Technology Trends: Open Content

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The Horizon Report released by the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative reports on trending technologies in education. In the 2010 edition, the authors identify six technologies that they feel are within six years or less of entering mainstream use in education. Identified in the report are mobile computing and open content likely to enter the mainstream within the next two years, electronic books and simple augmented reality within the next four years, and gesture-based computing and visual data analysis within the next six years. Of these, open content appeals to me the most. It appears to offer the most potential to help the most educators and students around the world. The purpose of this post is to provide a concise discussion of this technology and its possibilities for use in education.

The term open content is believed to have been coined by David Wiley in the 1998 (Wikipedia, 2011). While Wiley was not just talking about education materials when he coined the phrase, his vision was content that was freely available for modification, use, and redistribution under licenses that allow for sharing and reusing, but also requires the user to credit the original source (Wiley, 1998). Open content does not just mean free stuff. The purpose of open content is the collaboration on a global level by content makers to create more effective and useful resources using the Internet as the medium of collaboration and dissemination of information. It is the belief that by working together, sharing and collaborating on any level, content can not only be made better, but also more accessible to people who want to learn.

After being put into practice for over a decade now, open content is no longer a radical idea, and has ...

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...mpact on the future of education.

Works Cited

Johnson, L., Levine, A., Smith, R., & Stone, S. (2010). The 2010 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Open content. (n.d.) In Wikipedia. Retrieved February 12, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content

Unknown. (2011, January 4). Firefox overtakes Internet Explorer in Europe in browser wars. StatCounter: GlobalStats. Retrieved from http://gs.statcounter.com/press/firefox-overtakes-internet-explorer-in-europe-in-browser-wars

Wiley, David (1998). "Open Content". OpenContent.org. http://web.archive.org/web/19990429221830/www.opencontent.org/home.shtml. Retrieved 2010-01-12.

Zachte, E. (2010, November 17). Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report - Wikipedia Page Views Per Country - Overview. Retrieved from http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportPageViewsPerCountryOverview.htm

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