Open Education: project or process and practice?

September 9, 2009

I’m new enough to the Open Education world that I can’t tell how unusual the closure of Utah State’s OpenCourseWare initiative is (http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Utah-State-Us-OpenCourseWare/7913/ and http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/967). It’s probably the largest OCW initiative in the US after MIT and in a summary of its successes earlier this year the  Utah State University online news noted that it [...]

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Comparing metadata requirements for OERs (part 3)

September 2, 2009

The first two parts of this foray into metadata requirements for Open Educational Resources examined: 1) how the required information for the UKOER programme compared with the requirements for the Jorum deposit tool and the DiscoverEd aggegator 2) how the UKOER requirements compared to the information projects thought would be necessary for particular activities (find, [...]

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Comparing metadata requirements for OERs (part 2)

August 31, 2009

In Comparing metadata requirements (part 1) I examined the required and suggested metadata for Open Educational Resources in the UKOER programme, for the Jorum deposit tool, and the DiscoverEd aggregator. In this second part of the comparison I’m going to try to capture some of our initial discussions fom the UKOER programme session about metadata [...]

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Comparing metadata requirements for OERs (part 1)

August 26, 2009

In our elluminate session on metadata and aggregation for Open Educational Resources, Phil and I spent some time  gettting everyone to think through the information required to interact with an educational resource in certain ways  (such as: (re-)use, cite, find, identify, manage). this produced a lot of responses prioiritizing different bits of information that are [...]

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Open Educational Resources, metadata, and self-description

December 8, 2008

If we share learning materials, do we have a professional responsibility to describe them?
At the CETIS conference Open Educational Resources / Content session in the midst of the discussions about metadata someone, I think John Casey, made an offhand comment about embedded metadata. As valuable as his next statement was, it was the notion of [...]

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Next Generation Environments

April 30, 2007

I was at the JISC Next Generation Environments conference. http://involve.jisc.ac.uk/wpmu/u-and-i
Much of the day revolved around how university-based users use tools (in particular social/ web2.0 ish tools) and the challenges that they bring to the environment. A few things that I found interesting during the day:
Peter Hartley’s articulation of challenge of using web 2.0 [...]

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StandardConnection - an interesting NSDL project

January 26, 2007

StandardConnection:Mapping NSDL Educational Objects to Content Standards.
PHASE II: An Achievement Standards Network Architecture
Standard Connection is a NSDL service project.
http://www.thegateway.org/asn
http://projects.ischool.washington.edu/sasutton/NSDL/StandardConnection/
The short version:
Following on from a project examining automatically matching learning resource descriptions with curriculum components, StandardConnection Phase2 is developing a machine addressable registry and repository of content standards and tools to use it. A content [...]

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