So this week I have been mostly ranting about creativity (or lack of). I’ve been inspired by a few things recently such as the We are what we do approach to friendly, guilt-inducing, but essentially practical advice marketing around environmental awareness - their key message is small actions, lots of people, big change. Then there was the Metro ReCreate competition encouraging people to create something new from their newspaper. Here are some people randomly collaborating to create a house from newspapers.

It constantly strikes me how fun, simple and beautiful these things are. They appeal to people’s creativity. They join people in a creative mission. They create something tangible (actions in the case of We Are What We Do.) They promote the creations in a way that encourages more contributions (today the top of their homepage declares 1,247,119 actions completed). And they badge their contributors as responsible citizens (wear that organic cotton shopper with pride).

So what is the relevance for Open Educational Resources? Those in the OCWC (and many others) are working hard to publish educational resources freely and openly under a Creative Commons license. Made available as building blocks for new courses, people can amend the resources to create new, possibly richer versions with wider relevance to a global audience - essentially recreating rather than reinventing course materials. There are examples of remixed versions of Open University materials in the LabSpace. In accordance with the 1% rule only a tiny proportion of OER users are being creative in this way. But you can bet your bottom dollar that its not 1% of the global academic community who are making contributions in this way. There are many, many reasons why - which is another day, another blog post. But if one reason is time we should consider that the “small changes x lots of people = big change” message works. We have to enable our contributors to make those changes quickly and easily. Another barrier is awareness of open educational resources.

So how do we communicate the principles in a fun, simple and beautiful way?

We have some ideas for why remixing educational resources are useful, and why open licensing is important for inspiring creativity, but until/unless remixing becomes commonplace we won’t be able to test our assumptions (that sharing resources might reduce costs of course development, increase the time tutors spend interacting with students and increase quality of materials for example). More importantly we won’t be able to find out from users what is the real value to them of having these materials. It sounds obvious, but until you understand the benefits, it’s impossible to communicate them.

So we need to coax the 1% of creative remixers in the educational community to make use of these materials. Taking lessons from We Are What We Do and ReCreate we need to induce guilt (do not waste these intellectual resources), inspire creativity and creation (take our blocks and build), reward and badge our contributors as responsible resource creators (an I’m in the 1% t-shirt?) and give them a creative mission to join (academia is by nature serious and complicated but we all have a fun and simple side we like to indulge. Even pitch the resource creators in a battle with the resource haters).

Creative suggestions on the blog’s equivalent of the back of a postcard - be in the 1% and comment below. I might even get you a t-shirt.