Welcome to Wide Open Education

So long and fairwell. Thanks to the guys at OEDB for inviting me to write here. It’s been a fun two months and I hope you readers have enjoyed these posts. If you’re looking for more good posting on free educational resources, visit Stingy Scholar where I’ll continue to post. Two other excellent, regularly updated and substantive educational blogs are Oculture and Zaid Learn.

In this last post I want to wrap up our OCW reviews series with some comments on MIT OCW - the true point of reference for all other OCW’s. A few months ago I did a post covering the top 15 MIT OCWs. While there are certaintly some good materials on there, such as the intro biology course or aircraft systems engineering, I have to admit that it was a bit tough to find 15 courses that were classifiable as turn-key OCW’s.

I’ve been tossing around the idea of the turn-key OCW to describe a courseware that has all the materials you need to really use it. While lots of universities are doing a great job of making some materials available, few are bundling enough of them together to make it usable. In this respect MIT and Open University are on opposite ends of the spectrum (see my post here). Open University free courses are totally accessible but not comparable to full university courses. MIT courses are full university courses but totally accessible.

As you see below, I’ve give MIT good grades and cause it’s nice to end on a high note. But what I’d really like is to see programs like those of the Open University and MIT continue to make courses that are really usable and deep. I’d like to see these courses taught in virtual classrooms, using open textbooks, with students interacting in forums. Maybe even one day there could be OCW degrees, or some sort of method to demonstrate the work users put into studying.

We’ll see.

Number and Variety of Courses Offered: A-

Course Substance: A-

Material Mix & Accessibility: B+

Overall Score: A-

Jason’s site, Textbook Revolution, was the first and remains the best resource for open textbooks. It continuously contradicts the argument “if it was good, they’d be charging for it.” Staff picks only begin to show some of the materials gathered here…such as the excellent Light and Matter series or Digital History. The best thing I can say about Textbook Revolution is that I use it…when I need a book on statistics or calculus or economics…what have. I come here and search. And 9 times out of 10 there’s something here that helps.

If open educational websites were Super Mario Brothers 2 characters, Learn Out Loud would be Mario. Some of the other options may jump higher or pick up toadstools faster…ok, the analogy is falling apart. But what I’m trying to say is that LOL is just about the best all-around, swiss-army knife of an educational site.

Currently cataloged in the free section are 1911 entries from around the web. Jon and company pick and choose from the best resources around, pointing out the best in their free resource of the day series. They’ve also done a great job of find copyright free materials and recording them in professional studios. Over the past year the podcast selection has expanded tremendously to 16, including the free audiobook of the month podcast.

Poke around. There’s lots here.

Like free education links? Like naked ladies? Then Good Sh#t is the unlikely combination you’re looking for.

Fred is one of the most prolific educational bloggers around, writing dozens of posts per days on everything ranging from history to music to open source software. Although some of the links are hit-or-miss, Good Sh#t points out so many excellent finds that you can easily forgive a couple of so-so’s. To give you an idea, here are a couple links from the past few days.

WORLD`S ANCIENT MYSTERIES: The World`s 10 Most Famous Uncracked Codes

Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation.

help to fix your writing

Coral Kingdom Pictures, Coral Photos, Photo Gallery, Picture Gallery, Desktop Wallpaper – National Geographic

the world’s best snowmen & snow art

Raymond Chandler - Raymond Chandler’s Long Goodbye

The Wonderful World of Early Photography.

A complete guide to the Army’s recruiting incentives. - By Phillip Carter and Brad Flora - Slate Magazine

NPR : Songs of the Criminal Life

Just free books

I can’t tell you the number of great links I’ve found through this site. So check it out….although maybe not at work.

Come for the links, stay for the porn. Or do I mean the other way around.

This will be the last week I’ll be writing this blog. Rather than just point out new sites, I thought I’d cover some of my favourites, the best sites I’ve come across over the past few years.

Motion Mountain is by far the best open textbook I’ve come across. It’s so good because it’s not so different from any other textbook. That’s a higher complement than it sounds. Clocking in at almost 1500 pages in this 21st edition, the book could easily substitute any general physics book in a university freshman or advanced high-school course. It’s really fantastic that Christoph Schiller has decided to make this book available for free.

And the openness pays off. The first 360 pages are now in french. And feel free to translate to other languages.

It’s great that people like to use the web to create clever, hyperlinked and multi-media materials. But it’s also important to open-up standard, traditional materials. Congrats to the few trying to do this (credit to R. Preston McAfee for the open IntroEcon textbook as well).

I don’t want to be cynical or discouraging in this series. This recent trend of universities attempting to open information to the world is great.

But as easy as it is to be greatful for any old scraps and raise your Dickensesque soup-bowl upwards with a tentative “Could I have some more, please?”, it’s important to remember that we OER users shouldn’t feel like these universities are doing us a favour. First of all, universities benefit from OER. It’s free press. Second, and more importantly, universities should be all about the open spread of knowledge. Especially public ones.

And that’s why I get a touch annoyed when OCW’s offer slices of a classroom but not the materials necessary to really use them. Learning like this is like trying to drive half-blind looking through beer glasses.

Just like a teacher grades toughly to demand more, we’re doing the same here. We’re grateful for the effort from these universities to make these materials available…but if they’re going to go through all the effort (and press conferences), why not make them useful? Why not make “turn-key” OCWs?

Berklee Shares is another issue. It’s just a blatant attempt to sell their online courses. Really, you guys could do better.

Number and Variety of Courses Offered: C

Course Substance: D

Obviously all the course are going to be music related, and the topics do touch on a variety of instruments, production and management. My real beef is what’s contained in these alleged “OER’s”. Let’s try it out.

I open the site and see “Guitar” on the sidebar. Hey, I play guitar. Let’s see the topics. “Power Chord Progressions in Songwriting“. Hey, I play Power Chords. Let’s open it up.

Oh wait, what’s this screen? Oh, they sell a book. And I can send this to a friend. But where’s the pdf? Oh there it is. I have to hit download. Adobe is giving me a message that there is multi-media content. Rock-on! This is going to have audio and video and all kinds of stuff. I hit ok. I here a little welcome riff. Cool. But wait? It’s only 3 pages. That’s probably because of all the rockin’ multimedia content. Hmm.

Ok, well Page 1 is the introduction. Page 2 has a page of text. And page 3 is full of ads trying to sell me books and their online courses. That’s it? It’s not even a full-sized page…and it refers to content in a part II of the book…where’s part 2? And where is the multimedia? Was it just that lame little intro? Guess so…
True. Some courses are a little longer…we’re talking a full seven or nine pages…well 5-to-7 after cutting out the ads and title pages. But it’s really clear that these are teasers designed to sell product. Worst of all, the Berklee site is disguised as a genuine OCW, complete with Creative Commons licenses. Geez, can’t wait to remix and reuse their ads.

Material Mix & Accessibility: D

For a music school I was expecting some audio. Didn’t find much of that. There are some quicktime files, such even clocking in on over a minute. But really they should do better. If the goal is to sell me their products, they’re not doing a good job.

Overall Score: D

If I was cynical I would saying that Berklee is exploiting the reputation of honest OCW efforts in an effort to draw attention to their “me-too” online learning program and book store. But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say this isn’t a cynical marketing attempt. Rather, they probably ran into the issue of “if I make this free, who’s going to pay?” Well, my answer is that if you made it possible for me to really learn, I’d figure it worth my money to let you teach me even more.

Come on. You’re Berklee. You’re like the MIT of music. Act like it.

From Haverford College here’s your hook-up for all the latin and ancient-greek podcasts you could want. Cicero and Ceasar on your iPod, Ovid in your SVU. There are classic textbooks in audio form. And all 100 of you the world over who like the daily news but wish you could hear it in a dead language…you can get that here. Ain’t the internet great?

For more latin and greek nonsense and know-how visit TextKit aka, the mothership.

Check out this OER webpage as slick in design as it is rich in content. HippoCampus is a project from the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), targeted at high-school and college students.

For all the bitching I do about the lack of authentic “turn-key” Open Coursewares from leading universities, I should give HippoCampus credit in this respect. For instance, choose an area of study such as Algebra and see a choice of topics. Under each topic (eg, Algebra 1), there is a complete list of topics as well as a complete course. The complete course carries you through these topics in an ordered fashion, each point utilisising interactive media, video, answer-prompts and other flash doo-hickeys/doo-dads.

The site is truly aimed at teacher looking to help students reinforce classroom topics at home. And, for better or for worse, the questions are organised around the questions from the classroom textbooks. The bad part of this is there is little room for open textbooks, but I shouldn’t be such a whiny ass…really anyone could jump in and work with these questions. Math is math, right?

In the “homework-helper” vibe, teachers can even create a page where extraneous topics are eliminated and personalised announcements. Perhaps the next step will be the ability to add content…we’ll see.

Like chess? Wish you did? Check out this massive list of chess sites and try every online variety in AJAX, Java and even Google Earth. I’m a fan of the 64squar.es aesthetic but try it out for youself. Most of these sites have some teaching aids or forums, but two other good places to get started are the CC Chess Tactics and WikiChess. By the way, the lady pictured is Carmen Kass, top model and president of the Estonian Chess Association. If you ever needed a reason to start playin…

I’ve just the past two hours playing around with this site. The Met has created art history timelines which allow you to bop about from time and place to see how art developed comparatively and dialectically. The site is really big - once you start on a time period, place, or thematic essay it’s easy to keep linking around through other works and periods.

For instance, start with Easter Island and you’ll link on over to a piece on the moai figures. Then maybe you’ll link out to over of these recommended links. The drop-down menu on the right will also link you to relevant timelines and themes. Students will also appreciate bibliographies.

Lingo is an extraordinarily handy tool for anyone learning a foreign language. Open any webpage on the web and click on any word. With the magic or AJAX, a bubble pops up with the meaning of the word in the language you’re studying (current options are Spanish, Italian, French, German and Polish).

But that’s not all. Create an account and you can save the words to a study list and practice with flashcard “games”. Lingro’s functionality can even be used on .txt, .doc and .pdf files. Oh, and if a word isn’t in the dictionary, add it, please, for the rest of us.

Amazon’s new iPod for eBooks, the Kindle, is already available on the Amazon store. Although the $400 price tag may raise a few eyebrows, a look at some of the videos available on the Amazon webpage as well as here and here might make you think that Jeff Bezos is on to something.

What sets the Kindle apart from previous attempts at eBook readers is a wireless connections letting readers buy bestsellers from the Amazon library or daily editions of newspapers like the NYTimes. Importantly, the reader attempts to capture the tectile feel of the real book with electronic-paper display, mimicing the feel of real textbooks.

Newsweek has a long cover story on the Amazon reader and Engadget has been following the device for some time. Customer reviews on the Amazon page are striking a lively debate, largely negative, particularly on the lack of pdf compatability.

Since starting this series, I’ve been reluctant to tackle the UC Berkeley Webcasts for several reasons.

It’s one of the oldest OCWs available. Course go all the way back to Fall 2001.

It’s one of the largest OCWs around. There are 46 courses in this semester alone.

And, along with MIT, it’s the model of an exemplary university OCW.

One way or another, all other OCWs are going to get compared in reference to UC Berkeley. But how good is it?

Bottom line: like most OCWs, it’s pretty good but it could be better.

Number and Variety of Courses Offered: A-

Last year, during a quixotic and ill-fated attempt to create a comprehensive website listing every OCW on the web one-by-one, I spent a full week copying and organising the depths of the Berkeley archives. Along with MIT, Berkeley has the most and most-varied offering of course around.

Unsurprisingly, there is a heavy focus on math, computers and sciences - in this semester there are only 10 humanities courses. But these courses are eclectic and interesting, covering topics you often don’t see in OCWs such as “Foundations of American Cyber-Culture” and “Heidegger“.

All-in-all, Berkeley has done a fantastic job in this respect and deserve high marks.
Course Substance: B

The Berkeley podcasts are based around a simple concept - record the classes and put them online. It’s a simple concept which is good and bad in it’s simplicity. For hungover undergraduates, it’s a great way to see what they missed on their Friday AM class. And for the rest of the world, it’s nice to be able to virtually sit in on the classroom while driving to work or waiting for the metro.

But unfortunately, this simplicity has a downside. The webcasts offer a soundtrack to a professor pontificating…who are sometimes long-winded as professors tend to be. Nice as that is, to really learn you need more. Although many courses have homepages (eg, this one from American cybercultures), these pages are generally more administrative for the Berkeley students and less focused on the public as, say, the MIT pages.

Another downside is that sometimes podcasts and incomplete and cut-off at the beginning or end. This is inevitable in such a large undertaking but can be a bit frustrating to listeners.

You have to give Berkeley credit for the quantity of available information but the substance is, for all intent and purposes, limited to the mp3 or video.

Material Mix & Accessibility: B

See above. Few extra materials are available beyond the podcasts. In college you can’t learn by just going to class and the same applies here. Berkeley should consider offering some courses with open textbooks or with more supplemental materials. While, obviously, not all teachers are going to want to use open resources, they should at least pilot a few courses that do and highlight them.

Overall Score: B+

Berkeley gets a B+ for sheer volume and their efforts to open up the classroom. No other university is so freely open in this respect. MIT has no where near as many podcasts and other podcast programs such as Purdue are not as well organised. That being said they could do much more to make these usable for the public.

The famous $100 laptop campaign has come to fruition. Although a little more expensive the initially thought, the MIT based team has developed a truly remarkable project that hopefully prove to be an important influence in global education and open learning.

Laptopgiving.org has lots of beautiful photos and details on the project. As can be seen, this is not a substitute for your Dell, but a reconception of what an educational laptop can be while meeting needs to be for children who live in places with harsh weather conditions and speaking local languages.

Josh Gay, a programmer friend who has been involved in the project, says:

“I will tell you that they have reconceptualized the very idea of a laptop in such a way that when you pick it up, as an adult, you feel really old It’s a special machine, built for kids, but durable, innovative, and powerful enough to work in the harshest conditions with poor communications and energy infrastructures. It is not only a library of books you can read in the bright sunlight (no glare in the screen!), but one whose battery will last all day while doing so — and it can be kicked around while you take photos of your friends playing soccer (one of the first actual uses of it by kids).”

For the next 9 days, you can donate a laptop to a child while also getting one for yourself to play with. For more details, visit here.

Dresden’s famous art museum, the Old Masters Picture Gallery, has been completed recreated in Second Life. The 37,700 sq ft building has been lovingly cloned down to the smallest details. You can even pick-up a free audioguide to listen to curators as you wander through the exhibits. For some reason I had a bit of trouble finding the place in Second Life, try searching for “Dresden Museum”. For more details and a list of some other upcoming projects, see this article in Wired.

Although many people (myself included) believe Second Life to be a bit over-hyped, it’s great to see some educational used such as these in development. See also Beth’s series on the Stingy Scholar discussing Second Life in education.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has released thousands of audio and video clips of animal sounds and behaviour on this fun webpage. Search of the animal that interests you (eg, lion) or browse collections such as “courtship” and “stalking”. While there are several good “animal noises” sites, this is largest around: there are 149 clips for the little winter wren alone.

Cornell has also developed a Quicktime add-on named RavenViewer for visualising the animal sounds. It’s a bit of a page to install (you need to enable Flash in Quicktime and reboot) but a neat tool. Read FAQs with any problems. You will also need to install Real Player to listen to most of the content. A bit of a drawback but worth it to use this great site.

On this blog we try to not just point out free educational materials, but to identify truly useful and substantive open resources. And although many universities have developed coursewares and podcast series, Knowledge@Wharton is by far the resource I use the most on an regular basis.

Developed by the University of Pennsylvania business school along with corporate sponsors, the website falls somewhere in between a top-class economics newspaper such as The Economist and a university lecture forum like Princeton WebMedia.

For me, what sets Knowledge@ apart is the professionalism it bring to open university discourse. The articles deal with timely economic and financial issues while tying the discussion to university research and academic theories. Meanwhile, the materials excel in accessibility - in addition to html pages, all pieces are downloadable as pdfs or mp3s. And the posts are always trailed by many smart comments.

When signing-up for the account you can choose to receive newsletters linking to new articles. It’s for this reason I keep coming back to the page. Both the Knowledge@ and Latin America focused Universia address timely business news relevant for professionals and interesting to the intellectually curious.

In short, Knowledge@ has made itself a stellar example of an open academic resource by modelling itself as a topic business journal, but free and made by academics.

I highly recommend this site. To get started, try some of these post such as “Why African Oil Riches Don’t Trickle Down to Africans” and “What Does It Take To Compete In a Flat World?”

Oh, and on a separate but related note, if you’re looking for a brief explanation of the credit squeeze, check out this flash presentation from Financial Times.

While Google Earth has stolen the thunder recently in terms of desktop skygazing, Stellarium is an excellent open source astronomy program. Through the use of OpenGL, the skies are presented in real time and from your precise point in the world. Easy for begginers to use (surely you’ll go straight to the constellation cartoons), the program also offers contains plenty of various perspectives, lenses, time changes and other bells/whistles for advanced users.

Over the past month, NYTimes has been experimenting with their take on a “Book of the Month” club. Mixing educated, thoughtful posts from an all-star panel with comments from readers, the Reading Room makes the most of the blog format as an excellent platform for guided reading and analysis.

Unless you have spare time to read the new Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace, you might want to wait for the second reading (coming up in the next few days). I hope the the panel chooses something a little more accessible, as I look forward to following the discussion more closely.

What is the mysterious Codex Seraphinianus whose used copies sell for $550 on Amazon and whose images are pulled from Flickr? This bizarre manuscript, written in an indecipherable language and full of strange, transformational images has baffled the world since Luigi Serafini (still alive) created it in the late 70s. I’ve but some of my favorite images below - for more info see Wikipedia and this interesting article from the Believer. (PS. Adding to the mystery, I have tried to write this blog post TWICE and both times it was deleted for no reason!)