List.it--Free Software for To Do's and Electronic Postits

12.01.09

Here's a way to start the New Year. Get the free List.it software for keeping track of information, notes, ideas, resources. The software requires registration before the download link can be obtained, but that step is easily done. Registrants will also be invited to participate in research about how electronic notes are used. List.it also requires that the user have the latest Firefox browser. The developer is MIT professor David Karger with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. See the Jan. 5 Campus Technology article for more information about the project. ___JH

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"List.it, which focuses on minimizing the time and effort needed to capture information, was developed not by looking at how people organize information, but by analyzing what kind of information they keep and make lists of. The tool resides in a Firefox browser sidebar, which can be pulled up and put away through a customizable hot key. A 'quick input box' allows users to enter information on the fly. A synching feature ensures that notes will be backed up; if the user has List.it installed on multiple computers, notes will be mirrored to all of them."

LeMill Web Community

22.08.09

The LeMill Web Community site is available for sharing online learning resources. The site is viewable in nine languages; to orient to what is offered take the Tour and consult the FAQ. Thanks to the Development Gateway for information about this site. ___JH

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"LeMill is a web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources. First at all, you can find learning resources. You can use the resources you find in your own teaching or learning. You can also add your own learning content to LeMill. You may edit your content and combine larger chunks of learning resources from individual media pieces. If you wish you may also join some of the groups producing or editing learning resources. In LeMill the content is always easily found where and whenever you need them."

Many-Eyes.com Visualization Tool

12.01.09

I first read about Many Eyes in the business section of the Sunday 8/31/08 NY Times, where it was described by the Times writer Anne Eisenburg, "Lines and Bubbles and Bars, Oh My! New Ways to Sift Data." Eisenburg argues that Many Eyes does for users of data displays what YouTube does for videos and Flickr for photos: "Now they can share more technical types of displays: graphs, charts, and other visuals they create to help them analyze data buried in spreadsheets, tables, or text." Many Eyes was created by IBM scientists and developers to provide sophisticated visualization tools for data analyses and displays. The site should be of interest to students and to instructors, and to the general public. One of the most important contributions of the Web-- beyond quick communications and ready access to information, advice, and opinion-- is the access to sound, video, photo and other tools that were previously the province of specialists. (One caution--because Many Eyes is experimental the server is not always up, sometimes it is closed for development and updating.) ____JH

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About Many Eyes

SciTalks/HumTalks/GovTalks/BusiTalks

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

 

Free Digital Texts and Free Online Course Materials

12.01.09

It's important when the free digital textbooks and free online course materials are covered by the LA Times. The issues surrounding pricey textbooks and digital alternatives are compactly discussed in this news article. ___ JH (Thanks to the blog Free Culture News for this reference.)
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"Caltech economics professor R. Preston McAfee finds it annoying that students and faculty haven't looked harder for alternatives to the exorbitant prices. McAfee wrote a well-regarded open-source economics textbook and gave it away -- online. But although the text, released in 2007, has been adopted at several prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, it has yet to make a dent in the wider textbook market."
"McAfee is one of a band of would-be reformers who are trying to beat the high cost -- and, they say, the dumbing down -- of college textbooks by writing or promoting open-source, no-cost digital texts. Thus far, their quest has been largely quixotic, but that could be changing. Public colleges and universities in California this past year backed several initiatives to promote online course materials, and publishers and entrepreneurs are stepping up release of electronic textbooks, which typically sell at reduced prices."
"Open educational resources is an amorphous category for publishers, but basically it includes e-textbooks, courses, videos, taped lectures, tests, software and other materials released online free to the public without restriction on use."

15 Valentines Gifts Guaranteed to Get You Dumped

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 [...]

Graphical/Clustering Searches for LO/OER Information

22.08.09

Every now and then I like to do graphical searches related to Learning Objects and Open Educational Resources because I find that these searches sometimes yield different frameworks for understanding the information and sites that emerge than I get from my regular reading of rss feeds and blog entries. Recently I tried the new WikiMindMap and was pleased to see that the entry for "Learning Objects" is very good; the entry in Wikipedia for "Open Educational Resources" is a bit sparse, but not bad for starters. If you try "OER" alone as the search term you'll get not only Open Educational Resources but Oregon Electric Railway, Odaku Electric Railway, Offense Efficiency Rating, and Oxygen Efficiency Ratio.

Getting outside Wikipedia. I used my favorite graphical search engine, Kartoo. The Kartoo search for "Open Educational Searches" put the fairly new OER Commons right at the center of the display which I thought was accurate and timely.

A colleague, Dr. Russ Poulin from WCET, recently recommended the clustering search engine Clusty, so I tried it for both "Open Educational Resources" and "Learning Objects." Ten times as many results were returned for the second search term than for the first, indicating (I suppose) that Learning Objects have been discussed longer in the professional literature than Open Educational Resources. I liked the way Clusty ordered and outlined the results.

Finally, I did a search in Google for "Graphical Search Engines" and discovered a kind of meta search engine tool called, appropriately, the Graphical Search Engine Comparison Tool from SEO Tools. This handy tool permits the user to select two from among five popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Vista, and AlltheWeb) and then enter search terms for the two different search engines (e.g., Google and Yahoo) to compare their results. The resulting display shows which links are at the top, middle, and bottom of one search vs the other and what percentage of the sites overlap in the searches (in this example, 46% for "Learning Objects," 36% for "Open Educational Resources"). Using this tool will convince searchers how important it is to NOT rely on a single search engine. Highly recommended. ____JH

 

Annenberg Broadband Media Resources

22.08.09

The Annenberg Foundation has provided instructional media to schools, colleges, and to public television for many years. Some of the Annenberg Media productions are now freely available online. Registration is required. The Teacher Resources are organized by discipline and age group and are searchable with key words. Some examples include "A World of Art," "The Constitution,"  "Human Geography," "In Search of the Novel," and "Seasons of Life." Although the materials are directed at teachers for use as supplements to classes, they will also be useful for students and adult learners.____JH

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"Annenberg Media is a unit of The Annenberg Foundation. Our mission is to advance excellent teaching in all disciplines throughout American K-12 schools. Former names of Annenberg Media are: Annenberg/CPB, The Annenberg/CPB Project, and The Annenberg/CPB Math and Science Project.

We pursue this mission by funding and broadly distributing multimedia resources for teachers to help them improve their own teaching practice and understanding of their subject. Annenberg Media makes use of telecommunications technologies—the Internet, including broadband video streaming, and satellite television broadcast—as well as hard copy media to disseminate these multimedia resources, ensuring that they reach as many teachers as possible."

 

Open Education Search Project

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]

Open Education News

12.01.09

David Wiley announces the startup of Open Education News. This is another site to add to your list of rss feeds to monitor happenings in the field of open education. ___JH

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"The young field of open education is gaining momentum and energy. As additional projects, foundations, universities, and other participants join the movement, the need increases for a single source to gather, sort, analyze, synthesize, and disseminate news related to open education. As a field, open education is now where the field of open access was a few years ago. Peter Suber's wonderful Open Access News provides an invaluable service to the OA community, and we intend to replicate this service with Open Education News."

"Open Education News is essentially a group blog. A number of individuals from the US, South Africa, and eventually other locations daily monitor the internet for news related to open education. We then aggregate these items and publish them individually with minor commentary. Occasionally we'll publish bigger pieces of our own authorship; analyses and such. If you know of some open education news we should write about, contact David Wiley at david.wiley@gmail.com."

"Open Education News is graciously supported by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation."

Teachers' Domain

12.01.09

Teachers' Domain is a one-stop site for collected media resources from public television. Registration is required, but is free. The site is divided into Teachers' Domain for K-12 resources and Teachers' Domain College Edition for higher education resources. The materials in Teachers' Domain can be searched by keywords or browsed under broad subject areas. To switch from the K-12 to the College Edition click on the "Change Editions" link at the bottom the the search page. ___JH

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"Teachers' Domain is an online library of more than 1,000 free media resources from the best in public television. These classroom resources, featuring media from NOVA, Frontline, Design Squad, American Experience, and other public broadcasting and content partners are easy to use and correlate to state and national standards.

Teachers' Domain resources include video and audio segments, Flash interactives, images, documents, lesson plans for teachers, and student-oriented activities. Once you register, you can personalize the site using 'My Folders' and 'My Groups' to save your favorite resources into a folder and share them with your colleagues or students.

Teachers' Domain strives to strengthen teacher knowledge by providing innovative teaching methods that incorporate technology in the classroom and inspire students to learn."

Openness and the Future of Higher Education

15.01.10

This issue of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) contains a number worthwhile articles about the significance of open resources for academics. (Thanks to Russell Poulin of WCET for this link.) ___JH
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"We are pleased to present this very topical issue of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) on openness. Notions of open scholarship, open access publication, open educational resources, tuition-free institutions, and open source software continue to gain popular, research, and commercial interest. Thus, I was very pleased to receive an email 18 months ago from David Wiley offering to guest edit a special issue of IRRODL on openness.

He and his colleague John Hilton III coordinated a call for proposals and had over 25 responses. From these, 12 were selected for full paper development, and 8 survived peer review and appear as the contents of this issue. Brigette and I would like to thank David and John for their considerable efforts in very actively managing the editorial work involved. I am sure you will join me in congratulating David and John as well as the authors for contributing to this very important and timely special issue. Finally, links are provided to the archived recordings of 5 sessions presented by Athabasca University as part of our Open Access Week celebrations. Enjoy!
Terry Anderson, Editor, International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning"

Stanford Engineering Everywhere

12.01.09

Stanford is making core courses in computer programming and engineering available for free to non-registered students. This offering is a fine opportunity for self-guided students and for students and instructors in other institutions to share Stanford's intellectual resources. ___JH (Thanks to Free Culture News for this reference.)
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"For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online. A computer and an Internet connection is all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience.

Introduction to Computer Science | Programming Methodology

This course is the largest of the introductory programming courses and is one of the largest courses at Stanford. Topics focus on the introduction to the engineering of computer applications emphasizing modern software engineering principles: object-oriented design, decomposition, encapsulation, abstraction, and testing. Programming Methodology teaches the widely-used Java programming language along with good software engineering principles. Emphasis is on good programming style and the built-in facilities of the Java language. The course is explicitly designed to appeal to humanists and social scientists as well as hard-core techies. In fact, most Programming Methodology graduates end up majoring outside of the School of Engineering. Prerequisites: The course requires no previous background in programming, but does require considerable dedication and hard work.

List of Learning Object Repositories

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

You Tube Edu

22.08.09

This site address at You Tube provides links to video courses and lectures from large universities. It's a useful one-stop starting point.  __JH