Free Full Online Courses by Stanford University – Spring 2012 « Enzo Silva blog
Several universities world-wide have made their courseware available in different formats over the years. A very popular format is that of podcasts on iTunesU or video lectures on Youtube. See, for instance, this broad list of “free courseware” offerings by major universities. Yale, for example, has made several past lectures available on their Open Yale website. The Open University lets students try course materials for free on their OpenLearn resources page, which. Often, these courses are nothing but pre-recorded videos and audio elements (not full interactive courses) made public by the universities as a form of community outreach (which is already great, don’t get me wrong). However, Stanford University is blazing trails for open online courseware. The current Spring 2012 semester offerings include courses on an eclectic variety subjects ranging from Computer Science to Game Theory, from Anatomy to Linguistics: by Nick Parlante by Armando Fox and David Patterson
RiTa
now with one API for Java, JavaScript, Node, & Android! RiTa† is designed to be an easy-to-use toolkit for experiments in natural language and generative literature. The philosophy behind the API is to be as simple and intuitive as possible, while still providing adequate flexibility for more advanced tasks. RiTa is implemented in Java and JavaScript with a single API and optionally integrates with Processing. It is free/libre and open-source via a GPL license. Some of the features of RiTa/RiTaJS include: Text-generation via Context-Free Grammars and Markov-chainsTaggers for Syllables, Phonemes, Stress, Part-of-Speech, etc. Based on the RiTa library for Java, RiTaJS was developed to provide a seamless transition for those wishing to work with programmatic natural language natively in the web browser (in HTML5), as well as for those switching from Processing to ProcessingJS. † from the old Norse, meaning to mark, scratch, or scribble
Google Forms Branching – Digital Story Telling « Enzo Silva blog
The Google Apps team published a blog post explaining improvements to the Forms tool allowing form creators to easily configure branching of pages depending on the respondent’s choice for every question. This feature has a lot of potential for digital story telling. Teachers or students can create interactive stories that evolve with the reader’s every choice. In fact, the Google Apps team emphasizes this possible use on that same blog post with the sample interactive adventure “The Hunt for the terrible Dr. von Schneider”. It is a short little adventure but it illustrates the concept fairly well. Based on the Google Apps team’s post, as easy as 1, 2, 3: 1. 2. 3. Like this: Like Loading...
Open Books and TextBooks Online, Free « Enzo Silva blog
Taking after the movement of open source (free – as in freedom) software development, knowledge and information has also been “open sourced” (and crowdsourced) as new Web technologies allow for flexibility and ease of online collaboration in generating content. Textbooks are now on the same route and here are a few interesting resources for those who are tired of paying absurd prices for academia content out there. Let’s t get all of our mind and expertise together and share knowledge more wisely than the good ol’ authoritative knowledge consumption models allow us to… Question: Why don’t more experts and professors join the trend of open books? WikiBooks – From the same company that maintains WikiPedia, this is an incredible collection of open books in any subject imaginable. Flat World Knowledge - This website’s goal is to share quality, peer-reviewed books in many areas of expertise. Open Book Project - They still don’t have much in their collection of books. Like this: Like Loading...
free SCORM-Compliant eLearning Platform
Odijoo is a free course authoring tool designed to fit the needs of a variety of audiences. Odijoo makes e-Learning simple and quick for anyone – from the novice, looking for a quick way to place their content online and start teaching, to the expert who wants to host them SCORM content for free. To show Odijoo’s versatility, we’ve put together this list of 3 easy ways for you to author your courses for free in Odijoo, whether you’re a beginner, intermediate or advanced user. 1. Easy Course Authoring for the Beginner By far the easiest way to author courses in Odijoo, is to create a classroom and upload files into it, such as PDFs or PowerPoints. To add a PDF or PowerPoint to Odijoo, simply create a classroom, and add your resources to it. 2. Rapid Course authoring is a good option for users who require a more advanced course authoring method than simply adding resources, yet still require a fast and easy-to-use solution. 3.
