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Compelling blog post by Stephen Downes on free vs. not free resources, especially the distinctions made by educational institutions and OERs, November 27, 2012

Mashable on internet has gone as far as it can with free news, entertainment, services, etc.

I like this term "free-range learning" and believe it might be part of the Studio language. "Ms. Morgan borrows the phrase "free-range learning" to describe students' behavior, and she finds that they generally shop around for content in places educators would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to materials from other universities. They mention lecture videos from Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology far more than the widely publicized Khan Academy, she says. If they're on a pre-med or health-science track, they prefer recognized "brands" like the Mayo Clinic. Students often seek this outside content due to dissatisfaction with their own professors, Ms. Morgan says." Also this comment: I don't think academe has really come to grips with the very large role peer-to-peer sharing plays in the way students learn. We proved this interesting phenomenon this year in a very large online course that we were in the process of redesigning. One section of the course piloted the redesign, which had dropped the former textbook in favor of all online content, cut out 1/3 of the subject areas covered in the old version of the course and changed the assignment instructions and interaction modalities radically. Despite the fact that all students in the pilot section were fully informed that they were in a different and new course, and were required to go though an extensive introductory module covering all aspects of the new version of the course, including the syllabus, and were required to pass a test covering the course requirements and structure, we still had something like 5% of the students turn in work that was based on the old course assignments and old course structure. Some of them had apparently not read any of the assignment instructions from their own section, and were relying entirely on peers in other sections for information on how to complete assignments.

Great blog post by Pamela Wilson on how images market more than words; identifies resources, too. istockphoto.com: This is the site I go to first. The search capabilities are great, the selection is vast (and growing) and you can even search by color and composition. (If you want to run your text along the right side of a photo, you can search for photos that have open areas along the right side, for example.) shutterstock.com: Another excellent (and vast) collection of high-quality images. dreamstime.com: I haven't used this much, but it looks promising. It claims to have the least expensive stock photos, and the quality looks good. Free stock photos stock.xchng: The granddaddy of free stock photo sites. The free offerings are shown along with tempting paid offerings from a sister site, but if you can resist the urge to upgrade to paid, there are plenty of good images here. morguefile.com: Don't let the name fool you. A morgue file, as I learned in art school, is where one keeps photo and image references to be used in the future. This is the Internet's morgue file, and is assembled by creative people and freely shared.

Free forum and message board platform that allows you to customize the look so it matches your website. They have an example of how they have integrated a forum into a website. Downside to free service are ads on the forum or message board page, but paid service eliminates that.

Already learned something from the Bonk MOOC--see this page for free hosted CMS and LMS technologies.

Look at the reference to Open Culture which has 500 courses available free for people to take online.

resource page for finding free images online

" Where can you find free, good quality images that are cleared to use for your blog posts or social media content? It's a question with a lot of different answers and caveats. Nearly every image created in the last 30 years is still protected by copyright-a protection that gives virtually every author the exclusive right to use or reproduce their work. But you can find a public domain photo, use a Creative Commons image that might need attribution or even create your own image from scratch."

free vector sites

Excellent list of free tools

Today's Tampa Bay Times, May 7, 2012 on free online learning. Names at least three different places to learn online: Khan Academy, TED, Academic EArth, and Instructables.

Excellent resource: choices of free leadership videos.

Get free online courses from the world's leading universities. This collection includes over 500 free courses in the liberal arts and sciences. Download these audio & video courses straight to your computer or mp3 player.

RedHoop has an aggregation of over 7,000 (free, free trial, paid) online courses. Put in the topic you wish to learn about, and it sorts through the database to find them. I found 11 in 2 seconds on infographics. Like their tag line: search, learn, grow. Maybe we should just have RedHoop as a one-stop directory?

"Openlab Workshops' mission is to use open source and free software tools and knowledge to both enable and inspire people's creativity. We are part of the open source and free software community because of their idealistic emphasis on transparency, knowledge-sharing, and collaboration. Since 2009 we've developed and taught over 24 workshops in such topics as programming for artists and designers using Processing, interactive lighting, livecoding, Arduino, and sound generation and analysis."

My cousin Evan Raskob's Openlab Workshop site. They are f2f workshops, but the concept is to bring diverse people together to create and share knowledge about digital art and technology.

Christopher Pappas reviews free web conference tools, February 2013, elearning Industry trade mag

National Health Service, UK, gym free workouts

Good icons that are mostly free and do not need attribution.

Good icons that are mostly free and do not need attribution.

Harold Jarche's lament, January 12, 2015. "Salaried workers and consultants use what I give away in order to earn their livelihood. For the most part, I am fine with this, as it raises my profile and the level of engagement. But it seems we are entering a time when people expect to get whatever information they need for free and feel no obligation to support the people who create it. I am beginning to question my current business model. Last week I was twice asked to work for free. In each case the person asking me to work for 'exposure' was a salaried employee. My bank has yet to accept exposure as a form of payment." Jarche goes onto say that he is changing his business model because this isn't working.