LoomWare

Effective Practice in a Digital Age : JISC

Exemplars in Learning in the Digital Age

Interesting new version of a 2004 JISC report that outlines key issues in the goal of integrating technology more effectively into teaching and learning. The case studies alone make a perusal of the document worthwhile.

Academic Earth: Video Lectures By Top Scholars

Interesting Higher Ed Video Site

I managed to take a peek at a couple of the videos on this site and it looks promising. I didn't see any real prominent note re Creative Commons or any other license, but given the players I can only assume that the content would be freely accessible?

Scraped from Reference Notes

New Book Opening Up Education

Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge: John Seely Brown, Toru Iiyoshi, M. S. Vijay Kumar

I'm a big fan of John Seely Brown so will go out on a limb and recommend this book without having read it yet. From the blurb:

Given the abundance of open education initiatives that aim to make educational assets freely available online, the time seems ripe to explore the potential of open education to transform the economics and ecology of education. Despite the diversity of tools and resources already available—from well-packaged course materials to simple games, for students, self-learners, faculty, and educational institutions—we have yet to take full advantage of shared knowledge about how these are being used, what local innovations are emerging, and how to learn from and build on the experiences of others. Opening Up Education argues that we must develop not only the technical capability but also the intellectual capacity for transforming tacit pedagogical knowledge into commonly usable and visible knowledge: by providing incentives for faculty to use (and contribute to) open education goods, and by looking beyond institutional boundaries to connect a variety of settings and open source entrepreneurs.

These essays by leaders in open education describe successes, challenges, and opportunities they have found in a range of open education initiatives. They approach—from both macro and micro perspectives—the central question of how open education tools, resources, and knowledge can improve the quality of education. The contributors (from leading foundations, academic institutions, associations, and projects) discuss the strategic underpinnings of their efforts first in terms of technology, then content, and finally knowledge. They also address the impact of their projects, and how close they come to achieving a vision of sustainable, transformative educational opportunities that amounts to much more than pervasive technology.

Contributors: Richard Baraniuk, Randy Bass, Trent Batson, Dan Bernstein, John Seely Brown, Barbara Cambridge, Tom Carey, Catherine Casserly, James Dalziel, Bernadine Chuck Fong, Richard Gale, Gerard Hanley, Diane Harley, Mary Huber, Pat Hutchings, Toru Iiyoshi, David Kahle, M. S. Vijay Kumar, Andy Lane, Diana Laurillard, Stuart Lee, Steve Lerman, Marilyn Lombardi, Phil Long, Clifford Lynch, Christopher Mackie, Anne Margulies, Owen McGrath, Flora McMartin, Shigeru Miyagawa, Diana Oblinger, Neeru Paharia, Cheryl Richardson, Marshall Smith, Candace Thille, Edward Walker, and David Wiley

Effective Practice with e-Portfolios : JISC

New Report on ePortfolios

I haven't read this one yet but it sounded like a must read for those, like UPEI, implementing ePortfolios. We are moving ahead with a simple model as represented by the Exabis system for Moodle. Exabis enables a personal portfolio approach that is simple and accessible - each Moodle user gets an ePortfolio that follows them from course to course, knows which course they are in when adding material, allows items to be shared with a specific group or the larger public, etc. A bit from the summary of the JISC report.

Initiatives and national policies can drive forward an agenda for change, but the real test comes at the point of use. Emerging, often powerful evidence from practitioners and learners of the value of developing e-portfolios provides another strong rationale for reconsidering the role of e-portfolios in learning and teaching. Cutting-edge research and development projects funded by JISC and other agencies also indicate further potential that is not yet fully exploited – for example, in facilitating the transition between institutions and stages of education, and in supporting staff appraisal and applications for professional accreditation. But perhaps the most pressing reason for taking a closer look at e-portfolios is the indication that use of these tools can promote more profound forms of learning.

Effective Practice with e-Portfolios uses the outcomes of recent significant projects and examples from current practice to explore how e-portfolios can add value to personalised and reflective models of learning. Drawing on the work of key national agencies and organisations and on excellent practice and recent initiatives by institutions and professional bodies, the guide illustrates a wide variety of e-portfolio use across further, higher and continuing education.

ePresence: Open Source Software at Its Best

I love it when someone makes great open source software and knows how to make it work for you. The ePresence TV system is a great example of that. I used the system when at the University of Winnipeg 4 or 5 years ago and had the pleasure of seeing how the system has evolved this week at UPEI.

We wanted to be able to record lectures, stream them live and make them available via an archive. Not necessarily a huge issue these days, but to do it right takes time and a lot of work before and after. I called the ePresence people (based at the KMDI at the University of Toronto) on Thursday, we received the ePresence capture hardware unit the next day, plugged it in and performed a test in the lab, set it up in the lecture hall Monday and recorded the live lecture Tuesday. Not a hitch (except for a mic hum, now fixed and some funny slide titles, now being fixed) and it allowed us to take an overflow crowd of 70 and set them up in another lecture hall so they could watch it on the big screen. 20 minutes after the 1-hour lecture the presentation (video, audio and synced powerpoint slides) was available on the archive site, which is for now a server at U of Toronto (at the reasonable rate of $75/month). Not a hitch. How often does that happen with any software system?

Kudos to the talented crew at ePresence: if you have a need for a shrink-wrapped webcasting system go direct to ePresence and support this great open source project. The latest version of the software (which is also available as an OS download) provides advanced features such as remote scheduling and recording, seamless integration with Moodle. Take a look at the opening Global Issues 151 session by President Wade MacLauchlan and see how it looks.

Basic Academic Skills Videos

Use the Skills of Students

I had the privilege of working with one of our education students this summer on an Inukshuk funded project called Basic Academic Skills. Amy Kelly (starting her 2nd year in the Ed program this month) was hired to create a series of videos providing high school and freshman university students with a different perspective on how to be successful. Not all the videos are available yet, but I thought they would be of interest to the larger community as Amy continues to work on them. Amy has done an awesome job of capturing the basic elements and she also has a very creative approach to her design. The videos are available under a Creative Commons license:

Basic Academic Skills by Amy Kelly, University of PEI is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
Based on a work at library.upei.ca.

We would also appreciate feedback on the videos, so please feel free to do so via the comments feature of the blog.

Special Section of the Guardian

JISC and the Guardian on Academic Libraries

special insert for the Guardian newspaper and worth a read - the evolution of academic libraries in the new digital age.

Open Source and Blogging Dal SIM Student

I am doing a reading course with a couple of great students at Dalhousie's School of Information Management this year. Open source is the theme of the course and the students have been asked to reflect on their work via a blog. Two students are working together on a library system for the Anchor zine library and they are looking at Koha and Drupal - see http://blog.anchorarchive.ath.cx/. The third student is looking at UPEI's VRE implementation, including taking part in our development meetings via Skype - see http://seductivedetails.wordpress.com/. It is great to have the opportunity to see library school students learning more about open source (every library school should have at least one course on open source!), so if you have a chance to check their posts and maybe offer a few suggestions it would be a great way to show them how the open source community works.

Key Workers on the OLPC Project

Fortnightly Mailing: Key workers on the One Laptop Per Child project talk about the project

An interesting look at some of the people working on the One Laptop Per Child project. $100 each. Wow.

Scraped from Fortnightly Mailing

If Life Gets Any Easier...

I'm Going to Retire.

I just tried out Jing from TechSmith (thanks to Dave Cormier) for the first time and I'm in love. These guys know how to create software. Jing is a dead easy way to create screencasts, or as Dave likes to call them, Disposable Learning Objects. Just download the software (Windows or Mac) and when run it loads a little Sun-ish looking icon in the corner of the screen (can be changed to run in the menu bar). Clicking the Capture "ray" allows you to capture an image, or more likely, a video (with audio) of a section of your screen. I can't imagine a more effective way of building information literacy widgets for your students. They could even be done on the fly after a virtual reference session and loaded up to ScreenCast to serve to the student you are helping now, or in the future. Once you get used to ripping out a few screencasts quickly you will wonder how you ever got along without them. The added bonus is the immediate sharing with colleagues via the ScreenCast site. You can also save the video as a SWF file, so keeping your own archive locally would be a good idea.