Abstract

This case study has been assembled into an ethnographic account (LeCompte & Schensul 1999:17; Clifford 1990:51-52) to stop the clock as it were and to reorder the recent past that has been observed and jotted down; to systematize, contextualize and assemble the activity of the TOETOE International project (tɔɪtɔɪ: Technology for Open English – Toying with Open E-resources) with the University of Oxford across seven different countries over a period of four months. It is part narrative and part design dialectic, drawing on stories and evaluations made by international stakeholders concerning the re-use of Oxford content: Oxford-managed corpora (large text and audio-visual resource collections) and Oxford-created open educational resources (OER). Moreover, these evaluation narratives continue to inform the design of open-source digital library software for developing flexible open English language learning and teaching collections with the FLAX project (Flexible Language Acquisition flax.nzdl.org) at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.