Tag Archives: meta

Behind Open Education News

Recently a reader suggested listing some of the sources used to find posts for Open Education News. Without further ado, the following is a list of some top sources used for OEN:

The Google alerts are noisy, but they often contain some of the most interesting and novel stories. All of these sources, plus some others, usually yield about 450 items per day. These items are then distilled into 3-7 stories that fit the scope of OEN. Excess stories are either discarded or rolled-over for slower news days.

How Would You Change OEN? Part 2 – Social Networking

Yesterday we posted a story asking for feedback on how you would improve OEN. Unfortunately, we haven’t received any comments. We hope that the lack of response is because you are busy reading the stories we post. Here at OEN we have a few ideas for changes. One change might be adding Twitter, Buzz and Delicious badges, similar to what is done at Mashable.

We have a Twitter account with a respectable 522 followers and part of 43 lists. Should OEN participate on other social networks (Facebook, Orkut)?

We know that there are many online communities that you participate in, but we would really appreciate any feedback you have, whether it is about our social networking efforts or not. Thank you very much for reading OEN.

How Would You Change Open Education News?

The technology blog Engadget occasionally runs posts asking how people would change a particular gadget. In that spirit, OEN wants to know what you would like to change about the website. We’re looking on feedback about everything – from visual design to writing style. Leave a comment; we want to hear from you!

Welcome to Open Education News!

The young field of open education is gaining momentum and energy. As additional projects, foundations, universities, and other participants join the movement, the need increases for a single source to gather, sort, analyze, synthesize, and disseminate news related to open education. As a field, open education is now where the field of open access was a few years ago. Peter Suber’s wonderful Open Access News provides an invaluable service to the OA community, and we intend to replicate this service with Open Education News.

How does Open Education News work?

Open Education News is essentially a group blog. A number of individuals from the US, South Africa, and eventually other locations daily monitor the internet for news related to open education. We then aggregate these items and publish them individually with minor commentary. Occasionally we’ll publish bigger pieces of our own authorship; analyses and such. If you know of some open education news we should write about, contact David Wiley at david.wiley@gmail.com.

Where do you host Open Education News?

OEN runs on the popular WordPress open source blogging platform. The site is hosted at WordPress.com, which provides great stability and speed for a very low cost and zero administration overhead (e.g., no worry about backups, security, etc.). We’d highly recommend WordPress if you’re looking for a blogging platform.

Who writes for Open Education News?

The OEN team is currently comprised of Woldekidan Amde, SaraJoy Pond, Jennifer Maddrell, Philipp Schmidt, and David Wiley. If you’d like to join the team of folks writing for OEN, contact David Wiley at david.wiley@gmail.com.

Who supports Open Education News?

Open Education News is graciously supported by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation.