I have just come across the Cape Town Open Declaration, a “statement of strategy and …commitment [to open education]”. The focus is very much on the development and sharing of ‘open educational resources’ but there is stuff about the sharing of teaching practices too. It all seems quite reasonable but there is a bit of a debate around it of course, see Downes vs Wiley – Cato and Cicero revisited and Open education and the cape Town declaration. The declaration is supposed to spark dialogue so it’s off to a good start, although I suspect that particular dialogue was already there!

We’re currently working with the French department here at LSE and colleagues at Columbia University on a repository for sharing French teaching resources and while the teachers behind the project are keen to share the fruits of their labour I know that other teachers here and elsewhere are not, particularly when sharing goes beyond the dept / institution. I’m off to become a sceptical signatory if they’ll allow such a thing!

Coincidently, I also came across U-Now: an open courseware initiative at Nottingham university this week.

PS When did Martin Dougiamas relocate to Austria 😉 (See Cape Town signatories)