Worldwide
Learning Networks
Creating
open educational resources the focus
of several international efforts
Open educational resources (OER)
are teaching, learning, and research
resources that reside in the public
domain or have been released under
an intellectual property license
that permits their free use or re-purposing
by others. OER include full courses,
course materials, modules, textbooks,
streaming videos, tests, software,
and any other tools, materials or
techniques used to support access
to knowledge.
At the heart of the movement toward
OER is the simple and powerful idea
that the world’s knowledge
is a public good and that technology
in general and the WorldWide Web
in particular provide an extraordinary
opportunity for everyone to share,
use, and reuse knowledge. OER are
the parts of that knowledge that
comprise the fundamental components
of education - content and tools
for teaching, learning and research.
The Massachusetts
Institute of Technology may
have started the OER movement in
2001 when the university announced
the formation of its OpenCourseWare
project and the plan to make instructional
materials for all MIT courses available
online, and for free. Now, nearly
six years later, MIT has lived up
to its lofty aspirations. Campus
officials announced in March
2007 that the university will have
digitized and posted material for
all of its courses by the end of
the 06-07 academic year. (At this
time, the institution has posted
resources from more than 1,400 classes.)
MIT is not working alone in the OER movement. Since 2001, the William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation has made grants in excess of $40 million
to support institutions and organizations that develop and provide online
access  to
open educational content. With its Open
Educational Resources Initiative, the Foundation seeks to use information
technology to help equalize access to knowledge and educational opportunities
across the world. The initiative targets educators, students and self-learners
worldwide. The John D. and Catherine
T. MacArthur Foundation launched its five-year, $50 million digital
media and learning initiative in 2006 to help determine how digital
technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize,
and participate in civic life. Answers are critical to developing educational
and other social institutions that can meet the needs of this and future
generations. The initiative is both marshaling what is already known
about the field and seeding innovation for continued growth.
Other OER initiatives underway
around the world:
-
OER
Commons is the a comprehensive
open learning network where educators
can access their colleagues’
course materials, share their
own, and collaborate on affecting
today’s classrooms. It uses
Web 2.0 features (tags, ratings,
comments, reviews, and social
networking) to create an online
experience that engages educators
in sharing their best teaching
and learning practices.
- OpenLearn,
access to free educational resources
from The
Open University in the United
Kingdom
-
iCommons,
an organization created to help
coordinate and support global
efforts to share educational content
on the Internet.
-
Creative
Commons provides free tools
that let authors, scientists,
artists, and educators easily
mark their creative work with
the freedoms they want it to carry.
Students
Track the Inspiration for 'Robinson
Crusoe'
Bilingual
e-book was an international student
collaboration
It’s widely believed that
Alexander Selkirk, the 18th-century
Scottish sailor who spent four years
marooned on an island near Chile,
was the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe. A web
site, Chasing
Crusoe, chronicles Selkirk’s
voyages and draws comparisons
 between
the real-life sailor and the fictional
protagonist that he may well have
influenced.
Available in English and Spanish,
the site — an unusual collaboration
between students at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
and students from the University
of the Andes, in Santiago, Chile
— is a bilingual travelogue
mixing maps, multimedia, and even
an interactive game.
Chasing Crusoe is a blend
of fantasy and authenticity, exploring
the fictional isolation of Robinson
Crusoe; the reality of his times,
including pirates, privateers and
great sailing ships; and includes
a look at the modern day Robinson
Crusoe Island.
If you prefer just the straight
text of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe,
it is also available
free from Project
Gutenberg, a producer of free
electronic books (ebooks).
College
textbooks for free?
A
new advertiser-supported model for
providing educational resources
Textbook prices are soaring into
the hundreds of dollars, but in
some courses now, students won't
pay a dime. The catch:  Their
textbooks will have ads for companies
including FedEx Kinko's and Pura
Vida coffee.
Selling ad space keeps newspapers,
magazines, Web sites and television
either cheap or free. But so far,
the model hasn't spread to college
textbooks — partly for fear
that faculty would consider ads
undignified. The upshot is that
textbooks now cost students, according
to various studies, about $900 per
year.
Now, a small Minnesota startup
is trying to shake up the status
quo in the $6 billion college textbook
industry. Freeload
Press offers more than
100 titles completely free. Students,
or anyone else who fills out a five-minute
survey, can download a PDF file
of the book, which they can store
on their hard drive and print.
Around
the Web
A
snapshot of what's going on around
the World Wide Web
UC
Berkeley Awarded A.W. Mellon Grant to Assess the Future Landscape of
Scholarly Communication
The Center
for Studies in Higher Education at the University
of California at Berkeley has received a $400,000 grant from the
Andrew F. Mellon Foundation to examine "the future landscape of
scholarly communication." The money will allow the center "to
continue its research into the changing nature of scholarly communication
and publication practices in the networked age," according to a
news release, with a special focus on understanding the needs and desires
of scholars as they undertake and seek to publish their research.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
TimesSelect
is now free for University Students and Faculty
TimeSelect from the New York Times provides exclusive online access
to news and op-ed columnists, the paper's archive, web tools, and more.
One must be a student or faculty member with a valid college or university
e-mail address to be eligible for the offer.
The New York Times
Decision 2008: 'You
Choose' on YouTube
With Alabama's presidential primary only 11 months away, it's never
too early to get the know the candidates for president of the United
States. Now YouTube is making
it easy to follow along. The popular video-sharing website recently
announced the beginning of an online voter education initiative - YouChoose
2008 - that will serve as an informational hub for candidates to
showcase their own videos.
MSNBC
Make
Room, Wikipedia: Internet-based
Collaboration Could Change the Way
We Do Business
It sounds like something from a
futuristic TV thriller: American
spies thwarting a terrorist plot
through a shared online community
modeled after Wikipedia, the free
user-created, web-based encyclopedia.
But Anthony D. Williams, co-author
of the new book, Wikinomics:
How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything,
recently told a conference at Wharton's
Mack
Center for Technological Innovation
that this online community of spies
already exists -- along with a host
of other activist-oriented web sites
that are changing the rules of the
global economy.
Knowledge@Wharton
We Can't Ignore the Influence
of Digital Technologies
The dust-up at Middlebury
over Wikipedia was not what it
seemed. But it tells us a lot about how we should approach the digital
future, writes Cathy N. Davidson, interim director of the John
Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke
University.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
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How much digital
content is created in one
year?
Cellphone cameras and digital-video devices have turned college
students into campus
watchdogs and have made YouTube
a household name. In doing so, the tools have generated an amazing
amount of digital content.
It would take 161 exabytes
(161 billion gigabytes)
of storage space to hold
all the digital material
created in the last year,
according to a new study.
The study, conducted by
IDC,
a firm specializing in technology-related
market research, argues
that digital information
is growing ever more democratic.
By 2010, the company says,
more than 70 percent of
existing digital content
will have been created by
consumers.
For those who want to learn
some new terms:
Most are familiar with a
gigabyte, as that is what
most iPods hold –
250 songs. The next step
is 1,000 GB which equals
1 terabyte, 1,000 terabytes
equals 1 petabyte, 1,000
petabytes equals 1 exabyte
and 1,000 exabytes equals
1 zettabyte.
[Source: The
Chronicle of Higher Education
- Wired Campus]
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Featured Podcast:
The
New Yorker Animated Cartoons
Producer: RingTales
The world famous cartoons
of The
New Yorker come to life
in these fully-animated
versions. They're short.
They're smart. They're wickedly
funny. They feature the
hysterical work of renowned
cartoon artists such as
Sam Gross, Bob Mankoff and
Roz Chast. Enjoy a bite-sized
gift of comic comedy three
times a week. You can watch
online
or subscribe
and download these video
podcasts in iTunes.
Podcasting, a portmanteau
of Apple's "iPod"
and "broadcasting",
is a method of publishing
files to the Internet, allowing
users to subscribe to a
feed and receive new files
automatically by subscription,
usually at no cost. It first
became popular in late 2004,
used largely for audio files.
Do you have a favorite
podcast you'd like to share?
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7
Things You Should Know About
eBooks
E-books offer new ways for
readers to interact with content.
An e-book that abandons the
notion of reading from front
to back, for example, encourages
readers to take an active,
self-directed role in how
they learn. E-books incorporating
audio, movies, and simulations
facilitate deeper understanding
of subject matter, while annotation
features let users customize
a text.
The
"7 Things You Should
Know About..." series
from the EDUCAUSE
Learning Initiative (ELI)
provides concise information
on emerging learning practices
and technologies.
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Professor Glenn Ross, Philosophy,
displays course materials
he has made available to students
online via Blackboard,
the College's course management
system. Professor Ross provides
students with a variety of
electronic instructional materials.
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Click
to view larger image and description...
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 ATS
eNews
April, 2007
Volume 2, Issue 6
Tips,
techniques, and tools for
using technology to enhance
teaching and research
ATS eNews is published by Academic Technology
Services. http://ats.fandm.edu/enews/
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