Project PLN
Kelly Tenkely and Nicholas Provenzano, OpenZine, September 8, 2010.

Neat idea: "The goal of Project PLN is to provide a collection of posts on a specific topic that can easily be shared with educators all over the world. Kelly and I will select from submitted posts and compile them into a monthly issue." The project is being run using OpenZine, a service that "is a publishing platform with web browser based tools that provides an easy way for anyone to make their own magazine, for free." There's quite a bit of stuff there already. This launch is Take 2.

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Press release: Launch of Yoza m-Novel Library
Steve Vosloo, M4Lit Project, September 8, 2010.

After last week's post on e-Books in Africa Ignatia's Inge de Waard reminded me of a post she wrote profiling Steven Vosloo's project tackling literacy in South-Africa called Kontax. Kontax is part of a wider project intended "to get young people reading and writing, and in the 'book-poor' but 'cellphone-rich' context of South Africa." Here's the project blog. Vosloo has also written a guest column on UNESCO's Educational Technology Debate website (which was new to me).

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SCORM Harmonization
Various Authors, ADL, September 8, 2010.

Website for the new SCORM harmonization effort, which held its kick-off meeting yesterday. I attended, thoroughly in listening mode (I'm on some relevant bodies, including the Standards Council of Canada (ISO) and IEEE-LTSC) and preferring to let the others map out things like governance structures and proposals for core models. Most interesting to me was the consideration by the representatives of what will happen when major players like Google and Yahoo start working in the learning standards space - there's going to be a lot of change in a hurry over the next few years and it will be a challenge for these groups to stay relevant. It's worth going to the Google group and reviewing the posts from September 7, which offer a sketchy overview of the meeting. (The image below is from the ADL Run Time Environment (RTE) documentation provided to the meeting.)

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Open Graduate Course & Call For Network Mentors
Alec Couros, Open Thinking, September 8, 2010.

In the flurry of preparation for PLENK 2010 I would be remiss if I fail to mention Alec Couros's open graduate course, EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education. Couros notes, "While I see much of this as common-sense, I've had my critics and was once even labeled as a techno-communist. As an aside, here was my response in the form of my own attack-ad."

He writes, ", I am also proposing an advanced, non-credit participation mode in my Call for Network Mentors. Basically, I'm looking for knowledgeable and savvy volunteers who get to participate in the course sessions."

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