Proud to share - topic2

Recently I visited a swedish town I had never been to before.
As the town was new to me I took a taxi from the train station to the destination.
I was not in a mood for small talk, focusing on the meeting ahead, but the cab driver was nice and chatty, so I asked him something about what the town was like to live in...
To my surprise he turned off the meter and took an extra tour, showing me some beautiful places, and told me all the benefits of his town. Originally of middle eastern descent, he had lived here with his family for 17 years and vividly described what a nice town it had been for his children to grow up in. He also cruised by an old, fairy tale like castle, explaining with pride that he and his wife had had their wedding photographs taken there 10 years ago.
Vehemently refusing to be tipped, he dropped me off with exact directions to make sure I did not get lost, (and recommendations of where to get the best hot dog in town after the meeting)...

teleborgs_slott_växjö_2015c by: Bysmon CC BY-SA-4.0

This experience was at the back of my mind during the week, taking part of my groups PBL-work on topic 2 in the Open networked learning course.
In the PBL-group we discussed advantages and limitations and negative aspects of openness and sharing, analysing possibilities and strategies, getting familiar with online resources and the knowledge on how to use them presented in the course.
At the PBL-groups' hangout meeting the idea was put forward to turn ourselves into experiments:
that each one of us could try out something of using or sharing open educational resources in our own teaching or research and reflect upon the experience.
It was a good idea and even fun to try something practically.
I think we were all struck by the enormous amount of material which is available online under the creative commons license or the public domain. Initially it made me feel overwhelmed and a bit lost.
Using strategies for narrowing down searches, and getting the "feel" of the type of content on different OER portals made it more manageable.
In the ONL course we have been given interesting good presentations and links to material about openness and sharing. It really helped me get going and know where to look and what to do. But the "experiment" made it so clear what a different experience it is to try out something in practise, while keeping up a dialogue with the others in the group, compared to reading accounts of others experiences and knowledge.

Apart from all the good rational benefits of OER, it has been fun to have tried contributing in a small way. It feels good to offer my material to others, rather than to keep it isolated in my own little teaching bubble. It makes me feel proud that resources created for teaching at the small campus and tiny island where I live, could also be useful for another teacher, in another part of the world, perhaps using the material as a starting point to build something new.
Weller highlights the altruistic element of OERs  in his discussion of the development of openness in education from the emergence of learning objects, OERS and MOOCS. He concludes that while the development of open educational resources is rooted from a striving to improve education worldwide, as OER is growing and becoming widespread it is also being noticed by commercial interests whose use and adaptations could undermine the original altruistic orientation (Weller: 2014)
But maybe there is hope that the striving to share just for the sake of helping one another will live on in the OER-sphere, like the taxi driver who switched off his meter to drive an extra round, wanting to share and to show somebody else something he was proud of.


References
Weller, M. (2014). Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. London: Ubiquity Press.