EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online

Knol

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:10:16 GMT

Both students and instructors use the online collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia and both are likely to make use of Knol. The new Google site offers short articles on a very wide range of subjects from Backpacking to Malaria to Barbecue Sauces. Net watchers will be looking closely to see if Knol grows at the same pace and to the same scope as Wikipedia. ____JH
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The Knol site has one goal: to help you share what you know.

"The Knol project is a site that hosts many knols — units of knowledge — written about various subjects. The authors of the knols can take credit for their writing, provide credentials, and elicit peer reviews and comments. Users can provide feedback, comments, related information. So the Knol project is a platform for sharing information, with multiple cues that help you evaluate the quality and veracity of information.

Knols are indexed by the big search engines, of course. And well-written knols become popular the same as regular web pages. The Knol site allows anyone to write and manage knols through a browser on any computer."

Disruptive Technologies or New Pedagogical Possibilities

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:32:15 GMT

Grainne Conole of OpenLearn presents a view of how Web 2.0 technologies can influence pedagogical approaches. The models and ideas in Conole's presentation are worth considering by learning design professionals whose task is to facilitate the construction of online courses. (The video from the Eduserve Foundation Symposium 2008 was cited by iThinkEd.)____JH

Open Education News

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:14:55 GMT

David Wiley announces the startup of Open Education News. This is another site to add to your list of rss feeds to monitor happenings in the field of open education. ___JH

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"The young field of open education is gaining momentum and energy. As additional projects, foundations, universities, and other participants join the movement, the need increases for a single source to gather, sort, analyze, synthesize, and disseminate news related to open education. As a field, open education is now where the field of open access was a few years ago. Peter Suber's wonderful Open Access News provides an invaluable service to the OA community, and we intend to replicate this service with Open Education News."

"Open Education News is essentially a group blog. A number of individuals from the US, South Africa, and eventually other locations daily monitor the internet for news related to open education. We then aggregate these items and publish them individually with minor commentary. Occasionally we'll publish bigger pieces of our own authorship; analyses and such. If you know of some open education news we should write about, contact David Wiley at david.wiley@gmail.com."

"Open Education News is graciously supported by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation."

A Biograpy of America

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:52:15 GMT

This video series from Annenberg Media/Learning.org sets a high standard for online resources. The flash media presentations are exceptionally well produced to include clips from historical records and commentary by historians. Maps, a webography, and transcripts are also included with each module. Registration is required to access the free resources. Viewers who visit A Biography of America will also want to examine other programs available from Annenberg. ____JH

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"Annenberg Media is a unit of The Annenberg Foundation. Our mission is to advance excellent teaching in all disciplines throughout American K-12 schools. Former names of Annenberg Media are: Annenberg/CPB, The Annenberg/CPB Project, and The Annenberg/CPB Math and Science Project.

We pursue this mission by funding and broadly distributing multimedia resources for teachers to help them improve their own teaching practice and understanding of their subject. Annenberg Media makes use of telecommunications technologies—the Internet, including broadband video streaming, and satellite television broadcast—as well as hard copy media to disseminate these multimedia resources, ensuring that they reach as many teachers as possible."

ZaidLearn's OCW + OER Lists

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:02:19 GMT

Zaid Ali Alsagoff has revised his OCW/OER list compilation to produce an extremely useful update. Zaid's compilation should be bookmarked for reference by university instructors, students, and support staff. ______JH

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University Learning = OCW + OER = FREE!

- Zaid Ali Alsagoff ( [ZaidLearn]

Web-Based Mind Mapping

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:41:07 GMT

Robin Good writes enthusiastically about the benefits of web-based mind-mapping, with a special focus on MindMeister (which is free in its basic version). Robin also includes links to other mind-mapping tools. The mind maps that I create are most often done with a pencil and a yellow pad, but there are advantages in using a shareable, web-based tool such as MindMeister. From a very, very broad perspective all online educational resources can be viewed as variations of a mind or topic map. _____JH

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"Web-Based Mind-Mapping: Outline, Plan and Brainstorm Ideas Together With MindMeister. If you are looking to find an effective way to collaborate, brainstorm, visualize and plan ideas collaboratively online, much beyond what voice and text chat can do, it is the time you give a good try to the mind-mapping experience.

Thanks to unforgettable MasterNewMedia editor Antonella Pastore, who first covered mindmaps in 2004 (!), mindmaps have been on my radar for quite some time, but with the recent advent of online, collaboratively editable mindmaps the opportunities to reap significant benefit from these tools has just exploded.

The great thing about collaborative, web-based mind-maps is the ease with which you can visualize spatially while giving very precise text labels to ideas, tasks, projects and to the relationships between them. These two characteristics by themselves when mixed with ability to watch and edit in real-time the same visual map with others creates a truly effective, useful and memorable way of collaborating productively at a distance."

Short Course on Structured Course Development, LOs, and Standards

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:11:47 GMT

This excellent online course is available for free from CAREO (a Wiki version of the course is also provided for readers who might like to contribute to the presentation). The course was developed by the Resource Pool Project. The topics covered should be of especial value to developers of educational resources and resource repositories.
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Course Overview

This short course is intended to provide a basic overview of structured course development, learning objects, and e-learning standards and specifications. This course is meant to be non-technical in nature, although it is hard to make it so.

Course Goal

A Short Course on Structured Course Development, Learning Objects, and E-Learning standards will provide an introduction to using a structured language such as Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) or eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as a basis for producing a learning design and describing course content, activities, and assignments. The course will tell you what SGML and XML are and distinguish them from HyperText Markup Language. You will understand the concept of learning objects and the issues related to their use in e-learning, and you will learn about the standards and specifications initiatives that are shaping the e-learning world.

Key Concepts

Semantic markup languages
Instructional design using a structured approach
Characteristics of learning objects
Learning objects and metadata
The difference between a standard and a specification
Why standards and specifications are important
E-learning standards and specifications initiatives

DiRT: the Digital Research Tools Wiki

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:47:18 GMT

This Wiki page will be of continuing value to researchers at many levels--students, instructors, and librarians. The purpose of the site is to provide short evaluative descriptions of useful software. The software is listed in categories (from Authoring to Mapping to Utilities for easy browsing. The resources are also searchable. ____JH (Via Jane Park's post in Creative Commons.)

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"As digital information proliferates, researchers need tools to find, organize, manipulate, analyze, and share it. But how do you keep up with the hundreds of tools that can help you to be more efficient and innovative and find the ones best for you? Digital Research Tools (DiRT) brings together snapshot reviews of software that can help researchers--professors, students, think-tankers, teachers, librarians, corporate intelligence gatherers, and other inquisitive folks--do their work better. We do our best to keep our reviews clear and straightforward rather than full of jargon. We also group tools into categories so that researchers can identify relevant ones more easily. We cover a range of software, including tools to help you manage and share your bookmarks, create bibliographies, analyze and visualize texts, brainstorm, collaborate, collect data, etc. Although we generally prefer tools that are free (open source is even better), we also cover software that comes with a price tag (if seems to be worth the money)."

"The Digital Research Tools team currently includes academic librarians with expertise in the humanities, science, and business. We welcome new contributors--contact Lisa Spiro at lspiro@rice.edu if you're interested."

Guide to Navigating Information Clutter

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 04:57:29 GMT

I admire list makers who can meaningfully select and organize useful information from among the clutter. Librarians are certainly among the most helpful list makers so I regularly read a number of library blogs. Keith Stanger, the "Library Guy" at Eastern Michigan University's Halle Library would certainly be a helpful person for students and faculty members to consult when they are looking for information. If you can't visit Keith in person, visit his "Information Advocate" web site. The site is especially strong in the subject areas of education and psychology, but other areas are covered as well. ____JH

The Fuss--Resources for Learning about RSS

Thu, 29 May 2008 17:37:50 GMT

I found this listing of rss workshops, tutorials, and information on the University of British Columbia Wiki. The information included in The Fuss really does convey what all the fuss is about when it comes to using rich site syndication feeds to keep up with postings from diverse sources across the Web. Next to using e-mail and search engines in browsers, the ability to acquire and organize rss feeds is a primary information literacy skill for students, instructors, and all others who visit the wonderful world of the Web. At the same site also consult Intro to RSS. (These pages at UBC are maintained by Brian Lamb.) ____JH

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IntroToRSS - a long scrolling page with pretensions of primer-hood.

What's TheFuss with RSS? - a really long scrolling page of resources and tutorials about [our favorite three letter acronym].
Intro
Why the fuss?
What is RSS?
Viewing RSS Content
Cookie Time
Connecting Learning Objects via RSS
Implementations
Q&A

Guide to Online Course Design

Wed, 28 May 2008 15:20:01 GMT

This chapter is called "Design with Learning in Mind" from Robin Smith's Guide to Online Course Design. The author successfully summarizes the key components in designing an online course and brings out the crucial differences between an online course and a classroom course. ____JH (Via Tomorrow's Professor.)
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--"The posting below looks at how to develop learner-centered environments for online courses. It is from Chapter 1, Design with Learning in Mind, in the book, Conquering The Content: A Step-by-Step Guide to Online Course Design, by Robin M. Smith Published by Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 [www.josseybass.com] Copyright © 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc."

CLARe--Contextualized Learning Activity Repository

Mon, 26 May 2008 03:58:58 GMT

CLARe currently contains resources related to language learning and study skills but plans are underway to expand the contents. Take a look to see what's available. ___JH
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"CLARe (Contextualised Learning Activity Repository) is a repository for online learning and teaching materials. It contains complete interactive, multimedia activities (learning objects) and individual resources, such as texts, video or audio recordings (assets).
Use our search facility to find the most appropriate resources, or browse to see the kind of material that CLARe contains."

"CLARe is running on GNU EPrints repository-creating software, which generates eprints repositories that are compliant with the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting OAI 1.1 and 2.0. The GNU EPrints repository-creating software is available for free at http://software.eprints.org/."

The Harvey Project on Human Physiology

Fri, 16 May 2008 16:44:08 GMT

I've followed the Harvey Project for many years; they continue to improve and expand the resources that the site provides for the teaching of human physiology. Even if you've visited the Project before, it's worth a new look just to see what has been added. ___JH

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"An international collaboration of educators, researchers, physicians, students, programmers, instructional designers and graphic artists working together to build interactive, dynamic human physiology course materials on the Web. Founded in 1998, the Harvey Project has over a hundred participants in nearly twenty countries. It has received funding from the US National Science Foundation . The Harvey Project has developed over forty learning objects, mostly Java simulations and Flash(tm) animations. Check out some of our learning materials (RLAs) and please join us if you're interested in helping out."

Introduction to Open Educational Resources

Sun, 11 May 2008 14:51:54 GMT

This introduction to OERs is available at Connexions. It was prepared by Dr. Judy Baker of Foothill College to assist instructors in using open textbooks and other online educational resources. I highly recommend this tutorial for teachers new to OERs and as a review for professionals who are already familiar with using online educational resources. _____JH

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"A self-paced tutorial about open educational resources as alternatives to textbooks for college teachers. Visitors are invited to actively participate by posting Activity Reflection entries to the course Discussion area. This tutorial has 9 Lessons organized into 3 Units: Background, OER Sources, and OER Use."

Collection Contents

OER Introduction

Open Access Directory

Mon, 05 May 2008 14:21:44 GMT

The aims of the Open Access movement, the Open Software movement, and the Open Educational Resources movement overlap, with each movement influencing the others. This new Open Access Directory wiki should be a valuable asset for professionals in all three fields. ___JH(Thanks to Carolina Rossini for this reference.)

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"Welcome to the Open Access Directory (OAD), a compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD will make it easier for users, especially newcomers, to discover them and use them for reference. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about OA.

The goal is for the OA community itself to enlarge and correct the lists with little intervention from the editors or editorial board. For quality control, we limit editing privileges to registered users. We welcome your contributions to our lists, ideas for new lists, and comments to help us improve OAD."

Table of contents

Discussion forums
Events. Conferences and workshops related to OA.
Institutions that support open access
Jobs in open access
Journal declarations of independence
Lists maintained by others
Proposed lists. These proposals may soon blossom into active lists.
Research in progress
Research questions
Statements by learned societies and professional associations

Web Tools 4 U 2 Use

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:03:54 GMT

This is a very BIG collection of categorized web tools. ____JH (Thanks to David Warlick's 2 Cents Worth for the reference.)

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"This wiki was created for school library media specialists by Dr. Donna Baumbach and Dr. Judy Lee, University of Central Florida. The purpose is to provide information about some of the new web-based tools (Web 2.0) and how they can be used and are being used by school library media specialists and their students and teachers. Much of the information--including identifying a need for this kind of information--is the result of a survey conducted in 2008 of over 600 school library media specialists about their knowledge and use of web-based tools in library media programs."

"Because WebTools4U2Use is a wiki, you can add information to any page. We encourage you to do so! Add or edit anything that you think will help other library media specialists learn more about Web 2.0 tools and use them creatively and productively in their programs. We've also created special pages for each category of tool so you can share other tools or show others how you and your colleagues are using the tools in your programs, or you can use the "discussion" link at the top of any page."

Using E-Maps to Organize and Navigate Online Content

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 01:00:18 GMT

I report about concept mapping techniques and software every now and then in this weblog because I believe that concept or topic maps are critically important for learning in general and that computer-generated maps provide a special advantage for electronic learning over ordinary textbooks and classrooms. This pdf article by Prof. Michael Ruffini appeared in the most recent issue of EDUCAUSE Quarterly. Ruffini does an outstanding job covering the use of e-maps for online learning for both students and teachers. ____JH
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MIT OpenCourseWare Update, April 2008

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:15:20 GMT

The latest posting from MIT's OpenCourseWare about new and updated offerings shows an enticing variety of courses from Polymer Physics to Principles of Microeconomics to Forms of Western Narrative to Engineering of Nuclear Reactors. The newsletter also includes comments from teachers and students around the globe (World Impact). ___JH

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New and Updated Courses

> See all courses
> Subscribe to the RSS

Open Educational Resources and Practices

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:32:17 GMT

This article by Sandra Schaffert and Guntram Gesert appeared in the 2008 Feb. issue #7 of elearningpapers. The full article is available in pdf format. The authors provide an important perspective on what has been happening in the field and what needs to happen. I'm especially impressed by the wide range of stakeholders that they speak to in their formulations (from OER creators to learners). ____JH

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"Open Educational Resources (OER) can be an important element of policies that want to leverage education and lifelong learning for the knowledge society and economy. The urgency of the lifelong learning agenda in Europe and beyond makes OER initiatives targeted at driving participation particularly welcome. The OLCOS road mapping work was conducted to provide decision makers with an overview of current and likely future developments in OER and recommendations on how various challenges in OER can be addressed.

In particular, OLCOS emphasises that besides offering OER it is crucial to also promote innovation and change in educational practices. Because delivering OER to the still dominant model of teacher-centred knowledge transfer will have little effect on equipping teachers, students and workers with the competences and skills to participate successfully in the knowledge society and economy. Teachers should change their role from dispensers of knowledge to facilitators of open educational practices that foster learners’ own activities in developing competences and skills.

Today the digital environment offers many opportunities for a creative and collaborative engagement of learners with digital content, tools and services in the learning process ("elearning 2.0" instead of "click & learn"). One such opportunity is the collaborative creation, evaluation and sharing of open content and learning experiences. A new generation of easy-to-use Web-based tools and services, e.g. Wikis, Weblogs, platforms for content sharing, RSS-based content provision, makes this easier then ever before."

Zaidlearn's Collection of Free Learning Tools

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:50:58 GMT

Zaid Ali Alsagoff gives a visually exciting overview of free learning tools. Zaid, as usual, does a fine job collecting and describing sites and also includes collections from others. ___JH

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A Free Learning Tool for Every Learning Problem?

Let's explore the idea that there is at least one excellent free learning tool for every learning problem (or issue)!

I want a FREE:

Easy-to-use and secure Internet browser? Firefox
e-Mail system? Gmail
Social bookmarking tool? del.icio.us
Online RSS reader? Google Reader
Online Calendar? Google Calendar
Learning Management System (LMS)? Easy, Moodle
Hosted LMS? Here are SEVEN!
Learning Activity Management System? LAMS
Collaboration tool? Connect with Ning
Social Networking tool? Tricky one! Facebook
Content authoring tool? How about two? eXe & CourseLab
Screencasting (recording) tool? Wink
Hosted screencasting tool? Jing
Audio recording tool? Audacity
Tool to host my audio recordings? Odeo
Virtual Classroom? DimDim
Hosted Virtual Classroom? WiZiQ
Videoconferencing chat service? Vawkr
Tool to make calls from my computer? Skype
Online Quiz tool? ClassMarker
Online polling tool with a bit of fizzle? Polldaddy
Online survey tool? Click here to choose!
Tool to broadcast myself to the world? USTREAM
Online suite of office tools? Google Docs
Wiki tool? PBwiki
Blogging tool? WordPress! Why aren't you using WordPress? Good Question!
Microblogging tool? Twitter
Tool to share my slides? Too easy man! SlideShare
Tool to share my videos? Come on! YouTube
Tool to download videos from any video sharing site (YouTube, Metacafe, etc.)? ClipNabber
Tool to share my pictures? Are you joking! Flickr
Tool to create flowcharts, diagrams, technical drawings? Gliffy
Tool to create cool personalized images? Custom Sign Generator Widgets
Tool to create comics and cartoons? ToonDoo
Image Resizer? Dosize
Metasearch engine with visual display interfaces? What! Here is KartOO!
Watermarking tool? uMark
Screen Color Picker? ColorSchemer
Tool to make screenshots from different browsers with one click? Browsershots
File hosting solution that allows me to share files up to 250MB each? FileCrunch
Online visual dictionary and thesaurus? Visuwords
Mindmapping tool? FreeMind
Interactive 3D business simulator? INNOV8
Tool to create Flash games (templates)? ClassTools.net
Self-publishing tool (books, papers, articles, etc)? Scribd
Tool to improve my typing skills? Peter's Online Typing Course
Gaming tool to help me learn ICT? ReviseICT.co.uk
Tool to highlight text in a webpage? The Awesome Highlighter
Tool to aggregate all my resources, mail, RSS feeds, etc, in one place? iGoogle
Site to make you shut up? About time! Here we go:

25 (must-have free) Tools: Professional Development Programme (Jane Knight)

In short, for every learning problem (or issue) we have today, there is probably a free tool out there that enables us to solve it. If not, I am pretty sure some genius out there is constructing it right now. If no one is doing it, perhaps we can do it.

Another challenge is to integrate all our learning tools efficiently and effectively into our learning spaces. On the positive note, more and more tools are creating integration modules to widely used systems like Moodle and Facebook, so it might not be so difficult after all. Also, with OpenID we can increasingly login to all our favorite websites without much hassle. Single-login to all our learning tools! Now that is something we all can appreciate! Remember one password! Tough one!

Jill Bolte Taylor Reports on Her Own Stroke Experience

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:06:06 GMT

When a neuroanatomist reports on her own experiences during a stroke and her own stroke recovery efforts, then both professionals and other patients can gain insights. This report by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is of absorbing interest. (Patient support groups provide a valuable educational service on the Internet by providing emotional support and information exchanges. Some patient report sites are also starting to provide data of high quality. See the site PatientsLikeMe for some examples.) _____JH

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(Via Robin Good The Natural Psychedelic Experience: Right Brain Insight Can Really Change The World. "I have been aware of left and right emispheres brain intelligence since the late 70's, but nothing until now, has had an emotional and cognitive impact on me as big as this performance by Jill Bolte Taylor at the TED Conference this past February." )

Blackboard's Patent Rejected in Preliminary Review

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:23:11 GMT

This preliminary judgement by the U.S. Patent Office is very good news for all supporters of open source learning and teaching:

"On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard's claims. We caution that this is a NON-final action; both Blackboard and Desire2Learn will have an opportunity to comment before a final action will issue, and after that, the decision will be subject to appeals." ___JH

[Via Stephen's Web ~ OLDaily]

Wikiversity Course: Composing Free and Open Educational Resources

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:17:37 GMT

This Wikiversity course surveys many of the best known open educational resource sites and teaches participants how to develop their own OERs. Very useful. ___JH

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"The course readings and the assignments in this course will familiarize participants with the main concepts related to open education resources and to the historical and philosophical ideas behind them. The participants will also do their own projects where they will learn to create and participate in projects producing free and open educational resources."

Desire2Learn Interview

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:42:05 GMT

This Campus Technology interview with Desire2Learn's president and general counsel provides a useful perspective on Blackboard's patent infringement claims. ____JH

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"In a field in which intellectual property is contributed freely by so many, Blackboard's patent covering certain LMS technologies seemed to some to be out of place, and it was greeted with anger and distress by many in education and in the education development community."

"So we tried to talk about prior art that met the definition, the claim construction the court uses to define [elements of] the patent. And Blackboard fought against us by using words that weren't in the patent and weren't in the claim construction. They were almost creating smoke and mirrors around the actual, real heart of the matter. We were trying to define what's in the patent; they were trying to do everything they could to avoid using the words that were in the patent to make it abundantly difficult for a jury to, in my opinion, make the right decision."

"We have to--we have to--win here. Otherwise it puts all of our other competitors in jeopardy. If we lose, Blackboard's patent becomes stronger. Their stated intent [is] to go after others. That's why they were seeking the injunction ... to allow them to go after others and seek royalties or injunctions against them. And we don't want to let that happen."

OER: the Way Forward

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:14:25 GMT

This UNESCO planning document is now available as a Wiki page (a pdf version is also available and several translations are underway). The discussion of six priority issues facing OER development gives a useful summary of what has been done and what needs to be done. ____JH

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"Awareness raising and promotion and communities and networking, emerge as the main priorities for promoting the advancement of the OER movement. Third-ranked capacity development is essential to enabling creation and reuse of OER, while the fourth issue, sustainability, points to the importance of ensuring that OER initiatives find their way into existing and new approaches to extending flexible learning opportunities and knowledge sharing. The flagging of quality assurance raises a concern, one that reflects the broader issue of accessing information on the web. Without the control processes of the publishing industry and the selection process of the library or resource centre, users may be on their own in determining the quality of a resource. The very openness of access to OER means that the traditional structures of education systems which support and protect the learner may be absent.

The sixth issue, copyright and licensing, is of growing concern. Resources intended for release as OER, but which contain copyrighted material, pose a problem. Either copyright clearance must be obtained, or the material must be replaced or eliminated. Furthermore, the license assigned to educational resources determines the degree to which they may be openly and freely used. Alternate open licenses have been developed (such as those from Creative Commons), and their use is growing. Developers and users would benefit from guidance to help them better understand the implications of the license they select for their materials or that has been applied to the materials they wish to use."