K-12 school districts are starting to not just adopt, but to focus on teaching teachers how to effectively use OER in ways that improve student learning. Content partners like Open Up Resources have joined forces with OER publishers to produce openly licensed, full-course curriculum that school districts throughout the United States can adopt and adapt to local contexts. At the same time, organizations like UnboundEd, Gooru Learning, and ISKME are working on professional development opportunities with teachers. This excellent work has been bolstered by support from the U.S. Department of Education’s #GoOpen project, which has seen over 100 districts and 20 states make commitments to begin using OER.

You may have heard that “knowledge is power,” or that information, the raw material of knowledge, is power. But the truth is that only some information is power: reliable information.

The goal of the accuracy test is to assure that the information is actually correct: up to date, factual, detailed, exact, and comprehensive.

“The first step is admitting that everyone, from students to doctors, uses Wikipedia,” writes Jake Orlowitz, the head of The Wikipedia Library at the Wikimedia Foundation, in a blog. “We need to change the conversation from one of abstinence to intelligent information consumption.”

Digital literacies are not solely about technical proficiency but about the issues, norms, and habits of mind surrounding technologies used for a particular purpose.

Jhangiani, R. S., & Jhangiani, S. (2017). Investigating the Perceptions, Use, and Impact of Open Textbooks: A survey of Post-Secondary Students in British Columbia. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(4).

The current university lecture has a few aspects that students from earlier decades might not recognize. Instead of the occasional tape recorder, professors will often find themselves surrounded by a small pack of electronic recording devices, and be expected to provide a link to a PDF containing their lecture slides. That's assuming they don't generate their own podcast of a lecture or are part of a university that records and posts the material for them. This apparently free exchange of ideas, however, might be about to get a lot more complicated, depending on the results of a lawsuit filed last week in Florida.