Open Education 2012: How is your community sharing these days...

Use the link to access more information about Open Education 2012 and the following workshop: "Open.Michigan enables University of Michigan (U-M) faculty, students, staff and others to share their educational resources and research with the world. As “open” is increasingly recognized by teachers and learners on our campus, we have had to respond to varying local applications in the spectrum of Open (open access content, open educational resources, the use of restrictive open licenses, etc) to teaching practices and dissemination of content. Faculty and students are motivated to share in different ways and often create community-centered spaces and public-facing content that is intended to be accessible and useful outside the University of Michigan community, but may not fit the strict definition of an open educational resource (OER). Our initiative has responded to these applications of Open in a variety of ways. One example of our response is the development of a new collection policy. Open.Michigan seeks to reposition itself on campus in a way that supports the spectrum of openness, truly living up to the name “Open.Michigan.” This policy encompasses the curation of materials other than open educational resources, including open access podcasts on iTunes U, open teaching and learning experiences, relevant public domain works in repositories like HathiTrust, and others. It includes promoting and providing a record of (through the use of links) of any U-M teaching and learning resource or experience that is offered freely to the public. As our initiative has evolved from developing and hosting an OER collection to supporting this community of open educational practitioners, Open.Michigan is interested in how these emergent practices are being enacted across institutions. We will give examples illustrating how Open.Michigan has shifted from publishing a University of Michigan OER collection to truly supporting the spectrum of open educational practices on campus, trying to effectively address the question, how is our community sharing these days and how can we support it? We'd like to have a conversation with the open education community about experiences adding new types of content to our site and encouraging open innovation and participatory practices at the University of Michigan. How are these models shifting at other organizations? What are the sharing drivers in your community? How are teachers and learners interested in sharing and how can open education practitioners support the vast expansion of sharing options in today’s digital learning landscape?"