Nouts Education News

236 Open Courseware and Information Collections

12.01.09

This varied listing of collection sites from the Online Education Database includes everything from Archives, to Broadcast Learning, to Directories, to EBooks, to Encyclopedias, to Open Courseware Collections at selected universities. The range of available resources for learning is impressive. Readers will surely find several sites of worth exploring and bookmarking. ____JH (Thanks to dgCommunities Elearning for this reference.)

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" If you're interested in specific open courses, you can find a variety on the Web (or through this list of 100 courses). Usually, those single courses will contain all the materials you need to learn one subject for free. But, if you're after more than a single focus or if you need a deeper perspective on a subject, this list of open courseware collections may be just what you need. Each resource listed below contains a collection or collections of educational materials. You'll find digital archives, a variety of courses, Podcasts, videos and sometimes a mix of everything you can imagine so you can learn any given subject in depth."

Web Science

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."

Translating the World's Information with Google Translator

22.08.09

This is an informative article from the Google Blog about using the Google Translator Toolkit. Of course translation services are vital components to facilitate the world-wide sharing of educational resources. ____JH
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At Google, we consider translation a key part of making information universally accessible to everyone around the world. While we think Google Translate, our automatic translation system, is pretty neat, sometimes machine translation could use a human touch. Yesterday, we launched Google Translator Toolkit, a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring that human touch to machine translation.

For example, if an Arabic-speaking reader wants to translate a Wikipedia™ article into Arabic, she loads the article into Translator Toolkit, corrects the automatic translation, and clicks publish. By using Translator Toolkit's bag of tools — translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and ratings, she translates and publishes the article faster and better into Arabic. The Translator Toolkit is integrated with Wikipedia, making it easy to publish translated articles. Best of all, our automatic translation system "learns" from her corrections, creating a virtuous cycle that can help translate content into 47 languages, or over 98% of the world's Internet population.


Besides Wikipedia, we've also integrated with Knol, and we support common document types including Word and HTML. For translation professionals, we provide advanced features such as terminology and translation memory management.

For more information, check out our introductory video below. And if you're a professional translator or just a linguaphile, try Google Translator Toolkit for easier and faster translations. Be sure and let us know what you think.


Posted by Michael Galvez and Sanjay Bhansali, Google Translator Toolkit team

MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition

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."

10 Most Annoying Airline Passengers, As Told By a Flight Attendant

08.07.09

Written by Brandi Lynn If I could have one superhero power it would be the ability to snap my fingers and get to any destination I could dream of. But I’m a mere mortal so I had to become a a wing-wearin’, heel-stomping, drink-slinging flight attendant. People like asking the same questions over and over. My worst [...]

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 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."