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.)

Aluka: Building a digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa

For those interested in Open Resources in Africa, a quickie. Since 2008 Aluka has build a strong portal for African resources. Although the contact address is situated in Princeton, USA, there are a lot of African partners. Especially if you are interested in botanical information, this is a great resource.

From their website: "Aluka's success depends upon contributions of content from the global research and scholarly community. Aluka has benefited tremendously through contributions from dozens of partners and institutions around the world. These efforts have laid a strong foundation; by the beginning of 2008, the digital library included more than 320 000 digital objects. In the spirit of collaboration and partnership, we invite contributions from all segments of the academic community: faculty, researchers, libraries, repositories, archives, universities, learned societies, and publishers."

So if you have relevant information, you might want to upload information to Aluka.

eLearning predictions from across the globe

While roaming the net I came across a lot of predictions for 2009. While reading just a couple of predictions is fun, reading a variety of opinions and future visions gives a holistic idea of what lives in the minds of all these great eLearning people. Patterns do emerge.

It is amazing how up-beat most of the predictions are considering the gloomy economic shadow that haunts the world right now. Does it mean eLearners are more optimistic then the average person? Is it because we tend to look for the best? Or are we just happy people with so much bagage that nothing can stop us?

Maybe we could organize some sort of lotery? At the end of the year the people who got close to the achieved facts in 2009 wins.... an open source software?

A short link overview:

• Lisa Neal Gualtieri from the renowned eLearn magazine has captured the ideas of eLearning professionals in short inspiring paragraphs.
• For a great futuristic list, watch these predictions from the editor's of futurist magazine. Editors' top 10 forecasts for 2009.
• Or an incredibel list of predictions from Raj Boora with very detailed and specific points.
• FrankWatching is taking a look at Trends in eLearning (in Dutch)

‘Cartoon by Nick D Kim, nearingzero.net. Used by permission.’

My eLearning predictions for 2009

What will 2009 give us? Whatever we want it to give us, I imagine. And I imagine 2009 will give us: content, social media, educational policies and ... mobile learning.

First of all why should any of us learn? No matter how restricted your life has become, if you study you increase your chances to pick-up life once chances come along. My inspiring example: during imprisonment on Robben Island Nelson Mandela studied Bachelor of Laws from the University of London External Program. He never gave up hope and he kept investing in his knowledge and his future.

So let me give you my predictions for 2009. The media is filled with gloomy tidings these last few months. The world is in an economical crisis and both companies, organisations, institutions and especially the people in them will be affected by it. Traditionally eLearning, or training in general, is downsized during economically challenged periods... but will this be a wise thing in this case? No this time it would be the stupidest thing to do. Trust knowledge and expand it in your organisation.

I think that this time investing in (e)Learning will make or break companies and organizations. The world is evolving from an industrial age into a knowledge age, so content will become key in 2009. If a company can profile itself as a strong knowledgeable organisation/company, they will attract more people that are willing to collaborate with them. If your organisation is allowing its personal or employees to learn the latest in their field of expertise, it will make all the difference in any competitive market.

Partly because of this social media use will increase because it saves money as it keeps knowledge in a central place (quick retrievability, international access…). This is something all of the knowledge workers know, but that is not always seen as a positive evolution by management. But in this world one person no longer knows it all, it is our networks that make the difference and thanks to the networks knowledge workers and people around the world grow continuously.

Emerging and finalized educational policies will enable educational institutions to come to terms with new learning technologies. This will make a significant difference. In the past too much legislations suddenly banned new technologies (portables, cell phones, social media) from the classrooms. This resulted in a growing gap between the students' real life, their teachers and parents knowledge of new media and the new media that are out there. To ban new media from educational institutions will only result in bigger unwanted use of these new media. Policies can make students, teachers and parents aware of the dangers, but also of the benefits of using new technologies in the classroom.

Mobile learning will keep on growing. Especially in developing countries as landlines are skipped in those regions. Mobile learning is still missing solid educational frameworks and the use is not optimal yet, but ... more and more people use their mobile devices to get access to content and information.

I wish you all a fantastic 2009 in which you will see your wishes come true.

The Christmas wave out: adding audio to blogposts

Just before I am zooming off into my (much longed for) Christmas holiday, just a post about an easy to install widget I added to my blog.

It is just a small addition, but it makes all the blogposts more accessible. I have added the free (you have to sign in though) audio widget from odiogo. This widget allows visitors to click on the audio version of any blogpost. Odiogo uses text-to-speech software to convert your posts into an audio format. It was amazingly easy to install (click on the URL, go down in the window and click on 'free sign up' in the blogger part of the window, enter your blog and email, and here you go).

For next year I have a plan, so hope is born. Yes! I will be working on the realization of this eLearning plan during the Christmas holiday (ooohh, the pleasure and inspiration!).

I hope you all have a GREAT end of the year and that you will have inspiring ideas, eLearning inspiration and A LOT of FUN! A quick image of my hometown (Gent) and happy wishes to all.

WiZiQ session about three mobile cases

Last Friday 12 December 2008 at 4:00 PM (GMT + 1) I gave a presentation in collaboration with the renowned International Training Centre (ITC) in Turin, Italy. If you are interested the online session I gave on three mobile cases in development and developed at ITM can be viewed here.

In order to view it, you need to make yourself a member of WiZiQ (= free) and you need to sign in to WiZiQ in order to get permission to view the session. The session allows you to hear what was said and which questions were raised.

After you have registered (or if you are already a member) surf to this link and click on 'view recording'.

If you are interested in the powerpoint, but you do not feel like going through the session (60 minutes), then you can just look at the powerpoint I used for this presentation. If you want to you can also download it and test out all the links that are mentioned on it. The presentation is an updated version of a previous one with more relevant links.

During the session I mention other mobile resources that I blogged about in the past, you can find all the posts here.

Mobile Learning Three Cases And Discussion

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: mobile learning developing countries)

The session went well, but I always find it a pity that I cannot immediately show the things I talk about. Sometimes the questions are related to not having seen the mobile methods that I describe or not having felt the accessibility (or lack of) of mobile courses. I should think about bridging this gap in a future session.

Mobile ways to teach business and medical skills, plus a look at the changing face of e-learning…

During the last Online Educa Berlin, podcasts were recorded all through the conference. In one of them you can hear a bit of what we (= the eLearning team) does at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium. But what is really interesting to hear is the podcast part of Michael Wesch.

This is the link to the mp3-version (19 min in total). For the complete podcast with time, click here.

The podcast is the third and final part of Thursday’s coverage from ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2008 where we meet with more of the contributors to the conference and discuss their topics in more detail.

1 - Mathew Constantine, IE Business School (0m.30s) talks about using mobile phones to deliver market simulations and learning nuggets to students on business courses.

2 - Inge de Waard, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Belgium (6m.01) shows us how mobiles are being used to spread health information as part of a blended offering in the developing world.

3 - Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Kansas State University, US (10m.02s) shares his insights and thoughts on the future of education, particularly focussing on a global perspective.

a quicky post: MIT mobile web

The Open Course ware that MIT has been delivering for years is renowned. Last month they launched there mobile web.

If you have not tried it yet, visit the mobile site.

For some background information on their framework:

Developing the MIT Mobile Web

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: source open)

a Dutch audio learning innovation that blew my mind: Vociz

(no longer) Try out Vociz!

This is one great invention coming from Erwin De Vries, put to my attention by the ever great blogger Willem Karssenberg, aka trendmatcher (in Dutch). Erwin teaches German at the Willem Lodewijk Gymnasium in Groningen. He has developed a Voicemailboard which allows everyone with flash enabled computers to post mp3-messages in a really easy fashion (= no installation, just push record, play back to ensure and send to yourself and the voicerecord keeper to add it to all of the recordings).

Although the layout of this embeded feature is in Dutch, I heard that Erwin has offered Vociz to students in Denmark and Greece also. So if you are interested, do not hesitate and contact him.

Yes, you do have voicethread, but just give this application a try. It is really incredibly user-friendly and immediate. You can feel it is developed by a teacher. It enables students to exchange audio comments asynchronously without the hassle of downloading, installing, registering. Really great.

Just imagine a couple of students that need to do some language exercises (oral exercises). Then you simply implement this in their learning environment and off they go. I should send this to the Basque learning innovator Antoine Bidegain in France... he is always looking for easy access language tools.

At this moment Vociz is still in Dutch, but you can try it out by recording something right now (please do, the ease will astound you I am sure).

How to use it:

• click on Vociz embed;
• (it might be that a java pop-up appears);
• click on the upper tab 'recorder';
• start recording with a microphone;
• fill in your email address;
• click the 'vociz it!' button.

But be aware, you only have 30 seconds!

I was thrilled by this :-)

Join the live Wiziq session on 3 mobile cases in low resource settings with discussion

This Friday 12 December 2008 at 4:00 PM (GMT + 1) I will be giving a presentation in collaboration with the International Training Centre (ITC) in Turin, Italy.

This virtual classroom session is part of the Lifelong eLearning session that the International Training Centre of Turin, Italy organises. The session will focus on three mobile cases that were developed (or are in development) at the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) in Antwerp, Belgium.

I will try to keep the presentation of the cases to a minimum of 15 - 20 minutes, allowing the international participants to ask questions and thus all of us can collaborate in this session of 60 minutes.
If possible, please use a head-set with microphone. This will enable us all to enhance interactivity and collaboration.

Joining this session is free, but you need to follow a couple of steps:
Do these steps before the start of the session (that way you can make sure you can follow without a problem).

• First you need to 'join for free', by clicking that button on the WiZiQ website ;
• After joining you will receive a mail in which the confirmation code is send (it is send immediately, so if you do not see it pop-up immediately, look at your junk-mail folder):
• login to the wiziq site using your Wiziq username and password;
• click on the link session below to enter the session;
• after checking your audio/video settings, accept the settings;
  
• log-in to the session a couple of minutes in advance. This will allow you to check your microphone and headset.

Looking forward to seeing you!

Session link: http://www.wiziq.com/tutorsession/detail.aspx?id=A701A7F1799B4722ADE616015D0747FB



You can also use this embedded code, but you need to register with Wiziq just the same:

mobile learning: three cases and discussion by Ignatia

Get your own Virtual Classroom