Last week OEN reported on a post by David Wiley defining openness. Stephen Downes now has a post in response. From Downes’ post:

My perspective is that each of these, and large swaths of Wiley’s own position, represent efforts by corporations to own what we might call free and/or open content, and to make it not free.

Meena Hwang has a new post listing upcoming OCW webinars.

Eliminate the education divide, CURRIKI

Nightline with James Piecowye

Last week Curriki (one of the organizations my company works with) was awarded the Qatar Foundation WISE Award for innovation in education. As a result, Dr. Barbara Kurshan (Curriki Executive Director) and Peter Levy (Curriki Strategic Development) came to Qatar to accept the award (watch interview here).

After Qatar, Dr. Kurshan and I spent five days in Dubai chatting with ministries of education, universities, CEOs and teachers about our next initiative to create an Arabic language version of Curriki–i.e. a free and open source Arabic language curricula repository and online community. Our five days of meetings were VERY exciting as there is much enthusiasm in the region to support the use of English and Arabic open education content.

To learn more about Curriki, open education and the work Bon Education is doing to support the integration of education technologies into classrooms across the Middle East, I welcome you to listen to the Dubai Eye Nightline interview with host James Piecowye above. Curriki and Bon Education were also featured in a recent Khaleej Times article, “Improve Arabic Content on Net, Urge Experts“. Exciting times indeed!

Thanks for listening and reading!

Anna

CEO, Bon Education

@bon_education

Stian Haklev has posted a recording of his presentation on “innovative” OER projects. From the post:

…I decided to focus more on why these different projects were set up, what their purpose is, who runs them, and how they are sustained financially.

Note: YouTube is listed among the repositories, though it is only free, not open.

Jim Groom has a new post giving five reasons he dislikes iTunes U. From the post:

…ITunesU is not a place for community, context, or collaboration. What is interesting about the web is not that you can get something, but that you can participate and dialogue around something.

Jane Park has posted, on the blog “Opinions of Open,” a recap of a Peer-to-Peer University meeting in Berlin. From the post:

I think in the end that is the crux of P2PU, that it’s made up of and run by volunteers–people who are willing to risk their time and effort to realize a vision that may not be realizable.

Cathy Anderson has a new post giving her thoughts on OER. The post discusses social networking, OER reuse and other related issues. Note that some of the repositories listed in the post are free, but not necessarily permissively licensed. From the post:

I have often heard the statement made…there is no evidence or research that demonstrates that any institution uses OER for development of a course much less a program. There is also no research demonstrating whether or not individuals use OER to facilitate their informal learning and whether or not they have sought to have that learning validated. I have yet to delve into any research so am not certain whether or not these observation are credible or not.

Last week the New York Times ran an article on teachers selling educational resources online. Mike Linksvayer has pointed to response at The Huffington Post from the Board Chair of Creative Commons, Esther Wojcicki. From Wojcicki’s post:

Professor McDonald need not worry because most teachers tend to share lesson plans and resources freely within departments, within school districts and on teacher community sites. But they don’t sell them. At least in 25 years of teaching, I have never bought a lesson plan from another teacher and don’t know any colleagues who have.

“laurapasquini” has tweeted about a wiki page on mashing up OER. The wiki provides a workflow, list of tools and relevant URLs.

Wytze Koopal has tweeted about the launch of Free Technology Academy. The courses can viewed and taken freely, but teaching support will only be provided to enrolled students. From the announcement:

The Free Technology Academy opens its doors to students. The registration process for the first 2 courses has already started. The courses currently open are “The concepts of Free Software and Open Standards” and “The GNU/Linux Operating System”. These courses will start on January 25th, 2010.

“Michelle” has a new post recapping a recent talk by Martin Weller titled “OER and a Pedagogy of Abundance.” From the post:

Shared exploration and collaboration works well with the “guide on the side” metaphor, where you have subject expert mentors who help create “paths” through the sea of content, providing an intelligent information filter.

More from Martin Weller.

“Linda” has posted a list of the top 50 OpenCourseWare collections. The rankings are apparently not in order of quality, but to type and geographic location.

• Web 2.0 (You can find the notes there, just scroll down!)
• Digital Videography
• Comic Life
• Podcasting
• Blended Learning
• Web Presence
• Trivantis Lectora
• Managing your computer

Yep, he is a ‘Learning Gladiator‘ and I can’t wait to battle it out! It will be fun learning from another learning gladiator. Actually, I would have preferred going for the Comic Life workshop instead (if ever conducted here), because that would be more useful, as I am pretty familiar with the web 2.0 workshop curriculum. But, since I am invited, I am not going step down against another learning gladiator. It will be a true battle of learning, which only causes harm to the ignorant and ego-boasting male

P.S. Lance Larkin, just some fun! Hopefully, you take it that way, too

Wayne Mackintosh has announced, via mailing list, that WikiEducator and Connexions will be collaborating for greater interoperability. From the e-mail:

Gee — you gotta love open philanthropy! Let’s make OER remix and interoperability futures happen for education.

Thanks to Brian Lamb for the link.

Each month, Curriki tries to harness a little bit of your ideas to better understand the teaching landscape, and to help inform future development of the site. We appreciate your input and may publish select responses anonymously.

November’s Survey explores how you search for what, and why.

To find out more about finding and collecting resources on Curriki, check out the “Find” page.

Today I listened in on a graduate on-line course hosted by Alex Couros, from the University of Regina. The topic included mashups, Open Educational Resources..and much more. Here’s just one of the link that contains a plethoria of info that I will explore. One site at a time.

So I’ve decided to open up a personal blog. I’ve had a few for my classroom’s daily communications, lesson sharing source and even one for students to upload and post to. Why not give an opinion on something? After all, that’s what blogs are for, noh?

So today..I’ve joined Diigo and wordpress.com WordPress is easy to use and set up. The one annoying part is that the site creates both a message and a blog post for you, so you can edit and/or delete it to get content on the site right away. Well, it irritated me. :S

This is an awesome boost to my already curious pursuit of discovering and learning more about education, ICT and the combination of the two. That is all thanks to the recent ECOO (Educational Computing Organization of Ontario) conference held in Richmond Hill Nov. 11-13. Couros and Stephen Downes , known as Canada’s first blogger, were spotlight speakers at the conference. Amazing ideas and work was shared. I may have found some of my tribe during this event, as was pointed out to me by the conference organizer Brenda Sherry. Though I mention a few people, many interesting ideas and action was shared. Fantastic!

David Wiley has a new post attempting to define open. Wiley argues that openness is a continuum, not a binary concept. From the post:

A door can be wide open, completely shut, or open part way. So can a window. So can a faucet. So can your eyes. Our commonsense, every day experience teaches us that “open” is continuous. Anyone who will argue that “open” is a binary construct is forced to admit that a door cracked open one centimeter is just as open as a door standing wide open, because their conception of the term is overly simplified and has no nuance.

David Porter has posted a diagram done by Lisa Rogers showing an “agile” OER workflow. From Porter’s post:

While searching using “simple, easy, agile” and other adjectives to describe “OER workflow,” I finally got a hit that made sense.

Thanks to Stephen Downes for the link.

Andy Lane has published a new article in the recent issue of The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL). Lane reviews social, cultural and other factors that inhibit people from taking advantage of openness. From the abstract:

…while in principle there may be greater degrees of openness available in higher education it does not mean in practice that many people can still readily avail themselves of these new opportunities to learn, not just because they do not have access to digital technologies but personal circumstances mean they also lack the necessary skills and the confidence to use such technologies in general or for education in particular.

FOSSLC has posted video of Rory McGreal (Associate Vice President, Research at Athabasca University) speaking on the future of open educational resources.

The inaugural SLOHSIG meeting was held on the 5th October at CIPeL in the University of Coventry, and was successful, interesting and productive. There’s nothing to beat face-to-face meetings for getting things talked about and done

The meeting was ably managed and moderated by Elinor Clark, who wrote down the key discussion and action points on a flip chart towards the conclusion. Heather Wharrad took photos of these, which I’ve added to end of this blog entry for reference.

Aims & Objectives

The meeting agreed that the main purpose of the SIG is to move towards a ‘one-stop shop’ of e-learning resources for teachers, learners and practitioners in healthcare. That is, a single online point to which people can come to find resources, rather than having to go to multiple sources to search. This ‘one-stop shop’ should:

• have a simple, minimalist interface
• clearly identify resource types with icons (eg image, video, audio, presentation, e-learning material, etc)
• be simple and quick to use
• incorporate as many publicly-available healthcare e-learning resources as we can find
• incorporate resources developed locally but not yet publicly available

Fred Riley demonstrated one good (the excellent IRISS Learning Exchange) and one not so good (MERLOT advanced search) interface, and how tag clouds can be useful ways to search by keyword.

It was clear to all that behind such a simple ‘one-stop shop’ would be immense technical, administrative and political challenges, and that the project would need to progress in manageable steps to the eventual goal.

Practical outcomes and action points

Scoping exercise

In the short term, the meeting agreed to a ’scoping exercise’, to try to collect brief details of available resources in healthcare which could be incorporated into a one-stop shop. The recent blog post entitled “Unsung/undiscovered healthcare e-learning resources” is a start to this scoping exercise, and all SIG members are strongly encourage to add resources which they know of and which fit the criteria in the post, either by editing the post directly or adding comments. Resources to be collated include:

• existing repositories of e-learning resources
• existing websites with e-learning resources
• professional bodies
• individuals involved in e-learning

Funding

Because of the immense challenges involved in the ‘one-stop shop’ objective, it was felt that significant staff time and funding would be needed to carry the project forward. With Open Educational Resources (OER) and sharing being hot topics these days, we felt that there could well be funding calls from bodies such as JISC in the near future which SLOHSIG could bid for, and members agreed to keep a close eye out for such calls, and to seek out other sources of funding.

Workshops

Plans were provisionally laid for two workshops on sharing resources in healthcare. These would be very non-technical workshops aimed squarely at teachers and practitioners who may not even have heard of the term e-learning, let alone used any e-learning materials. The meeting felt that there was a large number of colleagues out there who have a lot to contribute but who know nothing, and/or are plain scared, of e-learning, and a strong effort should be made to ‘draw them into the fold’ as users and contributors. Maria Parks provisionally volunteered to run one workshop at York, Richard Windle the other at Nottingham. Dates and detailed venues are to follow.

Jorum Community Bay

SLOHSIG should set up a ‘presence’ on the Jorum Community Bay.

Next SIG meeting

We provisionally set a date for the next SIG meeting, at the OER10 conference to be held at Clare College, Cambridge University, March 22-24 2010. The SLOHSIG raisons d’etre dovetail closely with the aims of the OER movement, and many SIG members will be attending OER10, so we felt that it would be highly appropriate to meet there and try to attract interest from conference delegates.

Flipchart notes

Meeting attendees

In alphabetical order of surname, institution in parentheses:

• Elinor Clark (CIPeL, University of Coventry)
• Sarah Darley (Manchester University)
• Neil Hosker (University of Chester)
• Kate Lomax (NHS repository)
• Maria Parks (York St Johns)
• Fred Riley (University of Nottingham)
• Nicola Siminson (JORUM)
• Heather Wharrad (University of Nottingham)
• Jackie Wickham (Intute)
• Laurian Williamson (Intute)
• Richard Windle (University of Nottingham)

Karen Fasimpaur has a new blog post on a recent move in Texas towards open textbooks in Texas. Fasimpaur rebuts criticism that open textbooks will do nothing for those in poverty. From the article:

Will textbooks that are written in a way that is neither engaging nor even accessible, especially to children of poverty, help this situation? I think not. Engaging technology is certainly not the only answer, but it is one answer.

Roger Schmitz has tweeted about a presentation given by Richard Baraniuk at OWD 2009. Video is available. The conference took place Nov. 10-11.