Nouts Education News

ACE Resources for Lifelong Learning Professionals

22.08.09

The American Council for Education maintains a useful set of pages for academics who work with adult learners. Included at the ACE site is information about Military Evaluation Programs, Government Relations, and Public Policy. (Of course not very many years ago, most students involved in distance education were included in the "adult learner" category, but today distance education is appealing to more and more younger students.)  ___JH

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"For more than 60 years, ACE has helped adults gain access to a postsecondary education. We invite you to find out more about our programs and services."

DiscoverEd

15.01.10

This Creative Commons site provides a starting point to search for open educational resources. Search results are given a brief description and identified by Curator, Education Level, Language, License, and Subject Tags. ___JH

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DiscoverEd is an experimental project from ccLearn which attempts to provide scalable search and discovery for educational resources on the web. Metadata, including the license and subject information available, are exposed in the result set. We are particularly interested in open educational resources (OER) and are collaborating with other OER projects to improve search and discovery capabilities for OER, using DiscoverEd and other available tools. Contact us if you are interested in this work.

DiscoverEd is a prototype intended to explore how structured data may be used to enhance the search experience; there are a number of known issues.

Read our white paper that describes the rationale for and design of DiscoverEd, as well as our thoughts regarding possible future enhancements that could make the tool, or other search tools like it, even more compelling.

DiscoverEd is also being discussed among participants of the OER search and discovery community. You can also find slides on Slideshare about DiscoverEd. If you are aware of any related resources, please post them to the OpenEd community site, and we will cross-post them to this FAQ as we can."

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

Web-Based Mind Mapping

12.01.09

Robin Good writes enthusiastically about the benefits of web-based mind-mapping, with a special focus on MindMeister (which is free in its basic version). Robin also includes links to other mind-mapping tools. The mind maps that I create are most often done with a pencil and a yellow pad, but there are advantages in using a shareable, web-based tool such as MindMeister. From a very, very broad perspective all online educational resources can be viewed as variations of a mind or topic map. _____JH

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"Web-Based Mind-Mapping: Outline, Plan and Brainstorm Ideas Together With MindMeister. If you are looking to find an effective way to collaborate, brainstorm, visualize and plan ideas collaboratively online, much beyond what voice and text chat can do, it is the time you give a good try to the mind-mapping experience.
 
Thanks to unforgettable MasterNewMedia editor Antonella Pastore, who first covered mindmaps in 2004 (!), mindmaps have been on my radar for quite some time, but with the recent advent of online, collaboratively editable mindmaps the opportunities to reap significant benefit from these tools has just exploded.

The great thing about collaborative, web-based mind-maps is the ease with which you can visualize spatially while giving very precise text labels to ideas, tasks, projects and to the relationships between them. These two characteristics by themselves when mixed with ability to watch and edit in real-time the same visual map with others creates a truly effective, useful and memorable way of collaborating productively at a distance."