Brains working towards machine consciousness

 I was engaging in some open learning earlier.  It largely involved eavesdropping on a Twitter conversation between Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) and Owen Stephens (@ostephens) (which also included Joss Winn (@josswinn), who patiently puts up with me miss-spelling his name, and Amber Thomas (@ambrouk), who patiently puts up with me generally on Twitter) about Open Educational Resources (OER).  I am in favour of OER - and my interest was particularly peaked by this tweet by @psychemedia "@josswinn @ostephens OSS is still about producing an artefact tho'? Open ed is more a process related to developing understanding?" 

Ah ha! I thought, yes indeed, Open Education is about a process related to developing understanding, but, as @psychemedia had mentioned earlier in the conversation (when I back tracked through - try doing that when you are late to a meeting, or the pub!), "@ostephens I've started thinking common parlance in HK (sic) HE is more about OER™; ie closed/funded production of something with an open license."  And I think I have to agree - mostly, OER, as used in the UK, seems to mean a set of resources which are available under permissive licenses for use in education (RAPLE), and it dawned on me that OER can be parsed in more ways than one.

I happen to think that knowing what you are talking about is a useful trait (although, sometimes someone dropping in on a conversation and not knowing what it is about can spark useful discussions) and jargon which is readily mis-parsed can be a nightmare when you get different groups of people using the terms meaning different things.  Witness the PLE/PLN/VLE/LMS, for instance.  Anyway, it occurred to me that there are Educational Resources which are Open (ERO) which is what I think OER is generally used for in the UK, and there are Resources for Open Education (ROE) which get less attention, but which may well be more important.

The problem is, none of it is particularly well defined, as far as I can tell.

@psychemedia and @ostephens also drew out the fact that there is a difference between process and end-result.  I think I agree with @ostephens that there is a parallel with Open Source Software, including the collaborative work involved while @josswinn identified the potential benefit of recognising the 'fun' in OSS, and applying it to Open Education.

All of which put me in mind of my ongoing (rather half-hearted) attempt to manage my personal learning as though it were an open source software project.  Identify issues, prioritise, solve issues, document, iterate towards goal taking note of milestones in order to support a feeling of self esteem and well-being, all carried out (or at least documented as it happens) on a system which is visible to all.  Open learning, which is inherently creating a form of Open Educational-Resource (ERO, per above), and which, I believe, should serve as an Open-Education Resource (ROE, per above).