Open and Free Seminar: Open Educational Resources: January 19 - February 8, 2009

This seminar is part of the free educational seminars that are organized by ScoPE, a Canadian resource with seminars on all kinds of distance education topics.

This seminar interests me because it will focus on open educational resources which is a topic that is both supporting education for all, as well as dubious if you consider that the most techy regions can publish much more material, hence push (inadvertadly) their regions agenda.

It is my believe (well, along with a lot of others out there :-) that online learning is opening up the traditional educational system and creates new spaces in which different cultural groups can explore their own educational methodologies and especially build their own content. This will in its turn deliver insights in different topics with a variety in content delivery methods that can be used by all at suitable moments in their life or professional sphere.

From the scope website:
Title of the seminar: Open Educational Resources: January 19 - February 8, 2009
Facilitator: Scott Leslie
The availability of Open Educational Resources is increasing almost daily. High quality learning materials from reputable institutions are available in many disciplines for both instructors to reuse or student self-study.

This seminar will explore ways to find resources, issues with creating and licensing them, and techniques for starting to share, both institutional projects and personally.

The seminar will be led by Scott Leslie. Scott manages the BCcampus Shareable Online Learning Resources service, the Freelearning.ca site, and is deeply involved with open content and personal learning.

Live Session
This seminar will kick off January 19 with a live session via Elluminate at 19:00 GMT, 11:00 a.m. PST (see world clock)

We are gathering our resources into a Wiki.

(Cartoon by Nick D Kim, nearingzero.net.)

Round up fact sheet for the seminar on Social Media – Benefits for researchers

During the seminar on Social Media – Benefits for researchers I facilitated on SCoPE all the participants discussed the following topics:

Are you a social media sceptic or evangelist? Which lead to a discussion on the definition of social media. Most of the participants were partly sceptic and evangelist. The evangelists all pointed to the extras of using social media (communication, exchange of knowledge, building a network). But the sceptic part covered the height to which social media is hyped at this moment and the fact that it increases the workload and the amount of knowledge you need to organize/respond to.

To keep from becoming a sceptic it was important to get metrics going on personal social media apps (like sitemeter or cluster maps) or any feedback that shows non-commenting visitors statistics.

There was also a remark that the impact/benefits of social media are still not very clear and metrics are important. It was said that too few innovators and early adopters are actually using Web 2.0 technology to enhance existing learning behaviours (as this article concludes).

Net etiquette: where a 10 step list for net etiquette was posted addressing people that you want to enrol in a discussion forum or learners that start with adding comments in social media.

Discussion on open or closed research, we called it: research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!
A couple of gurus (Jean-Claude Bradley and Cameron Neylon) on open science joined this discussion and pointed out some advantages of open science.

For anyone interested in an overview of social media benefits for researchers, there is a presentation on slideshare. This presentation was the core of the online discussion some of the SCoPE participants had with WiZiQ and which was facilitated by Ignatia de Waard.

Links on topic:
The computer-supported collaborative learning page.
A European research project on pedagogically sustained learning in CoP: the Palette program for anyone interested in learning research.

Categorizing Web2.0 apps
Webel: http://droopy.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webel/

Open science:
The open science blog openwetware .
Open knowledge share http://www.vision2lead.com/html/webinars.html
Open science chemistry http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/
Lexdis: http://www.lexdis.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Topics we did not cover to the full extend, but are related to the topic:
How would you subdivide social media apps with eLearning and/or research in mind?
Are teachers/coordinators using packages of social media with a distinction in the tools they offer depending on the work the learners are involved in?
How would you evaluate social media apps?

Thank you to all participants for making this a good discussion.

share your thoughts on these three topics with other eLearning professionals

The SCoPE seminar on social media benefits for researchers is going smoothly with lots of input from different eLearning experts.

So if you have any thoughts on:
research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!
Net-etiquette is crucial to make or break Web2.0!
How would you subdivide social media apps with eLearning and/or research in mind?
or any of the other topics...

Feel free to join SCoPE (its free and a great eLearning community) and share your ideas.

In relation to the SCoPE seminar on social media in research I am currently facilitating, I have planned a live session. So let’s get together and exchange ideas live on social media that is used in research, I have set up a session through WiZiQ.

After an intro of about 20 minutes in which I will give a short overview of the big outlines on social media and how it is linked to research, the floor will be completely opened to discuss possible thoughts and questions you might have. These questions can be the basis of discussion threads during the ongoing seminar in SCoPE.

Practical:
The session is planned for Thursday 8 May
12 PM Halifax, Nova Scotia time = ADT;
8 AM Vancouver, British Columbia time = PDT;
5 PM Brussels, Belgium time = CEST;
If you are not sure of your time zone, you can look it up at the World Clock.

You can access the online session here.

On WiZiQ
WiZiQ is a free tool. It is an online virtual classroom and allows interactivity (audio/video and chat and 'raising hands', the last feature enables you to ask for the virtual floor. The presenter can give you the floor (= give you the possibility to say something if you have a microphone connected to your computer).

To participate in this session, you need to register for WiZiQ.
Once you are registered you can access all the sessions for free, BUT you need to be signed in to be able to open the sessions!
This session is audio/video enabled, which means you can use a headset with microphone. This will enable you to give audio comments if you ask for the floor by raising your virtual hand.

Technical tips:

• it is a good idea to surf to the link a couple of minutes before the session starts. This allows you to test your audio/video devices.
• Please keep in mind that you need a headset with microphone if you are planning to talk. This enhances the audio quality, open speakers give the microphones a hard time.
• (a small side remark: if you have been using audio/video software during the day (f.e. for camtasia or captivate) and you want to link to WiZiQ, sometimes the settings are intertwined and do not function correctly. In that case you will have to log out and log in again.

Feel free to join!

join free online seminar on Social Media benefits for Researchers

SCoPE has invited me to facilitate a seminar on Social Media - Benefits for Researchers for which I am very grateful. The seminar begins this Wednesday May 7 and runs up until May 18, 2008. If you have ideas on the topic, mail them or join!

Short description: Social media provides opportunities to socialize, read, write, collaborate, aggregate, create, synthesize, track... How do we use social media for conducting research? What are our new research questions and strategies now that we have access to social media? All the interested participants will explore how social media can benefit our roles as researchers.

This forum will open on Wednesday May 7, 2008. On Wednesday I will post threads to start the discussion. I will also post questions or remarks I frequently get.

If you have ideas of your own or ideas that could stimulate the forum, please send them to me or join the seminar (it is free, you only need to register for SCoPE - also free - and then you can join all the ongoing seminars).

SCoPE brings together individuals who share an interest in educational research and practice through online forums. It is a Canadian initiative, open to the world.

Online seminar on First Nations Pedagogy for online Learning starts today

This seminar is part of the free educational seminars that are organized by ScoPE.

This seminar interests me because it will focus on exclusion of cultural diverse groups from traditional education and hopefully deliver a (set of) methodology that arrises from those groups, which will in its turn, include learners from diverse groups in (online) learning that is breaking out of traditional education.

This content interests me not only from my professional point of view (in a big part of the world oral tradition and learning are the norm and have been proven very helpful for delivering knowledge), but also on a very personal level. While following gender studies my eyes opened wide on all the different kind of gate keepers that prevented groups that did not belong to western power groups to be kept from power (power in the broad sense: education, politics, board positions in companies…). It also told me why only very few of my fellow students (from my local school filled with riffraff of which I am one) got into university.

But I am lucky, I was brought up with literature and a traditional western framework (competition, unspoken rules on how to interact with the roosters in the den…). So although I started out from a lower socio-economic class, my chances to grow where difficult, but within reach because some of them were taught to me from an early age.

But what if the framework you start out from is not based on competing or written tradition? It will affect your life in a profound way. Whether or not you accept this effect will be up to your personal character, but will inevidably result in different chances throughout your life.

Up until now the western (capitalist) framework crushed down on a large, very diverse group of people. It got them numbed and this very dominant policy has erased a lot of cultural heritage and self esteem, the basis of all respectfull communication. This very act of erasing alternative cultures an impact on learning models that were used by other groups, but were challenged within the dominant educational methods from traditional education.

It is my believe (well, along with a lot of others out there :-) that online learning is opening up the traditional educational system and creates new spaces in which different cultural groups can explore their own native educational methodologies. This will in its turn deliver insights in different methods which can then be used by all at suitable moments in their life or professional sphere.

In Belgian schools a lot of really good students fall through the net, because they do not have the skills the school system imposes. On the other hand some of those students go out into the world to become succesful inspite of having no degree. The educational system fails them, yet life safes them. A bit like fishing, you do not need a lot of theory, you must just observe and do it.

If educational methods would become more diverse, it could offer more students a solid background from which to embrace professional life. My hopes lies with cultural groups that have different learning methods, so I will be following this seminar with great interest.

(Cartoon by Nick D Kim, nearingzero.net.)