Archive for the ‘Featured sites’ Category

Here’s a great site out of University of Wisconsim-Milwaukee that provides a clear explanation of the learning object concept that I’ve discussed before as an influence on the open educational resources movement. The site provides a description of the learning object concept as follows:

• Learning objects are a new way of thinking about learning content. Traditionally, content comes in a several hour chunk. Learning objects are much smaller units of learning, typically ranging from 2 minutes to 15 minutes.
• Are self-contained – each learning object can be taken independently
• Are reusable – a single learning object may be used in multiple contexts for multiple purposes
  Can be aggregated – learning objects can be grouped into larger collections of content, including traditional course structures
• Are tagged with metadata – every learning object has descriptive information allowing it to be easily found by a search

Notice that the learning object idea is an educational technology concept and is agnostic about copyright and ownership issues, thus differentiating them from open educational resources. (Although learning objects may of course be openly licensed and thus be OERs as well).

Don’t miss the really great list of learning object repositories here as well. It’s interesting to see an OpenCourseWare site in the list, as OCW materials are not usually as granular or manipulable as true learning objects, though they can be. (via EduResources)

The link to information on China in the previous post reminded me of one of my favorite open educational resources, the CIA World Factbook. The open educational resources movement has gained such momentum worldwide that it quickly outran my rusty geographical knowledge. The World Factbook has been a great resource for brushing up in a hurry and is a refernce I use quite often. One of the best parts about it is the frequency with which it gets updated.

If you’re looking to get more involved with the OpenCourseWare community as a user, producer, or supporter of OCW, the new forum on the OCW Consortium portal is a great place to start. The forum provides spaces for community members to connect around issues of how to create and use OpenCourseWare content, and also hosts many of the discussions regarding the development and management of the Consortium itself. A browse through the ongoing discussions is a great way to get a better feel for whether the Consortium is a good fit for your institution.

WikiEducator is a Commonwealth of Learning initiative that draws inspiration strongly from the open source software movement. The focus of the site is on collaborative planning of open educational projects, development of free content, sharing of OER expertise and networking on funding.

At the highest level, the site contains sections for collaboratively developed free content, open educational projects, OER research, and OER networks. The content section includes content under development in the areas of technical and vocational education, professional development, and–perhaps most helpful to someone new to the OER world–some great tutorials on producing and using OERs.

One of the more interesting examples I’ve come across of emerging “educational networking” sites is Carmun.com. Carmun has many of the characteristics of the social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook–you can create a profile, store links, create groups, blog. Most attempts to create an educational networking site that I’ve seen take these elements, maybe a few other general tools, and try in one way or another to add an educational flavor to the site through design elements or through association with other educational sites.

Carmun, however, actually adds (or rather was built on) functionality designed for academic pursuits. Namely, it incorporates a bibliography management suite that allows you to organize and share your bibliographical references. Within the community, this aids in the discovery of both source materials related to topics you are studying and in the discovery of other community members reading the same texts you are reading. The only similar project I’ve come across is the Berkman Center’s H2O Playlist project. Carmun is just getting under way, but is an interesting entry into the space.

Open Vault is one of my favorite new additions to the the open content library. It represents the opening of a vast resource of clips from Boston’s flagship public television station, WGBH. Simply making this material freely available is a service in itself–it runs the gamut from recordings of poets reading their work to interviews of participants in the Cuban Missile Crisis and Civil Rights Movement.

WGBH, however, went above and beyond by offering the content in a site that is well-designed, easy to use, and offers a nice set of annotation tools to help you organize and tag the content. The videos can be browsed by topic, keyword search, and a visual navigation “mosaic,” all of which manage to be complementary rather than confusing. I sincerely hope that WGBH will inspire other public broadcasters to begin opening up their back catalogs as well.