Open Educational Resources from Government and Parliament | OUseful.Info, the blog...

"Mentioning to a colleague yesterday that the UK Parliamentary library published research briefings and reports on topics of emerging interest, as well as to support legislation, that often provided a handy, informed, and politically neutral  overview of a subject area that could make for a useful learning resource, the question was asked whether or not they might have anything on the 'internet of things'. The answer is not much, but it got me thinking a bit more about the range of documents and document types produced across Parliament and Government that can be used to educate and inform, as well as contribute to debate.

In other words, to what extent might such documents be used in an educational sense, whether in the sense of providing knowledge and information about a topic, providing a structured review of a topic area and the issues associated with it, raising questions about an issue, or reporting on an analysis of it. (There are also opportunities for learning from some of the better Parliamentary debates, for example in terms of how to structure an argument, or explore the issues associated with an issue, but Hansard is out of scope of this post!)

(Also note that I’m coming at this as a technologist, interested as much in the social processes, concerns and consequences associated with science and technology as much as the deep equations and principles that tend to be be taught as the core of the subject, at least in HE. And that I’m interested not just on how we can support the teaching and learning of current undergrads, but also how we can enculturate them into the availability and use of certain types of resource that are likely to continue being produced into the future, and as such provide a class of resources that will continue to support the learning and education of students once they leave formal education.)

So using IoT as a hook to provide examples, here’s the range of documents I came up with. (At some point it maybe worth tabulating this to properly summarise the sorts of information these reports might came, the communicative point of the document (to inform, persuade, provide evidence for or against something, etc), and any political bias that may be likely (in policy docs, for example)."