My rationale for choosing the topic of openness for this assignment was simple: How could we tap into the latent energy contained in the educational communities around the world and utilize information and communication technologies (ICT) to produce free-of-charge textbooks?

On pages 4 and 5, I discussed Richardson's (2008) ideas of openness in the context of authoring learning materials: (1) inquiry, (2) co-creation, (3) sharing, and (4) reuse. I then presented the four key characteristics of Connexions on pages 10 and 11: (1) Workgroup: A shared online space for members to author content collaboratively, (2) CNXML: A mark-up language for creating and editing modules on the Internet, (3) Lenses: A peer-review mechanism for content quality control, and (4) Intellectual Property: A Creative Commons license for all content created in Connexions.

In Artefact 3, I used screen capturing to illustrate a typical workflow and created a collection (i.e. part of a textbook). This collection demonstrated how quickly one could compile a few modules to assemble and publish a textbook in Connexions.

A major effort in Artefact 3 was the analysis and evaluation of various features of this web-based technology. By uncovering Connexions’ ideological and technological dimensions (e.g. user friendly copyright scheme, decentralized distribution of textbooks, open source software, CNXML mark-up language, and so forth) and linking it to open educational resources movement of which it is a part, I was able to integrate several MDE coursework into an amalgamated vision of open textbooks (see @work section on this page).

My professor gave the assignment an A grade and the following overall comment, quoted here with his permission¹:

"This is a very good review of the open resources movement, well written and readable. There is another aspect of open materials that is not generally emphasized, either in this paper or in the literature as a whole – the lack of quality assurance from which materials often suffer, and which may lead to problems with the movement in future (as Wikipedia has been criticized for lack of QA). But this does not detract from the good grade given to this paper."

¹: Permission to use this graded assignment as artefact was received by email on 20/10/2010.