OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
inertia to overcome when adopting new practices. It attempts to set itself apart from traditional engineering schools through its focus on project-based and team-based learning, its interdisciplinary approach, and its unique organizational structure.
Universities and other centers of knowledge worldwide have been creating special collections, websites (often associated virtual communities of practice) around narrow topics, for example Decameron Web,[1] The Valley of Shadow,[2] The Perseus Project,[3] websites on the Civil War, and on and on. These become rich sites to explore and even participate in—starting to engage in learning to be a scholar. There are likely now hundreds of such high-quality sites with many in the humanities. Consider the MIT Shakespeare Ensemble and the ability it offers to pull up different (video and movie) performances of Hamlet and see/feel the wide range of interpretations different directors have given. Which one seems right and why?
Returning to history, how might one get youth to take some of this material and build games around them? This is a rich tapestry of history games already, but how do they get used in history classes, if they do at all? What kinds of discussions can they foster?
Moving back to engineering and science, recall the critically acclaimed series at Cal Tech called The Mechanical Universe… and Beyond.[4] This is a series of fifty-two thirty-minute videotape programs covering the basic topics of an introductory university physics course. It includes hundreds of spectacular computer animation segments created by the famed graphics guru, Jim Blinn. The National Science Foundation later funded production of a seven-hour high school adaptation suitable for high school physics students, and it has been translated into nine languages. But this just scratches the surface of what could be done to get people of any age to understand how the mechanical universe works. How could high-quality resources such as these be remixed and reused in even more powerful ways? We have already alluded to the vast capabilities of visual simulations—but there is now little way to know what each other is doing, what has worked, what can be shared and so on. Could a pervasive OPLI reduce this lost-opportunity cost?
Consider Andy van Dam’s ambitious proposal to build, in a distributed and federated way, a clip library of simulations[5] (sim clips) that recursively delve deeper into a topic. His focus initially was the human body, which can be viewed at multi-scale (both spatial and temporal) levels, but at each level each
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