Hi, all! My name is Jennifer Maddrell and I’ve signed on to help aggregate and share open education news. I decided to break the ice with a post about my open education inspirations. Since taking David Wiley’s Introduction to Open Education course last year and after attending the 2007 Open Education Conference in Logan, Utah, I have had some time to mull over this notion of an open education movement. I’ve found that open education means a lot of different things to people. Some folks focus on the sharing of resources. Others focus on open connective practices. I’m inspired by all of it.
I’m particularly inspired by individuals who pour out their passions for learning in open informal forums. For that reason, I am a semi-regular edublogger and an avid edublog reader with over 425 blog feeds in my aggregator. I also participate at EdTechTalk.com, an informal online community of educators. Participants come together in regularly scheduled webcasts to share ideas, resources, and practices related to education and technology. Last night, I recorded my 81st live webcast of EdTechWeekly with my virtual co-hosts, Jeff Lebow, John Schinker, and Dave Cormier. Since Dave and Jeff founded EdTechTalk in 2005, educators and learners have shared and discussed countless educational resources and practices. As part of our EdTechWeekly live webcast, we have captured thousands of links to educational news and resources in a del.icio.us account built by the educators in our informal global network.
I am further inspired by the growing number of educators who are opening their classrooms to the world. This past semester, Alec Couros stepped outside the walled gardens of higher education within EC&I 831 – Computers in the Classroom, a graduate level course at the University of Regina. While Alec facilitated the course by using and sharing freely available tools and resources, he connected learners from both inside and outside the course in online sessions which were opened to anyone with an Internet connection. The reflections from students tell the complete story. George Siemens and Stephen Downes will be facilitating a Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course through the University of Manitoba using similar open practices this September. As stated in the course wiki, all events and resources will be open to the public.
It is my hope to continue to share similar stories in this open forum. To that end, feel free to share your links to open education news by posting comments within this blog or by adding the link to our brand new del.icio.us folder – see http://del.icio.us/openednews. When you are tagging a link of your own within del.icio.us, simply add an additional tag of for:openednews. The link will come into our folder and we will do our best to summarize the news or resource here. See you soon!
