The Cape Town Open Education Declaration:Unlocking the promise of open educational resources is a new effort to galvanize the Open Education movement to focus attention worldwide on the potential for Open Educational Resources for all learners and educators

Lisa Petrides, of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), recently participated in the two-day meeting in Cape Town, South Africa that was jointly convened by the Shuttleworth Foundation and the Open Society, leading to the Cape Town Declaration. Inspired by the 2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative, 27 individuals from various organizations involved in open education came together to brainstorm and hash out many points of agreement and disagreement about open educational resources in terms of refining the emphasis, wording, and spirit behind the new declaration and its accompanying FAQ.

The declaration is being presented to the greater community to provide feedback. The aim of the declaration is to build support and participation and influence policy around the promise of open educational content, enabling people around the globe to widely share and sustain the new freedoms and opportunities for learning. Here is a short excerpt:

"This emerging open education movement combines the established tradition of sharing good ideas with fellow educators and the collaborative, interactive culture of the Internet. It is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint. Educators, learners and others who share this belief are gathering together as part of a worldwide effort to make education both more accessible and more effective."

Searching OER Commons, one may now notice new K-12 resources in the Estonian and Russian languages. These are some of the new additions made possible through a partnership with MELT/European Schoolnet Learning Resource Exchange (LRE). At the recent Associate Partners Meeting in Brussels, Belgium, Amee Godwin of ISKME, presented the OER Commons project as one of the first non-European partners to the LRE project and an active participant in their system for sharing open educational resources.

The MELT/European Schoolnet project's aim is to provide a scalable and cost-effective solution for countries within the EU to share resources across borders, and to provide educators with the infrastructure for easy access to open content, available in many languages, from across Ministries of Education and other resource archives in Europe, and beyond.

Explore LRE items on OER Commons

OER Commons participated in the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, in November, with ISKME Senior Research Associate Cynthia Jimes discussing OER processes and peer production (.pdf). Conference themes centered on bridging higher education and e-learning, to bring them together by using technology and tools of e-learning to support lifelong learning goals.

In the opening plenary session, José Mariano Gago, Portugal's Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education, announced the nation's goal to raise the number of people involved in lifelong learning from 5 percent to 12.5 percent by 2010. David White, Director of Lifelong Learning, Education and Training Policy, European Commission, Brussels, then discussed how to achieve this goal across Europe, particularly through adult education by including migrants, drop-outs, seniors, informal learners, and people most often left at the edge. According to White, distance education can ameliorate traditional higher education's tendency to push those at top quartile up, in terms of lifelong success, while excluding and pushing those at the bottom quartile down.

In a project about mediated participation with OER by excluded populations (.pdf), Billy Khokhar of the Open University UK discussed bringing a group of women of South Asian heritage in Yorkshire into blended learning using the OpenLearn platform. Understanding the specific needs and requirements of lifelong learners, their community, and their real or perceived barriers to participation was shown to be a vital bridge to the new learning experience.

Read more about the EADTU

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If you're a programmer, or know one, who might like to get involved in ISKME's efforts to create Facebook web applications for open educational resources, please drop us a line.