Most OER initiatives have focussed on the production of OER, search and discovery tools for OER, or aggregation & repository sites for OER. However, in between production and search and discovery lies an under examined part of the process -- community *re*-sharing of materials.
By "re-sharing", we refer to the re-publication of materials the publisher has not created themselves, and has often only minimally edited. Over the past ten years, re-sharing has become a central feature of many social publishing platforms. Most such platforms rely on these re-sharers to make discoverability happen, and see sharing as the behavior which drives production and community engagement. Tumblr is the land of "reblogs", Twitter of re-tweets, and Facebook of resharing posts. Central to many of these systems is the idea that to "use" is necessarily to "reshare". Additionally, reuse in these systems is not seen as "consumption", but rather an activity valuable in its own right.
This session will focus on the role that newer software architectures for re-sharing can play in the publication, dissemination, and discovery of Open Educational Resources. While we will deal with the theoretical underpinnings of the new approaches, the main focus will be to demonstrate new tools we have built that make the resharing of material a natural, rewarding, and enjoyable, and to some extent automatic part of the reuse process.
