12.01.09
This article in the Online Newsletter of the Association for Learning Technology reports on the initiative to establish a new concentration of science and scholarship focused on how the Web functions and how to improve Web operations. ___JH (Thanks to TL Infobits for this reference.)
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"To promote Web Science and explore its emerging agenda, a joint endeavour between the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, was set up in 2006, called the Web Science Research Initiative (webscience.org). WSRI’s mission is to foster the fundamental advances required for the Web’s continued growth. In particular, WSRI is focusing on steering the development of the Web Science discipline, running a series of workshops and looking at the lines of an academic curriculum for teaching Web Science. There will be an International Web Science Conference held in Athens, Greece, in 2009 – hopefully the first of many – as well as a new journal Foundations and Trends in Web Science."
"Web Science is not just modelling the current Web. It is about engineering new infrastructure protocols by using scientific and technological tools from many disciplines to understand the human society that uses them, to create beneficial new systems – which may involve extremely radical thinking about both technology and society (Shneiderman 2007). Such new engineering must respect the invariants of the Web experience: decentralisation to avoid bottlenecks and allow increases of scale; serendipitous reuse of information; fairness, openness and trust. In this way, the Web will remain a technology that enhances human society, and supports human aspiration."
22.08.09
Should be interesting to see what emerges from this new funding direction by the MacArthur Foundation. ____JH
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"Awards will be made in the two categories of Innovation and Knowledge-Networking. Innovation Awards ($100,000 and $250,000) will support learning pioneers, entrepreneurs, and builders of new digital learning environments for formal and informal learning. Knowledge-Networking Awards ($30,000 base award, to a total of $75,000 if budget warrants) will support communicators in connecting, mobilizing, circulating, or translating new ideas around digital media and learning. Entries to the Competition are due October 15, 2007.
Details and application requirements can be found at www.dmlcompetition.net. If you have comments or questions about the Competition that you would like to share publicly, we would love to hear from you via this Spotlight Blog."
29.01.10
Collected by theweek Well before yesterday’s grand unveiling of Apple’s long-awaited tablet computer, rabid fans began filming their own mock ‘commercials.’ Steve Jobs is rehearsing his pitch in the mirror. Bloggers are already at their keyboards. Today, after years of speculation, Apple will unveil its new tablet device, unofficially nicknamed the [...]
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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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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.
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."
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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