Group items tagged

\nWelcome!\n\nWelcome to the new BC gateway to Open Educational Resources.\n\nHere you will find FREE TO USE learning resources that you can use to supplement your own course materials or learning. Some of these are from BC-based projects while others are from Open Educational Resource projects from around the world.

Delivering 'Anytime, anywhere computing' was identified as the top concern in the UCISA Top Concerns survey of 2005. Delivery is a difficult balancing act - staff and students require access to office tools and applications, filestore and business applications from a variety of devices and locations (mobile phones, PDAs, laptops as well as home desktops). Service heads have to try and provide this securely to protect their institutions' assets, but in a way where authentication does not compromise ease of access and where managing connectivity does not come at the cost of a heavy demand on resources. Governance and security issues require appropriate policies for remote use of corporate information and applications, particularly on systems that may not be owned by the institution, and maintenance of security patches and antivirus software on remote systems add to the complexity. The growing use of mobile devices, increasing student ownership of 'cutting edge' devices, growth in the use of online learning and demographic changes in the student body have all contributed to systems resilience and availability becoming the major new concern for IT Directors. The expectation that services, particularly e-learning, are available 24x7 brings new demands - achieving this is a significant investment in infrastructure and maintenance and operational resource. Network security continues to be a concern - although many institutions have external antivirus and spam filter mechanisms in place, there is often a threat from within from poorly maintained systems.

What This Blog is About In one phrase: Building Engaging Learning Experiences through Instructional Design and E-Learning I'm an instructional designer developing online learning, so that's primarily what I write about. * Instructional Design: This is what I do all day, and I'm always trying to learn how to do it better. * Higher Ed: The courses I create are graduate courses, so I'm interested in higher education. * K-12 Education: The participants in those courses are mostly K-12 educators, so I'm interested in what's important to my audience too. * Corporate E-Learning: Even though I'm in education, I know I can learn a lot from corporate e-learning. Besides, I'm employed by a for-profit company. * Lifelong Learning: It didn't start out to be a goal for my blog, but I've discovered that these tools help my own lifelong learning. I write about my discoveries: what works, what doesn't, what I'm thinking. * Technology: I write about technology, especially as it overlaps with any of the above areas. * Bookmarks: The Daily Bookmarks Posts are resources I find interesting or useful. You can view and search the complete list of bookmarks on Diigo or del.icio.us. On my Post Series and Recurring Themes page, I've collected some popular topics. This includes my liveblogged posts from the TCC 2008 conference and my series on instructional design careers. The top posts in the sidebar to the right are another great place to start reading.

What This Blog is About In one phrase: Building Engaging Learning Experiences through Instructional Design and E-Learning I'm an instructional designer developing online learning, so that's primarily what I write about. * Instructional Design: This is what I do all day, and I'm always trying to learn how to do it better. * Higher Ed: The courses I create are graduate courses, so I'm interested in higher education. * K-12 Education: The participants in those courses are mostly K-12 educators, so I'm interested in what's important to my audience too. * Corporate E-Learning: Even though I'm in education, I know I can learn a lot from corporate e-learning. Besides, I'm employed by a for-profit company. * Lifelong Learning: It didn't start out to be a goal for my blog, but I've discovered that these tools help my own lifelong learning. I write about my discoveries: what works, what doesn't, what I'm thinking. * Technology: I write about technology, especially as it overlaps with any of the above areas. * Bookmarks: The Daily Bookmarks Posts are resources I find interesting or useful. You can view and search the complete list of bookmarks on Diigo or del.icio.us. On my Post Series and Recurring Themes page, I've collected some popular topics. This includes my liveblogged posts from the TCC 2008 conference and my series on instructional design careers. The top posts in the sidebar to the right are another great place to start reading.

For the last decade we have been researching these issues, and much of that work is represented and described here. Most recently, we have undertaken a large-scale research project designed to assess people's understandings of credibility across the wide range of digital information resources available today, including new and emerging forms. Through this work our goal is to learn more about how people find and use online information that they believe to be credible, and to refine and develop appropriate theories of credibility assessment in the contemporary media environment. What we learn in this research will help to advance social science, improve how we educate people to think critically, and contribute to discussions of public policy development.

An online blog for those who use Blackboard to teach. This blog provides resources for educators using Web 2.0 technologies.

A Public (invitation/application) group for collecting references and resources about Web 2.0 use in Academia--for teaching, for learning, for scholarly practice; 21st Century higher education, social networking, social media, and social knowledge creation in general.

Many Americans know about the commons from Garrett Hardin's essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons". Hardin wasn't a historian, but a population biologist, who was concerned with problems of population growth. Lewis argues that Hardin's prediction - that individual economic maximization will destroy collective resources - is based on a fantasy of a commons. In reality, commons had serious limitations on rights. You could only cut wood between Christmas and February, for instance. And commons were local entites - locals could exclude those from outside the region. These customary use rights meant that commons weren't tragic - in fact, they lasted for millenia in Europe. (I interjected here to ask why Hardin's idea has had such currency. Lewis offers two speculative reasons why - it's a great phrase, and it came out at a moment where the Cold War was in full swing, and Hardin's idea was a strong defense of private capital against communism.) Lewis suggests a different way to look at the commons, quoting Carol Rose, who talks about "the comedic commons", one with a happy ending. As such, the commons was a site of action, a space for citizens to act on their own rights.

StudyNet - University of Hertfordshire's Learning Environment

This week, Sonia Livingstone's latest book, Children and the Internet: Great Expectations and Challenging Realities, is being released by Polity. As with the earlier study, it combines quantitative and qualitative perspectives to give us a compelling picture of how the internet is impacting childhood and family life in the United Kingdom. It will be of immediate relevence for all of us doing work on new media literacies and digital learning and beyond, for all of you who are trying to make sense of the challenges and contradictions of parenting in the digital age. As always, what I admire most about Livingstone is her deft balance: she does find a way to speak to both half-full and half-empty types and help them to more fully appreciate the other's perspective.

Abstract: We borrow from computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) the lessons learned from the eight challenges of business groupware. Groupware decentralizes communication and control across existing institutional boundaries, often leading to organizational change. We will share how Georgia Gwinnett College applies CSCW challenges to select, deploy, and evaluate collaborative technology.

A community collecting and organizing the best information on the web about eLearning