12. Lisa Petrides, "Open Education: Stepping into New Collaborative Processes"

PARC Forum: March 20, 2008, 4:00 p.m., George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA

Open Education: Stepping into New Collaborative Processes

Lisa Petrides, Ph.D., President and Founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)

The open content movement – which involves the aggregation, sharing, and collaborative enrichment of free educational materials over the Internet – is re-energizing teaching and learning efforts and making educational resources more dynamic through a cross-pollination of ideas and expertise. This Forum will discuss open education efforts worldwide, including the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education's (ISKME) online network, OER Commons. OER Commons aggregates open educational resources (OER) within a social networking environment to stimulate engagement of diverse populations in accessing and using these resources. Drawing on insights from ISKME’s OER Commons initiative, as well as its research on online collaborative learning environments, this Forum will discuss: (1) how the open education movement is fundamentally about strengthening scholarship and teaching through collaboration – and developing technologies to make that happen; and (2) how this nascent movement is addressing the technical and cultural challenges that impact its widespread adoption.


Lisa Petrides, Ph.D., is president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), an independent non-profit educational research institute located in Half Moon Bay, California. ISKME’s work includes applied research, innovative projects, and field-building initiatives in the area of knowledge sharing in education. Petrides has led the OER Commons initiative, an open source teaching and learning network, which focuses on supporting teachers and learners to facilitate the creation and adaptation of dynamic and evolving open educational resources (OER). A former professor in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Columbia University, Teachers College, Petrides received her Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University, MBA from Sonoma State University.