Stephen's Web

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
August 13, 2009

The Social Media I Use
Nancy White lists the social media she uses and what she uses them for. "I have accounts on scores of social media sites - more that are forgotten than are used. So I want to focus on the tools I use regularly, the tools that make a difference in my work." Nancy White, Full Circle Associates, August 13, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Composing free and open online educational resources
Online course at Wikiversity. It was offered in March, 2008. "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." It makes me wonder how I could set up a connectivist version of the course. How hard would it be? Various Authors, Wikiversity, August 13, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Traditional and Online Courses, Online Learning] [Comment]

FolkSemantic
This is an open educational resource recommender. There's also a website widget and a Firefox extension. The system basically provides access to NSDL resources, but also Johns Hopkins, MERLOT and MIT-OCW resources. Announced today: OER Recommender now has real-time analysis of OER resources related to other web pages (eg. Amazon). It's all free and open source, and the code is available here on github. Various Authors, Website, August 13, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Open Educational Resources, MERLOT, OpenCourseWare] [Comment]

A Couple More Thoughts on Library Openness...
Tony Hirst looks in more detail at the role of libraries (including academic libraries) in subverting open educational resources. "It may be that we don't want OERs to be discoverable through the library website, but then we need to ask exactly what sort of proposition the library website is offering?" OUseful Info, Tony Hirst, August 13, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Open Educational Resources, Academia, Culture Jamming] [Comment]

Skills Training a la Carte
Instead of offering full courses, a Michigan college "has cut up its offerings into more than 1,200 individual skills, or "modules," that students can take whenever they wish on a walk-in basis." This is a much more natiral delivery mode for the web, and so one I would expect to see emulated online. And here si where various 'compentency framework' organizations come into play (though I suspect that the dream of some master list of competencies will be elusive). David Moltz, Inside Higher Ed, August 13, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Amazing Stories of Openness
What happens when you share content freely and openly online? Good things, as Alan Levine demonstrates in this presentation. Levine asked people to contribute stories, and then he recorded videos of them telling these stories (including a good one from me). This link is to his presentation page, where you can browse through the stories using CoolIris. And this link is to the UStream recording of his presentation at Open Education. Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, August 13, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Video] [Comment]

Driver
From the announcement: "Boloka, the Research Repository of the North-West University in South Africa was exposed to the global research community today in the DRIVER Research Infrastructure. As the first African repository to go global, this achievement highlights the imminent launch of a new international repository organisation supported by DRIVER known as COAR - the Confederation of Open Access Repositories." COAR will be launched at the Open Access Week (October 19-23 in Ghent). Various Authors, Website, August 13, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Africa, Research, Learning Object Repositories] [Comment]

Open Education: Content and Community
Interesting set of reflections from Chris Lott, presented oddly (and a bit disturbingly) as though it were some sort of Athanasian Creed, on the relation between open content and community. "Community becomes increasingly important as one realizes that open education (if not most education) uses content but involves community." That said, there is not a one-to-one relation between courses and community. So what is the relationship? And can it be expressed as a set of observations rather than as a statement of faith? Chris Lott, Ruminate, August 13, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Open Content] [Comment]

Open Education: Content and Community
Interesting set of reflections from Chris Lott, presented oddly (and a bit disturbingly) as though it were some sort of Athanasian Creed, on the relation between open content and community. "Community becomes increasingly important as one realizes that open education (if not most education) uses content but involves community." That said, there is not a one-to-one relation between courses and community. So what is the relationship? And can it be expressed as a set of observations rather than as a statement of faith? Chris Lott, Ruminate, August 13, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Open Content] [Comment]

Peer2Peer University
Based on the feedback from a session at Open Education last year, organizers created and today launched a free and open peer-to-peer university. More details on the website. "The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses. Think of it as online book clubs for open educational resources." Various Authors, Website, August 13, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Books, Online Learning Communities] [Comment]

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