beyondwebct

he lowest for administrators were "unlimited student access to the Internet" (12%) and "games/virtual simulations" (15%). The lowest for teachers were Web 2.0 technologies, including blogs and wikis (10%) and unlimited student access to the Internet (11%).

The Speak Up survey is conducted annually to assess views on current issues in education, and results are shared with state and federal policy leaders.

for the first time this year, administrators have participated in the survey. The group had expected about 325,000 individuals to participate in Speak Up 2007, a goal that was exceeded by some 42,000 participants, which included 319,223 students, 25,544 teachers, 19,726 parents, and 3,263 administrators.

About a third of teachers said they've :explored" methods for integrating online learning into their instruction. And, furthermore, a third also said they were interested in online learning for teacher professional development, and more than a quarter (26 percent) said that online learning is actually their preferred method for receiving training.

As for school and district administrators, 45 percent said they viewed online learning "as a way to boost student engagement."

Among teachers, parents, and school administrators, 52 percent said they think mobile technologies can help engage students in learning. They also agreed that mobile devices can help extend learning beyond the school day (43 percent) and help prepare students for work (42 percent).

65 percent indicated that they thought educational gaming would be an effective tool for students with different learning styles and would help engage students in coursework.

some 46 percent said they would "like to receive specific professional development on how to effectively integrate gaming technologies into curriculum

Do we foster an environment of “learned helplessness” among the faculty we support by most of our work being workshops on the tools rather than the craft?

And along these lines, I was part of some technology conversations with UBC faculty and I just relished watching my colleague Brian’s face contort when someone says, “how do I use twitter in my class?” He’d say in his sweet flip matter, “I am not going to answer that” — not because he doesn’t want to help, but because he wants to teach fishing, not toss them nuggets. You don’t find a freaking “job aid” that gives you a 8 step recipe to use twitter in your economics class– you spend some time in the environment, and let the affordances linger with your content area, and then maybe, you develop an idea that makes sense.

My thought is you do a lot of small things.

Toss ‘em something that might help on a personal level- be it flickr or doodle or diigo or heck, Blabberize.

it means less formal training, less workshops, and more learning by doing. It means using these tools a much as possible in our processes, so they become part of a fabric, not something strange and exotic.

They get so hung up on the basic that they can’t get into the cool stuff like expanding and applying their knowledge to more challenging problems. The same situation occurs with faculty. There are lots of folks out there…really…who don’t understand the Internet or servers or how web pages or email works or what the difference. For many folks, uploading links and icons and documents to Blackboard is a major accomplishment given their complete and total lack of understanding of the technological world. I am not even talking about understanding at the level of a techie but more an intuitive sense of how and why things work the way they do with technology.

First, this is not actually a philanthropic endeavor in the classic sense of "donating" something to those with less. Instead, the open education movement promotes conditions for self-empowerment, and one of the central premises of the movement focuses on the freedom to be educated in the manner of one's choosing. Second, the permissions granted in defining an open educational resource explicitly enable the localization and adaptation of materials to be more locally appropriate. Every person should have the right to be educated in his/her native language, and in a manner that is most suitable to the personal and cultural contexts in which they reside. Third, we have good reason to believe that the contributions to the global open educational enterprise from those in resource-limited settings are at least as valuable as contributions from anyone else. While we have much to do to enable truly equitably participation among all of the citizens of the globe, there is widespread agreement that the ultimate goal is some type of open educational network, not a unidirectional pipeline.

educational resources commissioned and paid for directly by the public sector should be released as open educational resources. This ensures that the taxpayers who financed these resources can benefit from them fully. Of course, this principle cannot extend to resources paid for indirectly with public funds, such as materials written by professors at public universities. The Declaration does strongly encourage these professors and institutions to make all of their resources open. However, in the end, this is their choice.

resources should be licensed to facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone

many of the participants advocated for inclusion of language that indicates that the license should ideally impose no legal constraints other than a requirement by the creator for appropriate attribution or the sharing of derivative works. This degree of openness represents the 'gold standard' in open educational resource licensing. However, it is also recognized that some authors and publishers may wish to disallow commercial uses (non-commercial). Resources licensed with this additional restriction are still open educational resources, but do come with risks and costs.

we suggest that you use one of the Creative Commons (CC) licenses, for several reasons: The licenses have human-readable deeds, which is (generally) easier for people to understand.The licenses have a computer-readable component which enables search and filtering by license status, an increasingly important consideration in an era of exploding online content.The licenses have been ported to many countries around the world, with more being added every year, which guarantees their worldwide application and enforcement.The licenses are already the most frequently used licenses for open educational resources, which will make it easier for users to learn about their rights, as well as use the materials in interesting ways.

If an author's primary purpose in creating open educational resources is for it to be used as widely, freely, and creatively as possible, then using CC-BY is the better choice

n most cases, the NC term is likely to have undesired repercussions for your work. If you are thinking of restricting commercial activity, ask yourself the following questions: What is the goal of doing so? Is it that the creators wish to make money from their contributions? Is this likely? Is it assumed that all for-profit activity is somehow inimical to education? What are the costs of restricting commercial use of open educational resources and do you wish to incur them? For example, is it your goal to forbid a for-profit publisher in a developing country from printing copies of your materials and distributing them there?

Open educational resources licensed using CC-BY have no restrictions on use beyond attribution for the original creator. Open educational resources licensed using CC-BY-SA also require attribution, but have the additional restriction of requiring that the derived material be licensed in the same manner as the original(s), thus ensuring their continued availability as open educational resources.

CC-BY allows for a variety of motivations, including the possibility of commercial success, to drive users to adapt and re-purpose their materials.

f an author's primary purpose in creating open educational resources is for that material to never leave the educational commons, such as it is, then you may want to apply the SA term. In this case, the possibilities for viable commercial derivatives, though not disallowed, are diminished, and so users motivated to adapt materials for that purpose are unlikely to participate. In addition, open educational resources licensed with an SA term are only interoperable with other SA materials, which seriously limits their capacity for re-mixing.

There are two key points we would ask you to consider prior to applying the ND term. First, are you willing to prevent all of the wonderful ways in which your work might be improved upon just for the sake of preventing a few derivatives that you would consider inferior? It is worth remembering that it is the granting of freedoms to share, reprint, translate, combine, or adapt that makes open educational resources educationally different from those that can merely be read online for free.

you must remember that digital resources are not consumable goods, in the sense that they can be shared infinitely without any loss of value for the original. As such, if inferior derivatives are created, those creations have done nothing to diminish the quality of your original work, which will remain available for others to use or improve upon as they wish.

there is absolutely no restriction on use of public domain materials. In addition to being able to freely use such materials, you are free to adapt public domain materials and then license the derivative works in any way you choose, including standard all-rights-reserved copyright. You have to apply an open license if you want your contribution to add to the pool of open educational resources.

open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning. Understanding and embracing innovations like these is critical to the long term vision of this movement.

Most educators remain unaware of the growing pool of open educational resources.

he majority of the world does not yet have access to the computers and networks that are integral to most current open education efforts.

ree strategies to increase the reach and impact of open educational resources

we encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement.

Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly.

elease their resources openly.

Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet.

governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources.

These strategies represent more than just the right thing to do. They constitute a wise investment in teaching and learning for the 21st century. They will make it possible to redirect funds from expensive textbooks towards better learning. They will help teachers excel in their work and provide new opportunities for visibility and global impact. They will accelerate innovation in teaching. They will give more control over learning to the learners themselves.

We have a chance to nurture a new generation of learners who engage with open educational materials, are empowered by their learning and share their new knowledge and insights with others.

we have an opportunity to dramatically improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world through freely available, high-quality, locally relevant educational and learning opportunities.

there must be a minimum of 5 public pictures in the account in order to start this review process.

If they are real pictures, the public photos in the account are added to the pool of pictures in flickr searches and RSS feeds.

In the course of looking for the pictures and creating the annotated hot spots they will be thinking about the material covered in a new way and strengthening the mental links to the concepts they have learned. I hope to make their learning sticky.

reating digital mind maps of the material we learned way back at the beginning of the semester.

At exam time they can review all the annotated pictures in the pool made by themselves and their classmates. They will be teaching and learning from each other.

They can use the pictures in projects, assignments and blog posts. I will also be able to use them the next time I teach the course to benefit the next group of students. They will be teaching people they have never met. They are also building a permanent resource collection.

They are talking to other students and teachers in the building about this. A buzz is growing. Can you imagine the conversations they are having at home? They are involving their families and friends in their learning.

As pictures began to come up in public searches on flickr for each of the unique course tags, I created a flickr badge (you'll have to "sign in" to follow that link) for each class. I put it in each blog's sidebar under the heading "Our Math Photo Gallery." The engine behind the badges is the RSS feed associated with each unique course tag. Flickr generates these RSS feeds automatically.

if this kind of help is cheating, then so is tutoring and all the mentoring programs the university runs and the discussions we do in tutorials.

every survey of employers suggests that the ability to work as part of a team is both one of the most sought after competencies and one which they feel is not being taught by the education system.

this point represents a key distinction between the traditional and digital person.  While the traditional educator approaches the virtual world to learn how it can be used in education, the digital educator approaches the environment asking how this experience can change the entire practice of teaching and learning.  One seeks to perhaps adapt their current practices to fit a new environment, while the other looks to completely transform what they do based upon the opportunity provided in the virtual world.

traditional educators seek a structure to their inworld activities, while digital learners self define a process to reach the outcome they have decided upon. 

digital gamers are familiar with self-investigation to determine what is needed to "win the mission" and seek only resources and support.