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."
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29.03.10
Written by John D. Sutter For the world to tackle truly important problems, people have to stop looking to religion to guide their moral compasses, the philosopher Sam Harris told CNN. “We should be talking about real problems, like nuclear proliferation and genocide and poverty and the crisis in education, Harris said in a recent interview at [...]
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12.01.09
Grainne Conole of OpenLearn presents a view of how Web 2.0 technologies can influence pedagogical approaches. The models and ideas in Conole's presentation are worth considering by learning design professionals whose task is to facilitate the construction of online courses. (The video from the Eduserve Foundation Symposium 2008 was cited by iThinkEd.)____JH
22.08.09
In this interview in eLearn Magazine Tom Carey answers questions about MERLOT. In addition to his professorship at the University of Waterloo, Prof. Carey also acts as chief learning officer for MERLOT. Among other topics, Carey explains how MERLOT relates to other open education repositories and gateways. ____JH (Via the Development Gateway dgAlert.)
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"Instructors in higher education get e-learning support from two distinct sources: their own institutions, through colleagues and faculty teaching centers, and their disciplines, through subject area experts and scholarly associations. Tom Carey, professor of management sciences at the University of Waterloo and chief learning officer of MERLOT, explains how the MERLOT consortium is finding the sweet spot where those two processes come together."
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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.
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
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22.08.09
I only dabble in software programming occasionally (usually in Python), but I do pay attention to what programmers are doing because I believe the skill of programming is one of the most important achievements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Without programmers our handsome hardware computers would merely be pieces of furniture.
This item is from Jon Udell's blog and reports on a collection of essays compiled by Greg Wilson and Andy Oram, Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think: "The idea is to get a bunch of well-known and not-yet-well-known programmers to select medium-sized pieces of code (100-200 lines) that they think are particularly elegant, and spend 2500 words or so explaining why."
I believe Udell's book comments on sharing expertise, through Internet video and screencasting, are important beyond the field of programming. The influence of expert minds on one another and the potential influence of expert minds on student minds in formation are highly valuable features of our information age. ____JH
[Via Bruce Landon's Weblog for Students]
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"The 600-page tome arrived recently, and as I’ve been reading it I’m struck once again by the theme of narrating the work. Of the chapters I’ve read so far, three are especially vivid examples of that: Karl Fogel’s exegesis of the stream-oriented interface used in Subversion to convey changes across the network, Alberto Savoia’s meditation on the process of software testing, and Lincoln Stein’s sketches (”code stories”) that he writes for himself as he develops a new bioinformatics module.
Although this is a book by programmers and for programmers, the method of narrating the work process is, in principle, much more widely applicable. In practice, it’s something that’s especially easy and natural for programmers to do.
It’s easy because a programmer’s work product — in intermediate and final form — happens to be lines of text that can be printed in a book or published online.
It’s natural because programmers have been embedded for longer than most other professionals in a work process that’s fundamentally enabled by electronic publishing. We’ve been sharing code, and conversations about code, online for decades.
Most work processes don’t lend themselves to the sort of direct capture and literal representation that you see in Beautiful Code. Not yet, anyway. I think that can and will change, though, and I think two emerging forms of media will be powerful agents of change.
One of those forms is Internet video, which enables the capture and sharing of many kinds of physical-world expertise. The other is screencasting, which does the same for virtual-world expertise. Narration of work in these forms won’t be able to be printed in a book. But it will be just as valuable as the narration in Beautiful Code, and for the same reasons. Access to expert minds is just inherently valuable. We’re entering an era in which we’ll be able to access many more — and many different kinds of — expert minds. I’m looking forward to it. Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the access I have now to the 38 minds that Greg and Andy have collected for this book."
Usługi zwi±zane z szeroko rozumian± reklam± w internecie pozycjonowanie , tworzenie stron www, tworzenie sklepów, indentyfikacja wizualna.
08.10.10
Written by joePA The success of “The Social Network at the box office this past weekend has many mid-20-somethings nostalgically reminiscing back to the days of “The Facebook (circa 2004), long before the advent of so-called “privacy settings. It was a carefree time when users needed a .edu e-mail address from a select network of [...]
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12.01.09
Tony Bates' listing of OER sites adds yet another useful selection to an ever-growing collection of annotated listings. ____JH
"Whatever happened to learning objects? Well, they've been replaced (or rather swallowed up) by open educational resources. Increasingly, more and more institutions are making online educational resources and course materials available free of charge for educational or non-profit purposes. So will content be free in education in the future? I think this deserves a blog entry to itself! (to come). In the meantime, I list here web sites that provide access to free material."
12.01.09
Zaid Ali Alsagoff has organized and edited 69 postings from his weblog Zaidlearn at the ePublishing site Scribd. Zaid's eBook provides many links and many valuable perspectives on the worlds of learning that are available on the Web. ____JH
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After a lot of filtering, I have settled for 69 learning nuggets posted on ZaidLearn, which I believe readers might find useful to their own learning. To make it a bit more convenient to find what you are looking for, I have divided the book into six learning galaxies (or themes), which are:
22.08.09
Inside Higher Ed reports on Blackboard's latest loss, which is good news for universities and colleges who use open source software because we can be sure that despite their disclaimers, Blackboard would certainly move against open source courseware if they succeed against Desire2Learn and other private companies. Blackboard's loss is also an affirmation of common sense since anyone with long-time experience in course management software knew that Blackboard's patent claims were simply assertions, not valid original contributions to courseware delivery methods. ____JH
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"Both companies appealed the parts of the case they'd lost to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has nationwide jurisdiction over U.S. patent claims. Its highly technical decision upheld the lower court's conclusion that Blackboard's claims 1-35 were invalid. But the three-judge panel rejected the lower court's finding that Blackboard's patented learning system had originated the approach of giving a single user with a single log-in multiple roles, such as being a teacher in one course and a student in another."
"The appeals panel embraced Desire2Learn's argument that such technology existed in 'prior art,' in this case previously existing course management systems such as Serf and CourseInfo 1.5. The appeals court essentially ruled that the lower court judge had framed Blackboard's claim incorrectly for the jury, said Bruce T. Wieder, a lawyer for the Washington firm of Dow Lohnes who was not involved in the case. Having done so, the Federal Circuit court "could have said, 'This is how you should have interpreted it, you go look at it again,' " Wieder said. "But instead, the court said, 'Since we've seen what was argued, we now can say that the district court wouldn't have come to any conclusion,' and declared those claims invalid."
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."
01.11.09
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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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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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