There are certainly differences in opinion, and people try to persuade others, for example David Wiley believes that it’s fine to use CC BY-SA and involve commercial companies in education, and Stephen Downes thinks that CC BY-NC-SA is much better and wants to keep the commercial companies out. However, I would argue that open ed is such an emergent field that it’s much more the case that the community is collaboratively exploring the boundaries of the possible. An example is the “Wiley Wiki” way of teaching classes, which was pioneered by David Wiley and then quickly adopted by others who improved on the model etc, thereby raising the “collective state of knowledge” of the “sphere”.

Now that I am researching open education in China, I wonder if there are similar “blogospheres” around open education, etc, in China. I find lot’s of blogs mentioning open education, but these are seldom “about” open education, they are more personal blogs, and they seem to be more read by someone’s friends, rather than by peers who are interested in open education. Is there collaborative knowledge building around this phenomenon in China? Is there a Stephen Downes or a Peter Suber (Open Access News), who read thorugh hundreds of feeds and filter out daily summaries? Are there portals like Planet Wikimedia and OERBlogs that suck in a number of RSS feeds on the same topic and display them together? And how do we make it easier for people to discover where to go – lot’s of Americans can somehow read Spanish, but it might be very hard to just start looking for the top blogs on a given topic in Spanish… How do we point them in the right direction?

Just some thoughts I have to develop further.
Stian

(PS I”d love to a global voices for say open education. What’s the German open ed blogosphere talking about today? The Israeli? The Arab? The Mexican? How can we take all those conversations and merge them – or at least have the good ideas and meaningful conversations “bubble up” and perhaps be translated? I saw a few blogs actually translating blogs from “luminaries” in English, like Stephen Downes, into Chinese. But none that go the opposite way.)