Nouts Education News

35 Seriously Creative Examples of Digital Artworks

08.06.10

Collected by WDCore Editorial Creativity has no boundary, no limit, and no measurement; it is basically the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. It involves critical thinking and then turning your imagination into reality. There are many artists who are well-versed with converting their dreams and imagination into paper, canvas, and computer screen; [...]

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

 

Sweetest Break-up Letter Ever

15.06.10

source

69 Learning Adventures

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:

• Learning
• Teaching
• Stories
• Free e-Learning Tools
• Free Learning Content
• Free EduGames

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

 

Health Sciences Online

12.01.09

HSO is an important new portal for health sciences information. Sponsors of the site include NATO, the World Bank, the US Centers for Disease Control, and the World Health Organization. ____JH

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"HSO is the first website to deliver authoritative, comprehensive, free, and ad-free health sciences knowledge. Search and browse any health sciences topic from over 50,000 courses, references, guidelines, and other learning resources. Materials are selected from accredited educational sources including universities, governments, and professional societies, by knowledgeable staff at HSO."

"HSO provides free, online linkages to a comprehensive collection of top-quality courses and references in medicine, public health, pharmacy, dentistry, nursing, basic sciences, and other health sciences disciplines. These materials are donated, hosted, and maintained by our distinguished content partners, so quality is maintained, and materials can be constantly updated. HSO is a sieve that includes world-class materials (currently numbering >50,000 resources), hand-selected by clinicians and other experts from already-existing reliable sources and resource collections. This includes medical specialty societies, accredited continuing education organizations, governments, and top-ranked universities such as Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Penn, and UCSF."

Paul Andrew's E-Learning Resources Guide

12.01.09

This is another useful compilation of e-learning resources, well-organized and thoughtfully selected. ____JH (Thanks to OL Daily for the citation.)

____

• Free
• Easy to use
• Produce high quality resources that can be used on any web enabled platform

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