Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as facilitate policy dialogue, knowledge sharing and capacity building.Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with an intellectual property license that allows for free use, adaptation, and distribution.

I increasingly fear that the open educational resources movement is being used as a way of perpetuating inequalities in education while purporting to be democratic. Some components of OERs also smack of hypocrisy, elitism and cultural imperialism (the bad), as well as failure to apply best practices in teaching and learning (the ugly). Despite my support for the idea of sharing in education (the good), these concerns have been gnawing away at me for some time, so after 42 years of working in open learning, I feel it’s time to provide a critique of the open educational resources ‘movement’.

The learning resource in question is the fifth element of a Moodle unit on Academic Writing and comprises an Exe learning object on ‘How to Avoid Plagiarism’. The learning resource has 21 pages of content that include text, images, and multiple-choice questions.  The main CORRE elements that impact on the conversion of these learning materials will be:

Here’s an elevator pitch, in 10 sentences, for social learning, which is what really makes social business work.

The main reason no one uses OpenID is because Facebook Connect does the same thing and does it better. Everyone knows what Facebook is and it’s much easier to understand that Facebook is handling your identity than some vague, unrecognized thing called OpenID. That’s why, despite the impressive sounding billion URLs and 50,000 sites supporting OpenID, it pales next to Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect has been around less than half the time of OpenID and yet it’s been adopted by some 250,000 websites, is available to the hundreds of millions of Facebook users and has the advantage of Facebook’s brand familiarity.

Eventually OpenID will likely disappear from the web, not because it was a failure, but because identity will be managed in other ways. Mozilla is hard at work putting identity in the browser. It’s not hard to envision Firefox managing your OpenID credentials for you, just as it does today with your passwords. In that sense OpenID may end up like RSS (another tool routinely declared dead), invisibly powering features behind the scenes, essential, but unnoticed. Eventually online identity may even come full circle and move back into the real world — chips in your phone, tokens that generate random codes or biometric devices.

Lernen und Lehren mit Technologien Ein interdisziplinäres Lehrbuch

Recently, my friend Philip Rothschild asked if I would write a blog post on “the anatomy of a 500-word blog post.” He said that he sensed I used some kind of template. He thought it might be something that would be valuable to others, as well as something he could use with his students.

We are extraordinarily proud to share these award-winning educational wikis on Wikispaces. In different ways, each is an example of how wikis can be used to break down borders and build unique and captivating experiences that learners and educators will remember for years to come.

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Das agile Prinzip ist Lean Production für Software und bedingt grundlegende Veränderung in Unternehmen. Das Prinzip wird daher Impulse für eine zweite Lean-Management-Welle geben und die Gewichte im IT-Dienstleistungsmarkt verschieben, sagt der Unternehmensberater Arthur D. Little.

*How do we personalize the internet? (glad you asked!)It starts by Hunch getting to know you: what do you like; how do you think; who are you? Then, Hunch builds a taste profile mapping your unique tastes & preferences to the people, places and things all around you which you might like. The result is great recommendations that are customized just for you.

2011 is the e-Learning year! Traditional instructor led training is expensive and, in some cases, difficult to track its effectiveness. e-Learning is the only solution for organizations to save time and money and benefit from just-in-time training, faster learning, consistent instruction, higher levels of retention, greater levels of assessment, no travel expense, and no need for a classroom!

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Teachers all over the world are using Skype to make learning more exciting and memorable. It's easy to see why: Skype offers an immediate way to help students discover new cultures, languages and ideas, all without leaving the classroom.