There are hundreds of thousands of free and open education resources spread across the internet and being organized into repositories such as the OER commons, TES Connect, and Open Education Europa. Yet many teachers and learners are not benefiting from these resources.
Policies for OER Uptake (POERUP) looks at in-depth case studies of user and producer communities of OER in Europe and abroad. The project has already created an inventory of over 400 OER projects and published numerous reports on European and Gulf states. Based on this research, POERUP has come up with three sets of recommendations for encouraging OER uptake in schools, colleges, and universities. More...
Website: POERUP.

UNESCO has announced a new Open Access Repository making more than 300 digital reports, books and articles available to the world under the Creative Commons IGO licenses.

From UNESCO’s press release:

“Currently, the Repository contains works in some 12 languages, including major UNESCO reports and key research publications. As well as the 300 Open Access publications, UNESCO will provide on-line availability to hundreds of other important reports and titles. Covering a wide range of topics from all regions of the world, this knowledge can now be shared by the general public, professionals, researchers, students and policy-makers… under an open license.”

UNESCO will continue to expand its collection of open resources with selected past publications and all new works following its new Open Access Policy adopted in April 2013. As of 31 July 2013 all new UNESCO publications are released with one of the CC IGO licenses and will be loaded into the Open Access Repository. The majority of UNESCO resources will be openly licensed under CC BY SA. More...

However, these developments also raise important issues at both national and European level, such as quality assurance, recognition and accreditation, the promotion of innovative teaching and learning alongside more traditional forms, infrastructure and technical requirements. At a broader level, the EU is in danger of lagging behind other regions of the world in this field. Already much of the supply of digital content comes from outside Europe.

Links

• Open Educational Resources and digital learning

Open source is a huge part of Facebook engineering. Whether we're building new data infrastructure tools like Corona and Presto to manage our warehouses on Hadoop, releasing a new mobile build tool like Buck, or improving PHP runtime with HHVM, open source projects are integral to our operations.  
We also believe that contributing to open source projects is one of the best ways a student can prepare for a job in the industry. Software development as a profession has many features that are distinct from computer science as an academic subject. Projects are often larger than the people who participate in them; project management and interpersonal relationships can have as much impact on software design as technical issues; and systems are ultimately evaluated by user satisfaction rather than technical merit. More...

The Hewlett Foundation’s Education Program is committed to openness and transparency in its grantmaking. Recently, the Program revisited its Open Educational Resources (OER) strategy in an effort to better understand how its philanthropic investments—within the context of the larger funding landscape—can help integrate OER into mainstream education. We conducted dozens of expert interviews and commissioned new research and analysis. The result of our research is this white paper, which presents a roadmap for transforming teaching and learning by shifting OER from a small-scale movement to standard education practice.

Read the full White Paper here >>

By Jenny Mackness. Openness does not mean that anything goes. Even openness of mind does not mean this. In our work on emergent learning, we (Roy Williams, Simone Gumtau, Regina Karousou and I) have in the papers we have published (see here  and here) suggested that constraints are needed for emergent learning to occur. I have been thinking about this further over the past week or so in relation to the work of two artists – Jackson Mac Low, the American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright and Edmund de Waal, the British ceramic artist and author. More...