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This is your wiki - feel free to build it.OER Lexicon - A Primer on OER-related Terms
From ICommons wiki
[edit] About the Lexicon
- Summary
The definitions below offer simple explanations to common OER terms. The definitions are based primarily upon first-hand research and practical experience with OER projects, as well as on perusal of existing definitions offered by Wikipedia. - Tips for Reuse
We invite OER community members to reuse the definitions for their own local purposes. Examples include tailoring them and inserting them into internal presentations and documents, or pointing to them to increase understanding or awareness among project members. - Invitation to Participate
The definitions are a work in progress, and we invite OER projects and OER community members to to add to this list with new definitions, or to suggest changes to the existing definitions. Simply create an account for this wiki, and add your comments to the bottom of the page.
Licensing – The process of choosing and assigning a license to an open educational resource by the original creator of that resource. OER creators can choose from several licenses offered by organizations/initiatives such as Creative Commons and GNU—with the license typically stipulating the conditions under which that resource can be used, shared, adapted or distributed by other users.
Localization – The process through which educational resources are adapted to meet local teaching and learning needs. Resource localization might entail, e.g., translating a lesson plan into another language, removing parts of a lab exercise that are too complex for a given set of students, or adding more culturally relevant examples to a course module.
Log files – Website use files that can be used to study user behaviors, including how users navigate through a site, what they click on, and what specific actions they take.
Metadata – Basic descriptive data about an educational resource, which help users more easily find and use the resource. It is “data about data,” or attributes that describe the data, and includes descriptors such as title, language, author, and grade level, creation date, etc.
Open Educational Resources (OER) – Teaching and learning materials that are freely available for instructors, students, self-learners and others to use. Examples include lesson plans, modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world. OER can exist as smaller, stand-alone resources that can be mixed and combined to form larger pieces of content, or as larger course modules or full courses.
Open source – Initially, a movement, its activities and concepts associated with the collaborative creation of software source code which is freely available to download and use by everyone. Linux is one example of open source software. Today, open source extends beyond the collaborative creation of free-to-use software to include the activities, processes and resources that are associated with creating all open content.
Peer production – The process of online, collaborative content creation by peers, most often facilitated through an authoring platform or wiki. One example of the peer production process is the [Free High School Science Texts] project, which draws on online volunteers and a collaborative authoring platform to create free-to-use textbooks for South African schools.
Reuse – The use, adaptation, remixing or modification of existing resources for new and/or local purposes.
Social networking tools – Tools that allow users to collaborate and communicate around their interests, often generating new user content or making new meaning from existing content. Social networking tools include, e.g., tags, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and user portfolios.
Tags – Tags are a bottom up, user-generated classification system (i.e., folksonomy) for educational resources, and frequently serve as an alternative or addition to a top down, expert-created classification system (taxonomy). Tags are words assigned to resources by the users of those resources. For example, one user of a lesson plan about the Spanish influenza of 1918 might assign a tag such as flu, while another might assign a tag such as pandemic. Once assigned by users, tags are tied to the given resource, and become a searchable way to find that resource as well as other resources that are tagged or associated with the same labels.
Tag cloud – A set of tags associated with a resource or a set of resources, which are displayed in a cluster next to the resource(es). The size of the fonts that represent the tags in the cloud provides an indication of how common each tag is: Common tags that occur frequently across a set of resources are typically displayed in large, bold font, while less common tags are displayed in a smaller font.
Web 2.0 – The second generation of the Web, which moves beyond the static, one way flow and siloed creation and use of Web content, and encompasses social networking tools that inspire new user behaviors. Web 2.0 facilitates communication and collaboration between Web users, a two-way flow of information between sites and users, and the creation of user-generated Web content.
Wiki – A Web-based tool that allows users to create and edit Web content collaboratively. Wikipedia lists the central features of wikis as follows: they provide the ability to edit content at anytime by anyone; their content can be modified and created through a web browser, old versions of a given piece of content is viewable by users; and the most current version of a piece of content can be monitored by users. Examples of wikis include Wikipedia and Unesco’s community of interest wiki on OER.
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