Monthly Archives: March 2009

Writing Spaces initiative to Offer Peer-Reviewed Textbooks

Professors at Grand Valley State University have started the Writing Spaces initiative. The project is a series of books containing peer-reviewed essays written by teachers and students using a Creative Commons license. Writing Spaces argues it is distinct from wiki projects because it uses a more formal peer-review process. From Professor Charlie Lowe, an editor at Writing Spaces:

We feel that this model has significant benefits over wiki-based collaborative textbook projects since it provides a clear peer review process and specific publication credit that tenure and promotion committees can understand. There are professors at many institutions, such as my own, where this type of publication can count towards tenure and promotion. Additionally, the individually-authored chapters will offer unique voices and perspectives that would be normed in a highly collaborative wiki project.

Dave Cormier on “OERs Shining Light”

Dave Cormier, a Web Technology Specialist for the University of Prince Edward Island, weighs in on OER as it applies to textbooks in the most recent EdTechTalk podcast. An accompanying post can be found at Cormier’s blog. From his blog:

Freeing knowledge is a good thing. Freeing content, on the other hand, is a bit sketchier. When something is ‘packaged’ into an ‘educational resource’ we’ve left the straight path (however straight you might think that is) of the research process and enter the realm of contextualization. When you design a particular course, you need an audience in mind, a skill set, a number of literacies, goals… you make any number of decisions about how to frame and scaffold that knowledge so that a particular group will assimilate it in whatever way you see fit. If we turn these into tradeable cultural capital, we will, in a sense, not be changing anything at all.

Distributed ICT4D Class Begins in March

P. Clint Rogers, an advisor to the the Consortium of African and European Universities, is offering a class on Information and Communication Technologies for Developing Countries (ICT4D). He plans to use a combination of YouTube videos, online articles and books for the course material, with synchronous and asynchronous discussion taking place online. Anyone can take the course, similar to Stephen Downes’ and George Siemens’ Connectivism course. Rogers says of his course:

The aim of this course is to familiarize students with topics related to Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D). The course concentrates on the challenges and opportunities of ICTs for developing countries. Themes of the course include the basics of ICT4D, current discussion regarding the role of ICT in different contextual environments, the social impacts on ICT development and use, writing up ICT4D case studies, and evaluation of ICT4D projects.

Persons interested in taking the course, which starts March 16, should contact Clint Rogers at clint dot rogers nospace 2008 at gmail dot com.