Archive for the ‘Webucation 2.0’ Category

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’m losing track of the version numbers… Anyway, while we’re gazing into crystal balls today, here is another look at what the future of education may hold, this one from Markz Space. I agree here with the assertion that much of the change in education, whatever it actually turns out to be, may occur in developing regions where educational systems are under more stress and have less inertia.

This is a great clip exploring a possible future for education as Epic 2014 did for news and media. It explores some interesting directions, and certainly doesn’t underestimate the pace of technological change. I am a little more skeptical about cultural change occurring at the pace that this piece predicts.

In addition to ICT’s making the world a smaller place, they are also making it a much more accurately and availably mapped place, and the geospatial data now available is being combined with all kinds of other data to reveal the world in new ways. Open Access News is carrying this bit on recent developments in open geospatial data, and Sramana Mitra has been carrying this related series as well. I’m not aware of any open education projects using this data, but I’m sure some are out there and more are on the way.

Interesting data from the National School Board Association on student social and educational networking.  While much of the activity still revolves around socializing and exchange of digital media, over half indicate they discuss education-related topics. This is the next generation of students who will be using open educational resources, and online networking tools are clearly already woven into the fabric of their learning lives.  Get the full report here [ PDF ].

(via Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day)

One of the hopes for Web 2.0 in the open education space is that educational networking sites will emerge, but so far there’s no clear model emerging for how this might happen. The growth of social networking illustrates the complexities. c|net is reporting some of the recent data around the growth of social networks, and while there seems to be rapid growth all around, there is also a global patchwork of preferred sites, shown in this Valleywag illustration. There’s no clear consensus at this point if educational networking will emerge from these existing communities, through the creation of new parallel ones, or from somewhere else entirely. (via elearnspace)