Archive for the ‘Tools’ Category

You may have caught Andy Ihnatko, the technology columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, on the CBS Early Show, touting the latest gadgetry for back to school. He led off with the iPod and played a clip of Walter Lewin’s Electricity and Magnetism video lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare.

As it so happens, I got my first chance to play with an iPhone this weekend as well, and yes, they’re way to expensive to make a difference in the short term for people with limited incomes, but they and other devices like them will get cheaper, and they are definitely the first handheld platform I’ve seen that really makes learning from open educational resources a viable experience.

I checked out many of my favorite OER sites, including MIT OCW, MERLOT, Connexions and Korea University OCW (an eduCause site). All of them behaved flawlessly, and the ability to view PDF documents with ease makes the OCW sites very useful on the platform. The iPhone will make the most connected more so, but as the technology becomes cheaper ($200.00 at a time?), it and other devices will have an increasing impact.

Here’s a cool tool if you find yourself remixing Creative Commons content while you’re doing a school project or making up lecture notes: CC Taiwan has create this license compatibility wizard. Helped me settle a discussion at work the other day…

David Wiley recently announced COSL’s release of OER Recommender, a Firefox plug-in that inserts recommendations for related open educational resources into the one you are viewing. It’s easy to install (though I did manage to get lost once in the three steps), and right now, OER Recommender (apparently) indexes about 20 OER repositories, including MIT OpenCourseWare.

What’s not revealed by any information I could locate is how the recommendations are generated, but my guess is some sort of automated RSS keyword matching. I’m guessing this because there are recommendations across the entire MIT OCW publication, something not easily done manually. This is important to know, as it provides some context for what you’re looking at. The recommendations aren’t, for instance, the recommendations of other educators or students (though I’m sure COSL has it’s eye on such a system of recommendations as well) but rather a high level these-two-thing-have some-sort-of-relationship-so-you-might-want-to-take-a-peek. I’m looking forward to playing with it a little more to see what it points out.

I haven’t yet written here about the One Laptop Per Child project, or the “$100 laptop” as it is more widely known. The project seeks to provide a laptop designed for use in developing regions to every child on the planet:

Any nation’s most precious natural resource is its children. We believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into the children’s innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children’s machine designed for “learning learning.”

The laptop itself is an infectiously enchanting machine for adults and children alike. But the project knows full well that hardware itself is not enough. For this reason, they are kicking off their Summer of Content:

The Summer of Content (SoCon) program offers budding creators mentorship and stipends to develop open content and run free culture events throughout the world. Inspired by Google’s Summer of Code program, our goal is to support a self-sustaining ecosystem of open content by encouraging growth of contributor communities, and attention to communication and accessibility around projects, where they’re most needed.

A lot of criticisms, fair and unfair, have been made of the project, but having seen the laptop in action and seeing this level of commitment to content, I suspect the project will be causing controversy for years to come.