Last Blog of the Year December 23, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentIsn’t it funny how you seem to manically plough through your outstanding stuff at this time of the year as if you were disappearing for weeks when it is just over a week. We are just heading into the final 3 months of the project which I predict will be eventful as we start to develop our processes for making our content open, host a National Workshop, present at a couple of conferences, finish our evaluation and write our report. We are, also, going to further investigate our IRep harvesting from our learning repositories.
I did not report that I presented our rationale for making resources open in our learning repositories at our Elearning Working Group and apart from some concerns about content they seemed supportive of us going ahead dependent on a process which we are currently developing, so that is definitely an excellent end to the year. We have had papers accepted for NTU’s annual conference and OER 11 which we are excited about. And we have now had confirmation that UKOLN, Jorum and Humbox will be speaking at our National Workshop.
So all that remains to be said is Happy Christmas and Peaceful New Year!
SHARE November Newsletter December 2, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentHighlights
Welcome to this month’s Newsletter. Not one to miss a chance to disseminate SHARE’s activities far and wide – it is a slightly abbreviated version of the one circulated amongst colleagues here at NTU.
At the beginning of the month I had a visit from Balviar Notay, the JISC Programme Manager for our project. This presented an opportunity to provide a more in-depth overview of the project’s outputs. Balviar was particularly interested in staff engagement with the learning repositories and the processes we had adopted to enable easy publishing and retrieval. Balviar commented that the project would be a useful case study for the wider higher education community.
With respect to the learning repository, we released another update of the metadata template that colleagues should complete when publishing. This is the simplest so far so we hope colleagues will be happy with it. We welcome any feedback on this or any features of the learning repositories.
The project, also, is pleased to announce after a couple of expectant months the national learning repository, JorumOpen, can now be searched via the learning repository tool, more on this below.
Bright Idea of the Month
The learning repository link now gives you access to the JorumOpen learning repository. The word Jorum is of Biblical origin and means a collecting (or drinking) bowl and JorumOpen provides a bowlful of learning and teaching resources deposited by UK, HE and FE Institutions. Everything in JorumOpen is free to reuse and repurpose and can be searched directly from within NOW. Are you thinking about adding fresh content to your learning room? Perhaps someone has already created an online resource for the topic you are teaching. Why not have a look in the JorumOpen repository to see what’s available?
Web Sites of the Month – a selection from SHARE Project web site
This month’s links includes dossiers, debates and developments:
- Taking OER Beyond the Community – With this initiative, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) are aiming to expand understanding of OER by educational decision makers and quality assurance experts in order to promote their wider use
- OER 101: Theory and Practice – Two presentations from David Wiley: The first presents a strengthened and clarified definition of OER. The second recognizes that in “practice” people play extremely fast and loose with the term “open”
- Roadmap for an Open Educational Highway – This project seeks to develop an interface for publishing Open Education Resources (OER) to a range of repositories
Monthly Stats
Here are this month’s stats:
- Number of learning resources published across all NTU’s Learning Repositories (including Schools and NTU LRs) – 3974
- Number of learning resources published in the NTU-wide Learning Repository – 1781
Web Sites of the Week December 2, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentOER hits the main press, more OER guidance and support as well as musings on OER.
- OER IPR Support: OER IPR licensing workshop form JISC Legal
- Why Free Online Lectures Will Destroy Universities – Unless they Get their Act Together Fast - Article by Adrian Hon the challenge to traditional teaching on online lectures
- Has Creative Commons Become Inevitable - some thoughts from Heather Ford
- Services to Support Repository Managers-a list to help managers to share their experiences, tips, ideas, solution and best practice
Snow and Dissemination December 2, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , add a commentJust a quick one from me this week. I have spent quite a considerable amount of time this week writing at home because of the snowy weather although I did manage to slot in some remote learning repository trouble shooting. This writing has included an interim report, a couple of conference proposals and our monthly newsletter. I must admit that sometimes it is not always easy motivating oneself to do these type of activities but on the reflection they are very useful endeavours. Reports help you to consolidate your thoughts with respect to how your project is progressing, a chance to revisit the project plan together with the expected outputs and given we are only four months from the end of the project an opportunity to reflect on our overall progress. Conference proposals help you to think innovatively about your project’s activities and also provides a chance to think about presenting on related fields. Newsletters help you to remind your immediate colleagues that the project is still there doing stuff. So despite my aching typing fingers I think it was all worth it.
