OpenEd, week2

At the beginning of the three weeks, I wanted to read all the papers and then “answer the questions” given by Wiley.
But then, I decided to share my thoughts about the papers while doing the reading, the “homeworks”.
Thus I will put here my Idea, and what the papers “awake” in me as a teacher, and then summurize the all in order to give a coherent answer to the course’s provocation.

The paper Giving knowledge for free has a captive title. Up to now I’ve read part one and two. Part one is a sort of review of the present situation, depicting an image of what is happening more or less worldwide, although it is strongly focussed upon western countries, rich countries, and so on.
It is not astonishing, as the introduction itself states the adressees of the paper: managers of higher education, institutions, stragists and decision makers.

The paper works around the concept of OER, open educational resource(s).
In the second part, it tries to define nearly the meaning of open, educational and resource.
It is openly said that the definition field concerns digital resources.

Up to now I find it too much limited to define OER, which in their very sense may or might have a broader meaning, only referring to digital and to computer based/delivered.
It is true that the paper puts it in clear as starting point, but I think that open educational resources should be defined starting from another point of view, that is wondering how to dismantle the idea of ©, changing it to copyleft or somethingelse.
The paper talks also about some experiments where creative commons licences where limited to a certain regione (e.g. BC of Columbia). It highlights the limitation given by password-and-registration systems (I think it is referred to the whole mass of LSM or PHP-based sites)
It would be interesting to try and see how to make these resources really open, where open is meant as something else rather than only 24h available and usable”.