OER

Today I listened to a conference presentation given by David Wiley:

http://opencontent.org/presentations/bcnet07/

A long time ago when I first started thinking about learning object repositories I used David Wiley's definition of learning objects. I was very enthusiastic about the whole concept of repositories. CCCOnline folks spent a lot of time researching software and looking at how to build repositories. Unfortunately that whole process has stalled over the years.

Why?

Because it's too complex. Today we have a repository of sorts, but we only have one or two people who can actually put objects into the repository and no one appears to be able to get them out again.

H'mmmm

In the Wiley presentation he talks about meta-tags versus folksonomies -- the tagging of the last few posts in this blog.

Certainly the idea of tagging does help solve the complexity issue of repositories. For example, for this post I wanted a picture of David Wiley. I went to Flickr and searched for one. And for what it's worth there are many to choose from. Tagging and an LOR in action. :^) The one above was taken by D'Arcy Norman and can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnorman/1451331578/ .

Reuse versus Adaptation

I think I am building up to an anti-copyright rant again. Learning Objects aren't overly usable unless they are obviously open. This is also something noted in the presentation above. Whenever I get some cool object that requires a contract to use I drop it like a hot potato. Getting a contract signed in my educational system is a lot like praying for rain. It might take months and I really have no control over the process.

Step two is that I have to be able to adapt the object. To use the presentation analogy -- I typically don't want to just string a bunch of objects together and call them a class, I want to change them first. This is of course much more complex than that - there are some technical skills involved, but at the least I want to know that I can change the object. :^)

Lisa

Educational Rap

My teenagers even thought this was pretty good rap.

http://www.educationalrap.com/music/index.html

Lisa

List of Open Content Resources

This list came from one Rhonda Epper of CCCOnline is compiling:


Open Content Resources:
MERLOT: http://www.merlot.org
Hewlett Foundation OER initiatives: http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/OER/openEdResources.htm
MIT OpenCourseWare: http://ocw.mit.edu
Carnegie Mellon: http://www.cmu.edu/oli/
Harvard University Library Open Collections Program: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/
Rice University Connexions: http://cnx.rice.edu/
Morgue File - public images: http://www.morguefile.com/
Wikipedia.org: http://www.wikipedia.org
Wikibooks.org http://www.wikibooks.org
National Repository for Online Courses: http://www.nrocnetwork.org
CCCOnline's Custom Hippocampus: http://www.hippocampus.org/myHippo/?user=myccco
Internet Archive's "Moving Images" collection: http://www.archive.org/details/movies
Prelinger Archives: http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger
Free videos produced by various PBS stations around the country: http://www.learner.org/resources/

From Jesse Stommel and Sean Law's Open Content ENG 121 course:
Etext library: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/s/shelley/mary/s53f/
Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/
Full etext with MP3 files: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=6542
Brevity - An online magazine of creative non-fiction: www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/index.htm
Plagiarism Article Database: http://www.web-miner.com/plagiarism
Hpyerdictionary: http://www.hyperdictionary.com
Wikibook on Rhetoric and Composition: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Rhetoric_and_Composition
The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing: http://nutsandbolts.washcoll.edu

Lisa

National Conference Season

The MITE Team is on the road, traveling the country to participate in a growing number of conferences about education, technology and online learning. National conferences tend to bunch up in the fall, but we also present, conduct workshops and organize round tables throughout the year at smaller, focused, regional conferences. We especially enjoy hooking up with NROC members to share tales and ideas.

Each year there are a few consistently popular topics that pop up across most, if not all, of the conferences. As one would expect, these themes show up when they are somewhere between the second stage of innovation and becoming mainstream. Conferences are one of best venues for spreading innovation beyond pioneers. When a conference room is packed with faculty and staff learning about educational applications of games, virtual reality environments, podcasts and web. 2.0 tools, you can expect to see the tools turning up in classrooms and online programs in non-tech subjects at a campus near you.

This year we continue to see standing-room-only sessions around tools that allow instructors and students to co-create immersive and interactive learning. Techie-pioneers were presenting earlier versions of such tools in previous years; now practitioner-pioneers share their reflections on the realities of using the tools to teach. Educators who advocate for more constructivist learning methods should be delighted at the abundance of these types of tools coming into mainstream use.

It's very encouraging to see an increase in sessions on two important non-tech subjects, which we at MITE have been pushing for a few years: sustainable models for open education resource (OER) projects, and inter-institutional collaboratives for developing and sharing digital content. We'll share some new ideas and highlights as we hear them out there.

What other topics are hot this year? We'll report back from the conference circuit, and welcome your comments.