William Ian O'Byrne sur Twitter : "Why Open Educational Resources (OERs) are Important for Critical Pedagogues #open. Why OERs are Important for Critical Pedagogues — Hybrid Ped. Few things annoy me more than burning time on bureaucratic paperwork. Frankly, as an educator, my time and attention should be centered on students and learning — and that includes modifying and selecting readings and resources.
Finding fresh critical pedagogical articles that connect pop culture and critical thinking, for example, is not only more interesting to me professionally than revising course outcomes to match accreditation evaluation rubrics, but such articles are more useful and engaging for my students. Plus, such articles can support critical thinking skills and connecting these skills with media in students’ lives. While some administrators might disagree, few educators would. Making this “idealistic” hope happen is a challenge. One possible path to this solution: reconceive how we as individuals approach Open Educational Resources (OERs) and our use of educational technologies.
OERs are arguably convivial tools for several reasons. William Ian O'Byrne sur Twitter : "Why MOOCs are great for teacher development #OpenEducationWk #OER #open. Why MOOCs are great for teacher development. William Ian O'Byrne sur Twitter : "Great reading on learner engagement in MOOCs #open. Reading: Learner engagement in MOOCs. After attending a FutureLearn partners webinar about designing online courses, the age-old issue of encouraging and engaging learners in online communication came up.
It made me reflect on my past posts about online learning, specifically this one: MOOCs – 9 points on what I like, and what I don’t. If you want to go and read it before carrying on, be my guest. Hurry back! Glad you came back. What annoys me about MOOCs, and some people who design online courses in general, is the assumption that everything you build will be used, and be used the way you want it to be used. VLEs are somewhat to blame for the apathy or lack of engagement in online activities, especially discursive or forums or comment sections – you’re locked into one specific tool for engagement. From my above post Carolyn from MoocLab commented about one of her articles, and I admit to being remiss and not reading it until now – Why MOOC forums fail to deliver.
“Forum management and content are key. William Ian O'Byrne sur Twitter : "Commentary on "Moving from openness advocacy to research" #OER #open George Siemens David... Commentary on "Moving from openness advocacy to research" 2 min read Excellent piece from George Siemens discussing a recent post from David Wiley and the Babson OER survey. I agree with the points made by George and David. I think there still needs to be a good amount of advocacy for OER. This is part of the magic that has made open, and OER what it is.
Additionally, in my work with other initiatives (Mozilla Web Literacy, badges, Connected Learning) advocacy is an important part that we don't want to ignore. Many times we're fighting for the hearts and minds of learners. I would also suggest that the field needs research, and we also need publications. We also need more publications. For more context on the Babson Report, please review these posts from Phil Hill. e-LIterate LINK 20mm LINK. William Ian O'Byrne sur Twitter : Don’t like Facebook owning/controlling your content? Use tools that support #open #indieweb. Don’t like Facebook owning and controlling your content? Use tools that support the open Web. When it comes to content — personal or professional — Facebook is a classic double-edged sword: it has such incredible reach that you almost have to use it, and it can drive huge amounts of traffic to your content. But at the same time it is a classic walled garden, run by a black-box algorithm that uplifts or down-ranks content for reasons that are completely unknown to anyone outside of the company’s ranks of developers.
So how do you work with it, and not give all the power over your content to a proprietary platform? Blogging and RSS pioneer Dave Winer has one potential solution: work with Facebook, but make sure the blog or site you control remains primary. Winer’s latest blogging tool posts simultaneously to Facebook and a self-hosted blog — and unlike other tools that do this, any changes or updates to the blog version are automatically reflected in the Facebook version as well.
Facebook wins, but so can you Supporting the “indie web” Why is this so important? OER and open learning…part 2. Wiobyrne : Episode 004 of Digitally Literate... Digitally Literate (DL) Episode 004 – Writing and Publishing Openly Online. Wiobyrne : Read 700 Free eBooks Made... Plus.google. Wiobyrne : More impetus for alternative... Plus.google. Fplus. NSA Concedes Hadoop Beats Its Pricey Alternatives – ReadWrite. GeoData Explorations: Open Street Map's Growth - O'Rei. Open Street Map (OSM), the open data mapping project, has grown a lot over the past year. It now has almost 80,000 users and 800 million data points. OSM’s data is still freely available, but commercial services around it have sprung up. Cloudmade is a startup that recently moved from the UK to San Francisco to be closer to investors and try to build up their US data. GeoFabrik is a German startup with similar plans (just focused on Germany).
Flickr has been making use of it lately to supplement Yahoo’s Mapping data (specifically Black Rock City, Beijing, Kabul and Baghdad). The above image is Planet – A Year Of Edits On OpenStreetMap. This cartogram shows the distribution of POIs (Points of Interest) in the OSM data set. If you’re not familiar with cartograms go explore Worldmapper, it’s an amazing site filled with them. The above graph shows the number of registered (and presumably contributing) OSM users and the number of uploaded track points.