It has a pool and a pond. The pond is good for you.

British girls keepin' it real

I was speaking with a friend recently about micro-reactions and the ability to read these reactions on the faces of people to tell if they are being truthful when presented with a series of questions. It's a newly-developed method of sooth-saying, an emerging field of study if not exactly a science, whose ultimate goal is to be used in a variety of situations where testing the validity of, say, eyewitness testimony is paramount. It's other natural use would be to perhaps aid in proving evidence for the guilt or innocence of an individual facing incarceration. Whether it gains acceptance or not is largely a matter of how accurate it is, but probably what types of situations in which it proves most useful. For example, is it used in legitimate crime investigation, and has it borne results? Then the odds that it gains some measure of credibility increases. If it is used, for example, to test whether or not someone truthfully reports seeing Bigfoot? Hmmmm...

Well, it may have just impugned itself as more CSI quackery. As it turns out, it's not really important as to whether or not the subjects were lying about seeing Bigfoot, it's more to the point that they believed what they saw. Because of this finding, the study of micro-reactions has in a way double-whammied itself; not only is it unable to tell if someone is lying, but it only has proven useful in a situation where no one knows the truth anyway. There are just no facts to support the hypothesis. So the whole thing falls apart.

Curtis Bonk is all about the Open Educational Resource (OER). Like micro-reactions, OER is emerging and thus far has not, at least in widespread institutionalized education, proven itself to be of much interest or use. But it is generating interest among those who view the ability to construct one's own knowledge in an equitable, accessible and highly dynamic way. It has the ability, if used properly and thoughtfully, to empower both the learner and the educator. It has it's drawbacks: free information is not always good information;  tools however useful, are often misused; and users of these new tools tend to be fickle. And so the torch of the OER tends to fall upon the diligent and forward-thinking, lest the OER become glacially institutionalized itself.

So it begs the question is not whether or not the OER is actually useful, but whether or not the user believes in the ability of the OER to be useful. Does that mean that the tool is effective? Maybe not. As in the case of the micro-reaction and Bigfoot, it is largely dependent upon the perceptions of the user. Only when true evidence of the usefulness of the tool is presented will it be widely accepted, no matter how innovative it is.