Investing in soft technologies for interoperability

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Investing in soft technologies for interoperability
This is perhaps a little left brain thinking - but in the OERs and social software world we often forget about the "pedagogy of building capacity" for interoperability. The "hard" technologies will change but the "soft" technologies (people skills) are our most important assets in the education sector. Strong investment in soft technologies will build the sustainability and critical mass we need for success.

Examples
 * Inspired by the Native American proverb: Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I may not remember, involve me, and I'll understand and a generous grant from Hewlett we are planing to launch the largest capacity building project in wiki editing skills since the inception of Wikipedia. This is a smart project because educator will receive free training in return for one lesson of free content donated back to the community. The bid was developed as a free content proposal.

High-Tech; High-Touch; High-Teach: If we focusing on people skills, then open-educational resources should be made available, as a priority, to those civil-society organizations and NGOs who implement in different settings. For every technology developed, let's create a cafe, a clearinghouse, and a marketplace so that we can include high-tech solutions (internet, radio, OER), high-touch solutions (identification of local leaders and respected innovators), and high-teach solutions (content creators and adaptors, public-private partnerships that can vet content, evaluation metrics that demonstrate not onlythe level of use in the classroom, but the degree to which students are learning.

My experience of high-tech, high-touch, high-teach is this: technology itself must reflect a user experience of hospitality and gratitude, cultural accessibility, and strong user-based content. High-tech without high-touch (great local teachers and human beings) or high-teach (practical, usable, sophisticated, vetted content) is useless; high-touch without technology or content cannot produce results or scale; high-teach without technology or touch results in isolated pockets of excellence. Beyond these syllogisms is a larger truth. Let's work on building interoperable memberships and interoperable organizations. It's a question of positioning OER as a people-centric, education endeavor. No soapbox here, just excitement over the possibilities.

I love the idea of creating sub-domains of toolsets (which, in and of itself is a good idea), as it breaks through the barrier of access. In a preliminary analysis of one foundation, a huge amount of money was spent on requests for off-the-shelf software that did not talk to other software or peer organizations. We are well aware of this. Beyond sub-domains, how about sib-domains? Instead of creating "the solution" and branching off from there (again, a good idea), there can be a menu of choices that can roll up into a more organization-specific offering. For example, if I am working in an organization working on human rights for women in Pakistan, I may need a social networking tool that talks to other social-networking tools; a content-authoring tool that both plays well with others and works with the social-networking tool I have chosen. Perhaps those of you working directly in this field are describing this very concept...

Presently, Teachers Without Borders is working with 8 countries in the Middle East. The teachers are not only adapting curriculum; seven of them have advanced technology backgrounds; presently, Palestinian, Jordanian, Egyptian, and Israeli programmers are working together to use OER content and tools. Part of the interoperability issue has to do with training a diverse group of global programmers who have direct experience with educational needs.