November 20, 2012
OpenAIRE
Various Authors,
Website, November 20, 2012.
As Stevan Harnad writes, via email, "OpenAIRE is a central harvester of peer-reviewed research from European institutional repositories (IRs)." (See also) Its objectivesare:
- build support structures for researchers in depositing research publications
- establish and operate an electronic infrastructure for handling peer-reviewed articles
- explore the requirements, practices, incentives, workflows, data models, and technologies to deposit, access, and otherwise manipulate research datasets
As Harnad writes, "Deposit institutionally (once only) and harvest centrally (to as manyfunder-based or subject-based repositories as desired)." This, too, should be the model for educational resources.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Project Based Learning, Research, European Union, Learning Object Repositories, Academic Publications]
ISCED: International Standard Classification of Education
Unattributed,
UNESCO, November 20, 2012.
One topic of discussion around the distribution of open educational resources (OERs) is how people can find materials for a specific subject area. In this listing, "UNESCO developed the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) to facilitate comparisons of education statistics and indicators across countries on the basis of uniform and internationally agreed definitions." It's not the only candidate. There is also the British "Joint Academic Coding System" (JACS).
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Open Educational Resources, Great Britain, UNESCO]
Brewster Kahle on “Universal Access to All Knowledge”
Hans de Zwart,
Technology, Innovation, Education, November 16, 2012.
Good brief ovrview of a presentation by Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. Hans de Zwart writes, "They are convinced that it is feasible to store all the world’s knowledge." And they have been doing an admirable job of it, scanning 3 million books (and making them available for free online) as well as web pages, audio and video archives, and more (I look forward to being able to contribute all my text, audio and video to the archive one day, and they are of course free to take whatever they want now). They have already stored massive amounts of data - 10 petabytes - and have learned some interesting things about how to deal with that.
10 Highly Selective Colleges Form Consortium to Offer Online Courses
Alisha Azevedo,
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 16, 2012.
I giggled when I read this. "A group of 10 highly selective colleges has formed a consortium to offer online courses that students enrolled at any of the campuses can take for credit." It is, of course, how you create MOOCs if you're an elitist ivory tower - you open up your courses, but only to each other. Oh, and you don't make them massive. "The software from 2U will give universities a platform for small online undergraduate courses capped at 20 students each." And, of course, it allows students to travel around the world while earning credit from their highly selective school. There's no word yet on whether Club Med membership is included with tuition.
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Schools, Traditional and Online Courses, Membership, Online Learning, Tuition and Student Fees]
SciStarter
Various Authors,
SciStarter, November 16, 2012.
Vicky Davis links to this site, described as "a fantastic website to find citizen science projects." I really like the concept and execution. The idea is that scientists contribute project ideas, when are then distributed to science teachers in blog or email format. Projects include things like EyeWire (participants "reconstruct the tree-like shapes of the neurons in the retina [to] help the computer develop 3-D reconstructions of the neurons"), WaterIsotopes ("a call for assistance in collecting samples of precipitation (both rain and snow) associated with the passage" of Hurricane Sandy), and Citizen Weather Watcher Observer Program, which I actually described (without knowing it actually existed) during my talk yesterday. What's key about these projects is that they are connective and immersive - they don't try to teach people content, rather, they engage them in real scientific communities.
Innovating Pedagogy 2012
Yashay Mor,
Designed for learning, November 16, 2012.
Yishay Mor writes about the Open University's "series of reports [that] explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation." He links to The first report, which "proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education." The posts themselves are very short; the meat is in the comments, so don't skip them.
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