Welcome to the Open Education Conference, 2007! In this opening session David will welcome everyone, cover some logistics, and introduce the 51Weeks system that will be supporting the conference.

Manohar Bhattarai has been actively involved in developing strategies for social appropriation of ICTs in Nepal. Working under a broad theme of ICTs for development and harnessing power of ICTs to effectively complement service delivery in key strategic areas like health and education, Manohar has been actively involved in the roll out of community owned rural telecentres in various parts of Nepal since the inception of Nepal’s nascent telecentre movement. Ramita Shrestha has been actively involved in operating and managing Youth Managed Resource Centers throughout Nepal.

Since 2005 a group of more than 600 individuals from 98 countries has met virtually to consider Open Educational Resources—the experience of some of those involved in OER initiatives and a number of the related issues. After this intense involvement, the international Community of Interest expressed its opinion on priorities to promote and enable the OER movement.

There are two sets of roadblocks to the localization of open educational resources: physical roadblocks such as undeveloped technological and political infrastructures and legal roadblocks such as the difficulties created by legal protections of intellectual property. This presentation will focus on both, as they work in conjunction with one another to block the localization of e-education.

In this presentation we report on two attempts to intervene in rural Himalayan villages with educational technology, one involving desktop computer technology, and one involving participatory video. We describe the unique constraints of designing appropriate educational technology for the developing world, and we propose a fourfold framework for design.

What does a sustainable collaborative network for building and sharing reusable, adaptable, high-quality, effective full courses of open education learning objects look like? The NROC Network is a demonstration of these complex and intuitively contradictory objectives. This session discusses the NROC Network’s key components and initial impacts.

OCW in Motion is a project to facilitate the reuse of OCW content in learning situations. It uses a Wiki-style structure to put courseware together and expand a teacher’s OCW with a student’s courseware. It extends the workspace with a collaborative platform to establish relationships with other learning spaces.

This case study shares lessons learned from making content available as open educational resources and eliciting worldwide collaboration. Our goal is to make resources available online in a format that is accessible and open for repurposing and localizing, and learning from the contributions made to the content.

Through the efforts of higher education institutions, Open Education has gained recognition for supporting learning throughout the world. However, the corporate world has been notably absent. This presentation examines the results of efforts by Novell Training Services to adopt Open Education as a corporate learning initiative.

Local educational agencies measure learning outcomes and validate the efficacy of a curriculum based on Learning Objectives Frameworks. This presentation will cover the strategies, based on open standards like SIF, SCORM and LOM, in development by Curriki to address this important ‘Framework Alignment’ element of the Open Curriculum metadata puzzle.

Open Educational Resources are often seen as a subset of Open Content. This raises the question of what characterises an OER and distinguishes it from other Open Content? And if the content is deemed educational then what makes it effective in promoting learning in a prospective learner?

Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (JHSPH) OpenCourseWare has made both creation and localization of open graphic content part of its content preparation workflow. Extracurricular availability of JHSPH OCW’s original graphic content via an open image library is an important next step toward making subsequent localization more manageable for reusers.

Ideally, through utilization of legally and technically interoperable standards, Open Educational Resources (OERs) should be educationally different from materials that can merely be read online for free. The current lack of standards threatens to undermine the promise of OERs. Some guiding principles for facilitating community adoption of standards are suggested.

The current "closed content" understanding of Intellectual Property is being challenged in educational arenas where a freedom to exchange ideas and content is viewed as beneficial. This qualitative case study analyzes benefits that come to instructors who contribute their content to OpenCourseWare projects, thereby employing an “open content” understanding.

In order to clarify critical factors in international co-development and localization of learning content, an evaluation study was held in Japan and Thailand. As differences were found in curricula/standards and copyrights/intellectual property rights in addition to language and cultural issues, strategies and processes of localization utilizing "learning objects" are indispensable.