Web Sites of the Week w/e 28th May 2010 May 27, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentThis week the range of sites includes a repository implementation paper; a call for OER papers; an evaluation framework; a preconference workshop; a non-profit volunteer group; an MIT OCW and a slideshare presentation.
- Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educationa Resources: This paper describes and analyses the motivations of Edshare and Language Boxprojects, the design decisions they took in implementing their repositories, the approaches they took to change agency and practice within their communities, and the changes in practice that have so far been observed.
- iBerry : Is run by an independent, not-for-profit group of volunteers. They provide information and resources for learners, educators, researchers and anyone else with an interest in adult education and also an Open Courseware Directory.
- JALN Call for Papers for Special Issue on Open Educational Resources: June 15 2010: The Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks invites submission of papers for a special issue focusing on Open Educational Resources (OERs). OERs are learning materials that are made publicly available for free to be used, modified, and redistributed in original or modified form.
- OER Why They Matter: Slideshare presentation by Karen Barton, Patricia McKeller and Paul Maharg from Simshare
- From CORRE to OER: a framwork for evaluating learning materials : A workflow framework that shows the process of turning our learning material into publicly usable OERs from the University of Leicester
- Pre-conference workshop engaging with open content: a framework for the novice Wednesday 2 June Solstice Edge Hill
- MIT OCW Designing Mobile Technologies for the Next Billion Users: over 100 videos documenting the development of seven team-based projects
Monthly Review of Progress May 27, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentAs I said some time ago I have started to review our project plan activities using google sites the site is called SHARE Project Plan Progress - as I thought this would help with our evaluation. I will be doing this on a monthly basis reviewing activities from the beginning of the project up to end of the month and starting the review of activities for the following month. If you would like to review our progress so far it’s all there on the site.
JorumOpen Testing Begins May 27, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentI have finally managed to get JorumOpen implemented on our development system we just need to get the harvesting switched on. This has really illustrated how effective our working collaboratively with our vendors Desire2Learn has worked and I would like to thank Yvonne Monterroso for guiding us through this and to, also, mention how useful Elluminate has been in this activity. I set-up JorumOpen using a recorded Elluminate demo together with Learning Repository guidance.
I think it has been a useful exercise as it helped us to get a better understanding of harvesting. Initially, I don’t think we were all fully aware that harvesting was importing metadata records into a our learning repository, so we have to set- up harvest and import intervals for this together with the number of records we want to import at each time and timeouts. I think we thought is was a bit like our Merlot which allow the user to search and retrieve links directly to content within Merlot, but this repository is fully integrated in the VLE. We are all a little bit more knowledgeable now.
More Planning For Our National Conference May 27, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentWe had a really useful conference call with Andy McGreggor our Programme Manager, to discuss the schedule for our planned National Conference in March next year. It was useful to have some input from somebody external to project. He gave some useful advice and feedback on our conference title, the themes and the programme. We aim to have the website for the conference up by June it will be one of the tabs on this Wiki and we hope to put an invite out for papers in July. Just a reminder that the conference is about transitions in practice relating to sharing educational resources, the three themes will be looking at repository use, discoverability and sustaining and building online communities in relation to this.
Web Sites of the Week May 21, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentI would like to start off by recommending JISC’s OER Phase 2 page - it includes the slides and the Elluminate recordings for the strands. This is a really helpful inclusive approach as those that were unable to attend the Elluminate presentation have an opportunity to listen to what happened together with the questions from those who attended.
And here are the best of the rest from the week – including a couple of additional funding opportunities from CC and Mozilla Drumbeat and the Shuttleworth Foundation :
- Future Internet Special Issue Opening Up Learning : special issue of the journal Future Internet focuses on open educational resources (OER), open educational practices (OEP) and open scholarship
- Open Education Quality Initiative : focuses on provision of innovative open educational practices and promote quality, innovation and transparency in higher and adult education
- Identifying Concrete Pedagogical Benefits of Open Educational Resources David Wiley : investigates the pedagogic issues of OER in comparison with (PER) proprietary educational resources
- CC Launches Catalyst Grants Program: investing up to $100,000 (via grants ranging from $1,000-$10,000) to provide seed funding to projects around the world devoted to increasing access and openness.
- Moz and Shuttleworth Fellowship : a joint fellowship focused on ‘education for the open web’ - aim is to find someone with solid, scalable and fresh ideas on how open learning and the open web intertwine
- Google Sitemap and Search Engine Optimisation : video tutorial form University of Westminster
- The Dutch Case with OER : an Emerging National Strategy : YouTube video of Keynote by Fred Mulder Rector Open Universiteit Nederland
- Open Educational Resources Movement Timeline : From Project Gutenberg to Linux
- The Many Faces of Openess Cathy Anderson : provides a list of reports, papers, research and journals on openness
- MIT decides to move to Plone open source publishing environment
Learning Repository Overview Paper May 21, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentI have finally managed to complete and circulate an Learning Repository overview Paper I have written. It provides details of the following:
- what a repository is together with details of the of the University repositories
- how staff access the repositories and what they can do within the repositories, with respect to permissions
- details on how learning resources are managed within the repository
- considerations with regarding quality assurance in particular copyright and accessibility
- what to do if you are unhappy with content that has been published
- details of additional services e.g. MERLOT and out intent to release JorumOpen
This as much about staff engagement as providing an overview as some staff will still be unaware of the Learning Repositories. Its a good time to remind staff that the tool is available as staff are preparing their courses for the next academic year. As a postscript I have offered to run workshops and demos to anybody who wants them.
Preparations for FUSION May 21, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentThis week I have been preparing our slides for FUSION 2010 http://www.desire2learn.com/fusion/conference Desire2Learn Vendor Conference with my colleague Anna Armstrong. D2L are going to present the slides in an instance in of their VLE within their ePortfolio tool. We will be giving an overview of the project and discussing the strategies we have adopted for engaging staff. It will be useful to see if our issues with respect to engagement and sharing of learning content are similar to those experienced by our colleagues across the Atlantic.
Metadata – are we reaching the end of the line? May 21, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentI think we are almost reaching the end of the line. We have found out that if we use Dublin Core and want to have a classification system the user has to add a classification to the learning resource after the learning resource has been published, which I am not sure to what extent we can rely users to do this, even if we highlight it within our guidance. However, with LOM a classification can be given to a learning resource when adding the metadata. The classification scheme is based on the subject codes used in our student MIS, however our Learning Repository already categorises the courses according to Academic Team. The DC interface is clearer than LOM interface and I think interface design can have an impact on users willingness to complete metadata. So we are debating how much more the classification system will add to the metadata and the categorises within the system and whether losing classification is an acceptable trade off for a clearer interface, I think may be yes but I am but the project manager so I will be presenting the arguments to my Development and Implementation Group to see if we can come to a consensus.
Web Sites of the Week w/e 14th May 2010 May 14, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentHere are my web sites of the week:
- Lola: Learning objects, Learning activities : Wesleyan University – an exchange for facilitating the sharing of high-quality learning objects. It contains materials for use across the curriculum, with a particular focus on modules for Information Literacy.
- OER Africa: Established by the South African Institute for Distance Education (Saide) to play a leading role in driving the development and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) across all education sectors on the African continent.
- Humbox: Part of a wider Open Educational Resources initiative funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and the HEA, to showcase UK Higher Education by encouraging teachers within HE institutions to publish excellent teaching and learning resources openly on the web.
- Open Education” ccSalon Video – Creative Commons San Franciso Salon event video
- Pan Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning: Leading conference on open learning and global development
- Internet Archive provides specially designed format to support those who are blind, dyslexic or are otherwise visually impaired
- Community College Open Textbook Collaborative : Funded by the The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a collection of colleges, governmental agencies, educational nonprofits, and other education-related organizations. Provides training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textboooks, an online professional network, support for authors opening their resources, and other services.
- Notemonk: A site for individuals studying with textbooks to collaborate~
- What’s So Good About Open Educational Resources: slide presentation Steve Wheeler University of Plymouth
- Phil’s JISC CETIS Blog : Repositories and the open web report
- Cloudworks – Consultation exercise: on a review of OER case studies and associated Open Educational Practices
- CETIS Resource traking for UKOER : set of pages about technical approaches to monitoring releas of OERs, use and re-use of resources, comments rating relating to resources
Planning for Dissemination Continues May 14, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentThe project’s thoughts and activities this week have been directed towards two dissemination events, out national conference and JISC’s Joint Innovation Forum 2010.
With respect to the national conference we have created a conference plan and a draft programme.The working title for the conference which may become the actual title is ”Transitions in Academic Practice: Supporting a Culture of Educational Resource Sharing”. The themes for the conference that are currently in development will relate to the implementation of educational/learning resource repositories, discoverability of educational resources and building and sustaining online communities of practice in relation to learning repositories. We hope to be inviting paper submissions in June and the conference takes place in March 2010. Full details will soon be available via this web site…so watch this space.
Regarding JIF2010, we are looking at repurposing some of our existing training and support material as well as using this as an opportunity to enhance these. For example, we have already produced a couple of posters for other events which we think will be useful for this event and we also have some video footage. However, we want to continue to develop case studies of individuals publishing to our learning repository. Not only do we want written case studies it would be nice to have some talking heads as well. I have been looking at Opal’s case studies which are available via Cloudworks we have a case study template but Opal’s case studies have also helped me think about additional information that we might require. Regarding talking heads I have noticed thatOlnet have started to develop these but I particularly liked the talking heads presented by Siyavula Project at OER10 as they brought the presentation to life. So I can see project members developing their multimedia creation skills over the next couple of months.
