TY - JOUR T1 - Open Source Resources in Education: Opportunities and Challenges JF - Open Source Business Resource Y1 - 2009 A1 - Norm Friesen AB - The education community has been at the forefront in envisioning and conceptualizing infrastructures intended for utilizing and sharing digital content or resources. However, this community has faced challenges in making these visions a reality. We begin by describing a relatively early attempt at creating an economy for sharing educational resources, referred to as learning objects. We then discuss two approaches to opening up educational contents to the world under the auspices of the more recent Open Educational Resources movement. One of these approaches has focused on creating open resources from scratch, utilizing Wiki content development and management technologies in the wake of the phenomenal success of Wikipedia. A second approach is represented by developments in Open Courseware. Following the example of MIT's Open Courseware, this approach has more recently been adopted by many other educational institutions under the OCW Consortium. We conclude by making the case that this second approach may represent the most promising of recent developments in the adaptation of open source and open content to educational practices and technologies. PB - Talent First Network CY - Ottawa UR - http://timreview.ca/article/271 IS - July 2009 U1 - Thompson Rivers University Dr. Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, Canada. Dr. Friesen has been developing and studying Web technologies in educational contexts since 1995, is the author of several editions of books on the effective use of instructional software, is co-editor of Phenomenology and Practice, and is a member of the Canadian delegation to the ISO subcommittee for Learning, Education and Training. He previously worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, and as an adjunct or visiting faculty at Athabasca University, at the University of Toronto, the Technical University of Dresden and the University of Innsbruck. He holds Master's degrees from the University of Alberta and Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD in Education from the University of Alberta. ER -