Group items tagged

"It isn't a completely introductory level document, but should be useful and informative for people who have a responsibility care towards children and young people - including governors, principals and senior management teams, Safeguarding boards and local authorities - people who are making decisions concerning educational provision and resourcing. It will also be very handy for anyone working within the sector and wanting to use internet based services with young people."

A group looking to extend education beyond testing and into life skills. "A gulf has opened up between what education systems provide and what children and young people need. Our schools and colleges rightly try to to ensure that young people are literate, numerate and gain academic qualifications. But the emphasis on testing and passing exams often squeezes out other skills that are just as vital in today's world. The leading non-political and non-profit-making organisations that have come together to form Whole Education are determined to change this. They want all young people to receive a well-rounded education that they can relate to. They want all to learn practical skills such as communication and teamwork, to develop qualities such as resilience and empathy and to acquire knowledge that goes beyond literacy and numeracy to an understanding of our culture. A Whole Education will combine practical skills with theory, vocational and academic study for all young people whatever their ability."

FB is associating 'likes' with people without their knowledge.

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?

What Are People Doing Online?

OCW Finder helps people find free online courses called OpenCourseWares (OCWs). Universities and other OCW providers can register their courses with OCW Finder to help people find them.

"The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."["

"Open Cobalt Alpha is the first step in a long term project to make available to all people a free and open source platform for constructing, accessing, and sharing virtual workspaces for research and education. This 3D multimedia wiki technology makes it easy to create deeply collaborative and hyperlinked multi-user virtual workspaces, virtual exhibit spaces, and game-based learning and training environments that run on all major software operating systems. By using a peer-based messaging protocol to reduce reliance on server infrastructures for support of basic in world interactions across many participants, Open Cobalt makes it possible for people hyperlink their virtual worlds via 3D portals to form a large distributed network of interconnected collaboration spaces. It also makes it possible for schools and other organizations to freely set up their own networks of public and private 3D virtual workspaces that feature integrated web browsing, voice chat, text chat, and access to remote desktop applications and services."

Hey guys. Just watched a live session online at Cisco w the developers of this system, still in development, but interesting differentiators vs 2Life, e.g. peer-to-peer, nested worlds, oh and its open-source. Thought yaz might be interested in tracking it.

Education people, groups, links, news, etc in Lists.

"At the end of the twentieth century, intellectual property rights collided with everyday life. Expansive copyright laws and digital rights management technologies sought to shut down new forms of copying and remixing made possible by the Internet. International laws expanding patent rights threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS by limiting their access to cheap generic medicines. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries; but recently, groups have emerged around the world to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counter-politics of "access to knowledge" or "A2K." They include software programmers who took to the streets to defeat software patents in Europe, AIDS activists who forced multinational pharmaceutical companies to permit copies of their medicines to be sold in poor countries, subsistence farmers defending their rights to food security or access to agricultural biotechnology, and college students who created a new "free culture" movement to defend the digital commons. Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property maps this emerging field of activism as a series of historical moments, strategies, and concepts. It gathers some of the most important thinkers and advocates in the field to make the stakes and strategies at play in this new domain visible and the terms of intellectual property law intelligible in their political implications around the world. A Creative Commons edition of this work will be freely available online."

"Teaching people 'how to' write an essay in Word, or 'how to' use shortcuts in their browser, or 'how to' use hashtags in Twitter is the same as giving them fish, rather than teaching them how to fish."

"A new UK-focussed report published by Childnet International aims to support teachers and lecturers who wish to explore the use of social networking services by young people. In this guest post, Josie Fraser, the report's author, explains more."

New search engine for people. Seems fairly accurate - well searching for me anyway!

Coursera now passing student details to employers (with the students permission - opt in). Allows people to seek work through the courses they have done.

From Jane Hart - Diagram of roles for people like us and where we should be working.

Excellent post on the blindness of the majority to discrimination on their part - often unintended but still existing because of their position of power.  It's something that we need to be conscious of since we all come from a position of being white, middle class, and majority male. It's not what we do in the office (but still needs to be applied there!) but how we think about the people we support and also how they might design for their classes.

"If you want to find out why people might become engaged in OER and Open educational practices (OEP) then you might like to look at the Motivations section. If you are interested in looking at the range of models and approaches adopted for OER Release then the Models page may be useful for you. If you want to know about the impact of the HEFCE funding then we have an Impact section. We have drawn together some critical factors to support OEP for those that want some tips on how to go about this themselves. We have a section that highlights tensions and challenges around OEP and the OER journeys section provides an interesting look at the wider context and how the HEFCE-funded initiatives fit into that. We also offer recommendations. If you contributed to our surveys, polls and interviews then we have a series of supplementary appendices and you can look at out methodology and evidence pages - all available from the main report page http://bit.ly/HEFCEoerReview. We have also produced a summary briefing paper."

"Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we've noticed that not everyone feels the same way. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to "chill" legitimate activity. The website offers background material and explanations of the law for people whose websites deal with topics such as Fan Fiction, Copyright, Domain Names and Trademarks, Anonymous Speech, and Defamation."

Interesting tool I came across after following a discussion about people changing their CC licence and then end users struggling to prove that they had fairly used under an earlier license. "mageStamper is a free tool for keeping dated, independently verified copies of license conditions associated with creative commons images. You can use it to safeguard your use of free images from license changes, or to prove you are the original image creator."