue to transform, most industries based on protection of intellectual capital as an economic model, including education and educational publishing. Simultaneously, however, the knowledge economy saw the rise of alternative models of licensing, most well known in the software industry.
The emergence of open source
As a Wikipedia article on the topic notes,
- The concept of open source and free sharing of technological information existed long before computers. For example, cooking recipes have been shared since the beginning of human culture. Open source can pertain to businesses and to computers, software and technology.[1]
However, the term 'Open Source' really came to prominence with the world of software development (where it was launched in 1983 as the Free Software Movement), coming to describe computer software for which, as a JISC[2] Briefing Paper notes:
- The source code is available to the end-user;
- The source code can be modified by the end-user;
- There are no restrictions on redistribution or use;
- ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source.
- ↑ Historically, JISC stood for Joint Information Software Committee (a UK-based initiative).
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