Brian Lamb, at the University of British Columbia, and his weblog on social learning, online learning, and open education
Sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, Academic Commons shares these principles with the Center's exploration of liberal arts education: (1) Free exchange: open source technology and the free and open exchange of ideas, intellectual and creative work; (2) Heterogeneity: an understanding of, and sensitivity to, different modes of inquiry and their value for the larger academic enterprise; (3) Rational evaluation: a respect for evaluative processes that are anchored within professional expertise and are based on practices of open and rational deliberation.
The ARIADNE Foundation was created to exploit and further develop the results of the ARIADNE and ARIADNE II European Projects, which created tools and methodologies for producing, managing and reusing computer-based pedagogical elements and telematics supported training curricula.
The Association of Internet Researchers is an academic association dedicated to the advancement of the cross-disciplinary field of Internet studies. It is a resource and support network promoting critical and scholarly Internet research independent from traditional disciplines and existing across academic borders. The association is international in scope.
The Berkman Center is a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. We represent a network of faculty, students, fellows, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and virtual architects working to identify and engage with the challenges and opportunities of cyberspace.
We investigate the real and possible boundaries in cyberspace between open and closed systems of code, of commerce, of governance, and of education, and the relationship of law to each. We do this through active rather than passive research, believing that the best way to understand cyberspace is to actually build out into it.
The CALIBRATE (Calibrating eLearning in Schools) project (October 2005 – March 2008) brings together eight Ministries of Education, (including six MoEs from new member states), to carry out a multi-level project designed to support the collaborative use and exchange of learning resources in schools.
CETIS provides a national research and development service to UK Higher and Post-16 Education sectors, funded by the JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee). This includes providing strategic advice to JISC, supporting its development programmes, representing it on international standardisation initiatives, and working with the wider educational community to facilitate the use of standards-based eLearning, especially through Special Interest Groups. We also provide direct support for the JISC eLearning Programme, especially the eFramework and Design for Learning strands.
More than 1,000 educators, technology experts and policymakers from across the country convened in San Francisco, California, for the CoSN 12th Annual K-12 School Networking Conference, representing the largest crowd ever in attendance. For the first time in more than a decade, the conference was held in a city outside of Washington, DC, and participants traveled from across the country and abroad to discuss the conference theme – Bridging Individualized Learning and High-Stakes Accountability in Education.
Project-based learning in a technology rich environment can be effective in K-12 classrooms allowing students to negotiate understanding and construct knowledge in social situations. Benefits include connecting students in communities in and outside of their cultures, and meeting learning goals in non-institutional fashion, while educators share practices and resources using technology tools. When projects endure over time, characteristics of communities of practice begin to emerge in which shared content grows and is amended by participants, generating historical artifacts. Once instantiated, the project philosophy provides an ongoing basis for immersive learning, using wikis, blogs, and other social networking applications. A project-based classroom philosophy sets an engaging, attractive environment for students by meeting their needs to be socially involved, as opposed to being passive receivers. An example long term Internet learning event called the Monster Project is examined in this paper. Widespread use of project-based learning has been curtailed by a strong focus on traditional instruction to meet testing goals. Research shows that active participation in project-based education results in students being more intrinsically motivated, more likely to show conceptual understanding, and more well adjusted than students in traditional education modes. These characteristics are those of a community of practice, where members are informally connected by their accomplishments and by what they learn together. The range of academic content that can be integrated into project-based learning as the main approach in a classroom is bounded only by a teacher’s energy and creativity.
A wide range of studies, reports and research documents have been published by the Commonwealth of Learning. Materials include monographs, curriculum and course development, training toolkits, directories, videos, and more. Most are available for download, free-of-charge, on this web site. Government agencies and institutions in developing Commonwealth countries may receive copies at no charge. Nominal charges apply to orders from developed, newly developed and non-Commonwealth countries.
Speeches and presentations by the Commonwealth of Learning officials. Archives from 1996 to present. Topics include new technologies, distance learning, and open universities
PLATO designed a study to explore "critical success factors for computer-based distance learning in developmental math programs" during the course of two academic semesters.
The 1st international workshop "D4PL Designing for participatory learning - Building from open source success to develop free ways to share and learn" will take place co-located with the OSS2009, 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems, on June 6, 2009, Skövde, Sweden (http://oss2009.org).
The Open Source world shows how volunteer collaboration can lead to great products and to great learning. We want to further explore at this workshop what happens using approaches from that community to break barriers between teachers and learners for today's Internet-savvy young people to design and co-construct sites for participatory learning.
The aim of this workshop is to explore the barriers for this type of learning in higher education settings. Content creation, knowledge exchange, community dynamics, and the impact on the boundary between formal and informal education are key subjects of this workshop!
D-Lib Magazine is a solely electronic publication with a primary focus on digital library research and development, including but not limited to new technologies, applications, and contextual social and economic issues. The magazine is published eleven times a year and is released monthly, except for the July and August issues which are combined and released in July. The full contents of the magazine, including all back issues, are available free of charge at the D-Lib web site (http://www.dlib.org) as well as multiple mirror sites around the world.
The primary goal of the magazine is timely and efficient information exchange for the digital library community. To meet this goal, both the articles and the shorter pieces are solicited or selected from among unsolicited submissions.
The DSpace digital repository system captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and distributes digital research material.
Research institutions worldwide use this open source system in a variety of ways -- as an institutional repository, a learning object repository, for records management, and more.
I'm a software developer at the Learning Commons, which is a service department at The University of Calgary. My current primary role is as a software developer on the Pachyderm project, but I also get to spend some time playing with new technologies to support teaching and learning - including, but not limited to weblogs, wikis, podcasting, rss, and a few others. I also spend a fair amount of time thinking (and rethinking) about the concept of control and copyright, and how they might affect academia (What happens when a professor uses a wiki? a weblog? What would be the worst case scenario if someone that wasn't a registered student in a class and session was able to access the online resources for that class?)
Rice University's 2007 De Lange Conference Aims to Describe How Knowledge Will Be Accessed, Discovered, and Disseminated in the Age of Digital Information.
Archaeology, data sharing, digitally enabled research and education. A weblog for archeology and the Internet, and semi-official news of the SAA Digital Data Internet Group.
In recent years changes in universities, especially in North America, show that we have entered a new era in higher education, one which is rapidly drawing the halls of academe into the age of automation. Automation - the distribution of digitized course material online, without the participation of professors who develop such material - is often justified as an inevitable part of the new "knowledge-based" society. It is assumed to improve learning and increase wider access. In practice, however, such automation is often coercive in nature - being forced upon professors as well as students - with commercial interests in mind. This paper argues that the trend towards automation of higher education as implemented in North American universities today is a battle between students and professors on one side, and university administrations and companies with "educational products" to sell on the other. It is not a progressive trend towards a new era at all, but a regressive trend, towards the rather old era of mass-production, standardization and purely commercial interests.
The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is a consortium of libraries and related agencies that are pioneering the use of electronic information technologies to extend collections and services.
The DLF documents and promotes strategies for developing sustainable, scaleable, digital collections, and encourages the development of new collections and collection services.
The DLF identifies, documents, endorses, and promotes adoption of standards and best practices that support the effective acquisition, interchange, persistence, and assessment of digital library collections and services.
