Developing 21st Century Skills through Colearning with OER and Social Networks

Abstract

In little over a decade, Open Educational Resources (OER) have opened upaccess to knowledge through hundreds of projects and open contentrepositories, open practices and, more recently, Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC). However, OER lie at the heart of the Open Educationmovement, which advocates that communities and individuals should haveaccess not only to repositories, but also to open technologies and methodologies. Since 2006, OER initiatives such as OpenLearn have beenproviding both open content and knowledge media environments. Currently, itis possible to observe that an increasing number of open learning projectshave been moving beyond the provision of repositories to offer socialpersonalised platforms for collaborative open knowledge construction.OpenScout and weSPOT, for example, offer opportunities for users toorganise their social networks and co-create resources, methodologies, inquiries and best practices.