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Interesting site referred to in today's edition of Kevin Kruse's Newsletter :
Here's more evidence of the proliferation of free, quality educational resources on the Web that I came across this morning. I love the organisation's strap line: "Connect, collaborate, change your world!"
The Development Gateway Foundation's Open Educational Resources portal aims to equalize access to education and help people in developing countries improve their chances for a better life. The portal features free course materials and other educational content offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Chinese Open Resources for Education and other institutions around the world.
On my first browse through I found all sorts of interesting resources that would be useful at all levels, from primary school to tertiary, and some for community education. In the current climate of focus on the World's energy problems, Dr E's Energy Lab is one example that I found within a minute of visiting the portal.
The World Summit on an Information Society is currently under way in Tunisia, and it would seem that the most controversial aspect of this whole world summit hasn't been the ensuing fight of who should run the internet but where it is being hosted: Tunisia, with stories about the clampdown on freedom of speech by the government in Tunisia the main focus of most stories up to now!
Writing from the Summit, Kieren McCarthy provides an interesting insight to what is happening in her blog entry titled internet, freedom of speech and the UN I love the part that reports how the Tunisian government are paying the UN in Tunisian dinars - which are, unfortunately for everyone except the Tunisians, non-transferable
For more updates on what's happening at the Summit check out the official Summit website or you could try the Tunisian version
I stumbled across this interesting tool this morning...
Imagine if you could:
- Easily collaborate with team members and clients spread across the world
- Stream content from online storyboards directly to live Flash media
- Streamline the process of eLearning design and development, saving time and money in the process
The QMIND?? Design Collaboration Platform enables project teams to collaboratively author and produce rich, interactive multimedia content.
The Design Collaboration Platform is described as an on demand multimedia authoring solution that integrates all the processes involved specifically in e-learning and rich media design, including: storyboarding, instructional design, project management, asset management, QA, and client review & feedback.
I found the QMIND?? Flash Demo interesting to view if for no other reason than it provides a simple summary of the whole eLearning development and production process. It would have been great to have a tool like this when I was working at the Correspondence School!
Elliott Masie has provided this very informative Podcast on podcasting on his Learning 2006 blogsite.
In this 10 minute segment, Elliott Masie details:
I'm in the midst of some work for the MoE that includes reference to the "Knowledge Society" concept which has raised issues forme, in particular, the constant substitution of the word "information" for "knowledge" when referring to this concept - and the fact that many people use the terms interchangably in this regard.
An interesting media release titled Knowledge versus information societies : UNESCO report takes stock of the difference arrived in my mailbox today which provides some helpful distinctions.
The release from the UNESCO website refers to a report launched in Paris this week by UNESCO Director-General Ko??chiro Matsuura which is the first in a new series of World Reports, ??Towards Knowledge Societies?? and will be presented at the World Summit on the Information Society (Tunis, November 16-18.
The distinction made by the authors of the report is sumamrised as:
The report urges governments to expand quality education for all, increase community access to information and communication technology, and improve cross-border scientific knowledge-sharing, in an effort to narrow the digital and ??knowledge?? divides between the North and South and move towards a ??smart?? form of sustainable human development.
The stakes are high, stresses the Report, for the cost of ignorance is greater than the cost of education and knowledge sharing.
I've just uploaded two more sets of photographs from my Nepal trip - that's it as far as the stills go, still have all the video footage to deal with!
Links are as follows:
Photo Set#1
Photo Set#2
Orphanages photographs
Or you can link to these sets through my blog site using the links in the right hand margin.
In view of my comment on Stephen Downes' paper on elearn 2.0 a few days ago, I ws fascinated this morning to read a press release titled Gates warns of 'sea change' in memo which quotes Ray Ozzie, one of Microsoft's three chief technical officers, as saying, "Microsoft has not led the pack on Internet-based software and services, and now faces intense competition from companies like Google Inc."
Seems that the big boys are finally waking up to the revolution that has been taking place in the online world over the past couple of years and are now looking at how they might retain their leadership. It will be interesting to see how the battle hots up when MS releases their Windows Live and Office Live, two Web-based offerings that aim to help the company compete with Google.
In today's release of eSchool Online, an article titled Educators take serious look at video gaming which reports on the recent Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Summit on Video Gaming held on 25 October this year.
At the summit, attended by a diverse group including those from education, entertainment and the military, experts in pedagogy and game design began the conference by discussing specific attributes of video games that lend themselves to learning applications and went on to examine areas of knowledge and skill development to which game features could be applied.
Key points/quotes in the article that I found of interest include:
The eSchool article continues with a report on another conference titled "Be The game", held jointly by two American High Schools - McKinley High and Ballou Senior High. This was a weekend program for middle and high school students to learn game programming by creating pedagogical games for use by primary school student held earlier this month. In this part of the article there are some really useful descriptions of some of the games being used - as well as some insights into the sorts of resourcing and organisation involved in the high schools themselves.
The FAS also has a useful list of links to Games for Learning Resources on its website for further reading in this area.
See also Serious Games Summit held in Washington D.C on 31 Oct-1Nov.
I've just been browsing a fascinating paper titled An Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning by Dr Marielle Lange and Dr Jessie Paterson from the University of Edinburgh.
The paper is actually constructed in a Wiki, and is about the use of a Wiki to write a collaborative essay. It chronicles the writers efforts to put the assignment together, and each page in the Wiki contains a useful summary of the content of the page, together with the information that was collaboratively constructed.
I came across a number of useful links within the substance of the Wiki, including reference to some interesting web-based tools and projects that I'd not come across before, including:
I've been busy sorting through the hundreds of photos I took while away in Nepal and have uploaded a selection as a set in my "Flickr" site - take a look at the Everest Base Camp Photos here. I've added a bit of commentary with each photo to help it make sense. The photos in the set are presented in a chronological sequence from when we arrived in Kathmandu to make it easier to follow!
