22.01.10
Written by Marium A wedding is an auspicious event that not only celebrates a union of two people, but joins two families together as well. On this happy occasion, a wrong comment, even if its said as a joke, can have a lasting impact on the whole marriage, turning it into an eternal tiff rather than [...]
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22.08.09
The American Council for Education maintains a useful set of pages for academics who work with adult learners. Included at the ACE site is information about Military Evaluation Programs, Government Relations, and Public Policy. (Of course not very many years ago, most students involved in distance education were included in the "adult learner" category, but today distance education is appealing to more and more younger students.) ___JH
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"For more than 60 years, ACE has helped adults gain access to a postsecondary education. We invite you to find out more about our programs and services."
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08.04.10
Written by John Eleven years ago Dave Devries started the Monster Engine project with one single question: What would a child’s drawing look like if it were painted realistically? This month, Dave’s art is being celebrated at the INDYINK gallery where dozens of artists are putting their own takes on children’s sketches. Look for those photos [...]
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12.01.09
This site provides a free course management system for students and teachers. The courses can be made private or public. LectureShare is very accessible with easy registration steps and easy-to-use course features which include a Gradebook, Announcements, and Lecture Uploading. Use the Available Courses section to search or browse the courses. Consult the recent review of LectureShare in THE Journal. ____JH
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"LectureShare lets instructors post lecture notes to their students, or the world, quickly and easily. Simply create an account, create your course, and in only minutes you can be posting announcements, documents, and media that your students can easily access. There's no frustrating software to learn and no course web page to maintain. We feel instructors time is best spent with students, not struggling with problematic course management software or maintaining their own webpage. We hope to bring a new level of simplicity and flexibility to the course management idea. We currently allow students to aggregate multiple courses under one account and take advantage of course notifications by e-mail, SMS text message, or RSS feed. This is only the beginning and we hope to develop many more features."
12.01.09
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."
22.08.09
These four sites collect video lectures on scientific, humanities, government, and business topics by prominent thinkers. I've sampled a number of the talks and found them to be extremely valuable. These sites could be very useful to instructors who want to supply supplementary materials for their courses. _____JH
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12.01.09
The OER Handbook is an excellent resource and will undoubtedly continue to be revised and updated beyond this version one. Coverage includes everything from Finding and Adapting resources to Composing, Sharing, and Licensing resources. ____JH
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"Welcome to the world of Open Educational Resources (OER). This handbook is designed to help educators find, use, develop and share OER to enhance their effectiveness online and in the classroom.
Although no prior knowledge of OER[1] is required, some experience using a computer and browsing the Internet will be helpful. For example, it is preferable that you have experience using a word processor (e.g. Open Office[2] or Microsoft Word) and basic media production software, such as an image editor (e.g. Gimp[3], Inkscape[4] or Photoshop).
The handbook works best when there is some sort of OER you would like to create or make available to others, but it is also useful for the curious reader."
Us³ugi zwi±zane z szeroko rozumian± reklam± w internecie pozycjonowanie , tworzenie stron www, tworzenie sklepów, indentyfikacja wizualna.
12.01.09
P2P University has received favorable coverage by a number of bloggers (including ZaidLearn and Stephen's Web). I just want to add my endorsement of this promising direction of development. ___JH
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"The Peer 2 Peer University is an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses. Think of it as online book clubs for open educational resources. The P2PU helps you navigate the wealth of open education materials that are out there, creates small groups of motivated learners, and supports the design and facilitation of courses. Students and tutors get recognition for their work, and we are building pathways to formal credit as well.Find out more about what P2PU courses look like, and consider creating your own. If you just want to stay informed, please add your name to our mailing list, and we will send you a message when we launch."
22.08.09
This is a useful list of the major learning object repositories, divided into general and discipline-specific listings. The web pages are hosted by the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee at the Center for International Education. ____JH
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08.02.10
Written by forkparty Love is in the air whether you like it or not. Around this time of year, girls tend to get all hot and bothered by the prospect of Valentine’s Day even though it isn’t even a real holiday. I don’t know why but women can’t seem to understand that Valentine’s Day is a [...]
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22.08.09
The O'Reilly Radar blog reports that ccLearn, Google, and the Hewlett Foundation are working together to build a search portal focused on open educational resources. Everyone interested in the OER field will certainly be following this new OE Search project closely. ____JH
"ccLearn is working with the Hewlett Foundation and Google to build an 'open education web-scale search,' part of a larger effort to offer web users simple, overarching mechanisms for discovering OERs. This tool aims to direct search engine traffic to the incredible diversity of OER repositories and communities. While such a tool would not replace the more specialized and sophisticated search sites and portals that the community already uses, we believe it would expose a much wider public to our community’s materials. This is also an opportunity to encourage OER adoption and specify legal and technical conditions for making educational resources openly available. We see this project as an important step for achieving large-scale access to and use of open educational resources. "
Open Education Search [del.icio.us/tag/oer]
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22.03.10
Written by Adam Pawlus Since 1977, George Lucas licensed companies like Del-Rey, Marvel, Dark Horse, and Bantam Publishing to sell you paper with the words “Star Wars somewhere on the cover. He’s also allowed several companies to make videogames with “Star Wars on the title screen, and then created LucasArts to churn them out more efficiently. [...]
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22.08.09
Since my own EduResources Portal closed in July 2007, I've been looking for other useful portal entry points to recommend to students and instructors who are searching for educational resources. I highly recommend the OER Commons as a valuable first stop. The Commons is extremely broad in scope, but so well organized that new users can orient to its resources quickly.
The OER materials can be browsed by categories or collections; resources are also searchable with key words. Additionally, the entry page displays the OER Top Ten and the Top 25 Tags for a quick scan of what other users are viewing. Visitors who register can set up their own OER Portfolio and also sign up to receive an E-News newsletter.
The "OER Matters" section provides links to News Stories, Articles and Reports, Conferences and Workshops, Discussion Forums, Organizations and Associations, Tools and Technology, and Blogs and Wikis. The Commons was created by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) which is supported by the Hewlett Foundation. OER professionals will want to mark the OER Commons in their bookmarks and visit the site regularly (an rss feed is also available). _____JH
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"OER Commons is a teaching and learning network, from K-12 lesson plans to college courseware, from algebra to zoology, open to everyone to use and add to."
"Learn more about the worldwide movement to make teaching and learning materials free and accessible for use and re-use by everyone."
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22.08.09
This interesting transcript of an e-mail interview features Scott McLemee, a regular contributor to Inside Higher Ed, with a programmer, Aaron Swartz, who works on The Open Library Project. The short interview effectively captures the scope and vision of the project. ____JH
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Here's a sample:
"Q: How is Open Library funded? Are you working on it full time? And how many people are involved in the project?
A: It’s currently being funded by the Internet Archive, with the help of some state and federal library grants. We have some volunteers, but also about 5 people working full-time (a couple programmers, a designer, and a product manager)."
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12.01.09
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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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.
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.