You’ve likely noticed that Open Education News has been on a brief hiatus. We’re currently working on a new model and structure for how we bring you Open Education News. Please bear with us as we put things in place; we’ll be back online shortly.
Posted in Open Education
Dave Cormier has posted a list of the lessons he’s learned from his participation in open learning. Open Learning – what I have learned includes statements like:
Dave provides longer explanations for each of his eight hypotheses. Head over to the blog and see if your experience agrees with his.
Steve Carson reports that MIT OCW is partnering with OpenStudy to provide an opportunity for people to participate in informal study groups around MIT OCW material:
MIT OpenCourseWare has paired up with OpenStudy to offer study groups in association with three OCW courses. Developed by researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory, and funded by the NSF and NIH, OpenStudy is a unique platform for collaborative learning. Try it out yourself:
David Wiley points out that MIT OCW has tried social software before. Here’s to hoping it works better this time.
The Center for History and New Media at GMU’s One Week, One Tool initiative has released Anthologize:
Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.
ePUB support means that, among other things, Anthologize is a drop-dead simple way to collate openly licensed content from blogs around the web, remix it, and push out to iBooks on the iPad. Many congrats to Dan’s group for another awesome tool.
A new Chronicle of Higher Education article, Lawmakers Hear Arguments for and Against Open Access to Research:
Advocates for public access to federally funded research made their case before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on Thursday, while publishers’ representatives urged lawmakers to proceed with caution for fear of putting U.S. intellectual property—and publishers’ livelihoods—at risk.
The article provides a good (if brief) summary of some of the arguments on both sides of the debate about open access to publicly-funded research.
The New York Times has published a piece on the state of textbooks called, $200 Textbook vs. Free. You Do the Math. One choice quote from the article:
Ms. Colby of Houghton Mifflin puts the state of affairs politely: “I think the open-source movement is opening a whole new conversation, and that is what is exciting to us.”
I suppose the feral fight-or-flight response the textbook industry feels as it stares at the growing open textbook movement could be called “exciting.” The story focuses mostly on Scott McNealy, formerly of Sun, and his contributions to the Curriki project.
OEN writer Seth Gurell got married over the weekend! Congratulations to Seth and Cassie, and best wishes and God bless them in their new life together.
Posted in Open Education
The world has another opencourseware! Congratulations to the Universidad de Cantabria on their undertaking, which initially includes courses in the Health Sciences, Humanities, and Experimental Sciences, and Vocational Education.
Posted in Uncategorized
Kids Open Dictionary Builder is a new site intended to “create a free, open simple dictionary for students to use. This dictionary will ultimately be published in a variety of formats and for multiple platforms.” Contributions to the dictionary are placed in the public domain. The project looks to be both well organized and ambitious; best of luck to Karen and company.
Posted in Uncategorized
