i’ve been thinking a lot about localization lately. its one of the things i hope to study in the spring. but for me its not exactly localization, its more regionalization. i’m not thinking about things like culture as in a completely different culture than the american one, or language. for me its about how to take a piece of open courseware to a specific audience. i guess its more of a reuse (ah, no ‘reuse’ category at the good dr. wiley’s weblog, i’ll find a link later) issue, reusing a piece of ocw. anyhow, my point. i was talking to someone in the department today about being stuck on this concept of regionalization — what does it mean? and i think i started to understand — part of regionalization (and localization?) is making it instructionaly sound for the audience. and what happens with oer’s is that regionalization / localization happens at the local level – with the instructor being the one to make it instructionaly relevant to the user.

so, this is a challenge. how to make oer’s instructionally relevant at the development level? and then i guess there’s this whole point of, each of us is different, and what is meaningful to one person is not necessarily meaningful to another person. its difficult enough to deal with that in a class of 10 students, much less one of 30 (imho one of the problems of public schooling, but another issue for another day), much less the to any possible person in the whole of the internet. but maybe.. oh, thats another post for another day. think the long tail – making a lot relevant to a few people, rather than relevant to lots of people.

so, what does this mean? i’m not really sure what it means. it means that i’m now looking at another piece of this whole open content world. it means that i’m now understanding why we need to understand this whole reuse issue.

this is like an onion. so many layers, and i just keep peeling it back, seeing a new layer, and then a new way to see it. its facinating, absolutely facinating.