Monthly Archives: July 2009

Kaltura Community Edition Now Available

Posted on July 29, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Maureen O’Gara at Open Source Magazine has an article on launch of Kaltura Community Edition. Versions of Kaltura software have been available for some time, but the community edition allows institutions and organizations to create their own custom Kaltura site. Kaltura will be selling support and other services around the open source project. From the article:

The free Kaltura Community Edition, out under the Affero 3 License and downloadable at www.kaltura.org, lets site owners and web developers integrate customizable video and interactive rich-media functions such as video management, publishing, uploading, importing, syndicating, editing, annotating, remixing, sharing and advertising into their sites.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Open Education

Tagged , , ,

WikiEducator Receives Hewlett Grant

Posted on July 29, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Claude MartinRainaud has tweeted about WikiEducator’s announcement that they are receiving $200,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. According to WikiEducator’s main page, the grant will be used to “improve content interoperability and further support for training through the Learning4Content project.”

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Open Education

Tagged , , ,

Open Ed Site Officially Launched

Posted on July 29, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Jane Park at Creative Commons is announcing the official launch of Open Ed. The site is meant to orient anyone interested in open education and provide a list of related projects and organizations. Open Ed has been up for a few months already, but this post marks its official launch. From the post:

Open Ed is hosted by ccLearn, but we are merely providing the web space. We’ve done some initial work on it, but the site is yours—be you an OER advocate, a teacher wanting to connect with other teachers, or a learner who would love to do the same. And you can contribute in any way you like, because Open Ed runs on MediaWiki, the same software that powers Wikipedia.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Open Education

Tagged , , , ,

Defining Open Science

Posted on July 29, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Dan at The OpenScience Project has a new post defining what “open science” means. The author advocates a completely open approach to scientific research, and argues that research isn’t complete until it is available to the rest of the community. From the post:

A “secret” experimental design doesn’t give skeptics the ability to repeat (and hopefully verify) your experiment, and the same is true with numerical experiments. Science has to be “verifiable in practice” as well as “verifiable in principle”.

Thanks to Glyn Moody for the link.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Open Education

Tagged , , ,

OpenLearn Research Report Now Available

Posted on July 29, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Alan Teeky has tweeted about the availability of a research report on OpenLearn. The report discusses OER development and research. It covers OpenLearn’s efforts from 2006-2008 and is licensed CC BY. From the report:

OpenLearn was established as an initiative to help us learn from producing and using open content. The OLCOS report (2007) used the term ‘laboratories of open educational practice and resources’ to describe the way that open content has led to experimentation in approaches to learning and OpenLearn has acted as such a laboratory carrying out a range of experiments linked to production, use and reuse of the materials on OpenLearn.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Open Education

Tagged , , ,

Lessons Learned From OER Africa Survey

Posted on July 29, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Andy Beggar has a new post reviewing the results of survey conducted for OER Africa. The findings include the need for better navigation and encouragement regarding re-use. From the post:

OER sites need to address multiple audiences at the same time: students; teaching staff; international; national; regional; low and high bandwidths and so on. This can create challenges in how the material is best presented in a single site.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Open Education

Tagged , , ,

Curriki Participating in Charity Contest

Posted on July 29, 2009 by | 1 Comment

Curriki has a new post on their participation in a charity contest by one of Google’s founders, Paul Buchheit. Buchheit is looking for a charitable cause to donate to, and is using social media to garner ideas. He has created a a group on Friendfeed for the cause and a Google Moderator account to manage voting. Voters will need a Google account to participate. From Curriki’s post:

Curriki has suggested to Paul that he fund the development of a complete set of high-quality K-12 open source content. With these resource, educators like you could work individually or with colleagues to build a complete curriculum entirely out of free and open source resources.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Open Education

Tagged , , ,

Open Universities in India Create Center for Quality

Posted on July 29, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Shubhlakshmi Shukla at indianexpress.com has an article on the creation of Center for Internal Quality Assurance for India’s open universities. According to the Shukla, 14 open universities agreed to the proposal and detailed planning will begin in August. From the article:

It [the center] will be an intricate mechanism that will involve material development, discussing and organising sessions with important institutes about curriculum, dispatching, delivery, purpose and final outcome.”

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Open Education

Tagged , , ,

WikiEducator Working on Administration Policy

Posted on July 27, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Stephen Downes reports that WikiEducator is working on a policy for its administrators. The policy includes outlining responsibilities and conflict management. From Stephen’s commentary:

Even if you’re not a part of WikiEducator, the document is a good case study of how to manage a collaborative educational initiative online.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Open Education

Tagged , , , , ,

Aligning Wikibooks to State Standards

Posted on July 27, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Wikibooks News has a new post discussing the state of Wikibooks. Wikibook News notes that Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, suggested at a recent keynote that none of the Wikibooks are aligned to K-12 standards. The author hopes that the recen license migration to CC BY-SA will help, but suggests that the Wikijunior project struggles even without curriculum requirements. From the post:

I also think that there are efforts that can be made to conform to existing (although admittedly not often used) free standard curriculums, and also to put pressure on governments to make more existing curriculums freely available.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Open Education

Tagged , , ,