Group items tagged

"Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any ereader within minutes. Create books on your own or with others via an easy-to-use web interface. Build a community around your content with social tools and use the reach of mobile, tablet and ebook technology to engage new audiences."

Infographic on online education providers that offer online courses - including ones that are free and well known such Coursera & Udacity as well as others that are less well known  which charge subscription fees such as Benchprep and The Great Courses. 

Take photos and have them appear instantly on a Google+ event stream. Would be great at conferences and other events.

A couple of useful suggestions esp on organising and getting other voices involved.

"Learning Space as Creation Space The next generation of learning spaces will take all the characteristics of an active learning environment-flexibility, collaboration, team-based, project-based-and add the capability of creating and making. Project teams will be both interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary and will likely need access to a broad array of technologies. High-speed networks, video-based collaboration, high-resolution visualization, and 3-D printing are but a few of the digital tools that will find their way into the learning space. The ability to rearrange furniture and technology quickly and easily will be highly desirable. Some project activities will need nothing more than comfortable furniture, food, and caffeine. Others will require sophisticated computational analysis and the ability to do rapid prototyping. Acoustics will be a concern and will need to accommodate a wide range of activities. It seems likely that such space will support more than one team or activity simultaneously. That will be a highly desirable trait, fostering serendipitous discovery and innovation. The ability to quickly and easily capture the group's activities and progress will also be desirable. An emerging class of powerful and effective collaboration tools enables project teams to save and store project elements, resources, concepts, plans, designs, models, and renderings-in short, all the "stuff" that a team might find or make."

While DRM has largely been defeated in downloaded music, it is a growing problem in the area of ebooks, where people have had their books restricted so they can't freely loan, re-sell or donate them, read them without being tracked, or move them to a new device without re-purchasing all of them. They've even had their ebooks deleted by companies without their permission. It continues to be a major issue in the area of movies and video too. Join us in working to eliminate DRM! This is the fourth year we've run the international Day Against DRM. In previous years we've focused on music, held events at the Boston Public Library and more! On May 4th, the Defective by Design DRM Elimination Crew will of course be running an event in Boston. But for this day to send a strong message against DRM, we need people all over the world to join us and hold their own events! As well as attending or running events, you can join other activists in blogging about DRM, putting up banners on your Web sites and blogs, talking about DRM on your social networks and more.

Moodle doesn't encourage good course design. Interesting post by James Clay and it gives me 2 thoughts.  Should we change the way we start people off on Moodle so course design comes first and then some mechanics.  The other thought is could we write a wizard (or some such thing) that leads people through the big picture design of their course and then helps them populate it with appropriate elements?

Scott Wilson reports on an open source initiative to develop web app stores for universities and other communities.

Create announcements in Sites from a calendar. Plus access lots of other tips on working in Apps.

"Individual [OER] projects have been getting institutional buy-in to OER release, particularly where it can be shown to support other, existing, priorities and strategies, such as sustainability, lowering environmental impact, or marketing."<--true of all projects?

A few months ago, I discovered MentorMob (MM), which allows any user to create "learning playlists" to share or open up to other fellow learners who might want to add or edit the content in the playlist. The end product is the ultimate learning tool for students, especially when the playlist is populated with high-quality content, including visual, audio and interactive elements. MM playlists make sense because they "scaffold" learning in a very visual and intuitive way. The lists are simple to make, follow, edit, co-author and collaborate. "

Graphing connection in social networks.

Like most marriages, the tie between citizens and the big corporations that dominate the web is one of both great joy and intense resentment. On the one hand, they are very good at helping us with web chores: Need information? Google has more of the stuff than you could ever process. Want to keep in touch with friends? Facebook eliminates the need to pick up the phone. On the other, they do not always give us the space we need. Privacy, it seems, is becoming the thorn in the side of this marriage of convenience.

"I use a version of the "garden method" in my classes at Duke, requiring each student to make at least two public contributions to knowledge, where they translate something they learned in the class to some online forum where others can make use of their learning and respond to it."

"Any pedagogical design which relies, in essential terms, on homework is a problem for me, and many others."

the Group Pattern Language Project's exciting new deck of 91 full-colour cards to help facilitators and participants make their group process work more effective. The deck is accompanied by a 5-panel explanatory legend card and a booklet describing the purpose of the deck, how it evolved, and some ideas for games and other activities using the deck.

This controversial anti-piracy legislation is all about studios and other corporations making excuses for their technological backwardness and looking out for their short-term profit

This booklet is intended to provide to all, both near and far, who are concerned with the creation, circulation and transfer of knowledge replies to certain questions they may have on the subject of copyright. It has no other objective than to clarify a complicated subject by translating legal language into language that can be easily understood by everyone.

Account of a copyright agreement between 2 Canadian Unis and a licensing agency which increases the cost per student 8-fold and breaks ranks with other Canadian unis.  Troubling developments.