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Items put on the weekly reminder email
Updated on 2009-11-06
Created on 2008-03-24
Category: Schools & Education
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10 Ways You Can Use Twitter Lists
Twitter’s new Lists feature is all the rage right now. There are probably already millions of lists, and that number is growing by the minute (or second). So what are people using all these lists for? Are people creating lists just for the sake of creating lists? Savvy individuals are looking for ways to use lists to further their personal/professional agendas, and while we are all still learning how to harness the power of this new feature, here are a few ideas to get the creative juices flowing.
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IRRODL special issue on "Openness and the Future of Education" Vol 10, No 5 (2009)
IRRODL just released a special issue on Openness and the Future of Education.
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From Agri-clinics to FarmerNet: applying mobile phone and internet to support rural farmers
Rural farmers are producers and also consumers in the food security equation. They are part of the 4 billion ‘bottom of the pyramid’ global community who earn less than 1500$US a year. Their actions - production, harvest and marketing - are critical determinants of the global food security. Information plays a critical role at every stage of this action chain.
In the modern world, information transfer to and from the rural farmer hinges upon the tools of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) where telecentres and mobile phone applications constitute major part. -
Manual for monitoring and evaluating education partnerships
What makes education partnerships effective? This manual aims to help practitioners working in any sort of coordination, management or governance capacity to monitor and evaluate education partnerships from start to finish by providing them with a set of principles and tools.
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Higher ambitions: the future of universities in a knowledge economy
The higher education blueprint, Higher Ambitions, by the Department for Business Innovation & Skills (UK) sets out a course for how universities can remain world class, providing the nation with the high level skills needed to remain competitive, while continuing to attract the brightest students and researchers.
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Avoid "Death by PowerPoint" with the Pecha Kucha Method - Helping LIS educators develop effective online teaching practices
The invention of PowerPoint software made it possible for great strides in the way people present information to others. Unfortunately, it's also borne the reputation for great snores when lecturers are allowed to blather on from slide to slide ad infinitum.\nA technique that is being practiced to prevent "Death by PowerPoint" is the pecha kucha method of presentation delivery. Named after the Japanese word for "chit-chat", pecha kucha (pronounced "peh-CHA-k-cha") sets specific perimeters for slides and presentation: 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide.
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INHEA Editorial series - Building Capacity in Africa: The Need for Coherent Policy and Informed Action
The power of knowledge in the globalized economy has been unequivocally recognized, and with this realization efforts to revitalize higher education and other knowledge systems around the world have been stepped up. This trend is clearly evident in Africa.\nThere have been different approaches by a variety of players to build capacity in Africa. Some have focused on select disciplines or fields (such as reproductive health or engineering), others on institutional units or sub-units (such as faculties of teacher education or departments of botany), and still others on whole institutions (centers or universities). In the last decade or so, the emphasis has been placed largely on full institutional approaches, guided by the recognition that only a coherent and comprehensive institutional and sectoral orientation provides a meaningful impact.\nCurrently, initiatives to selectively and preferentially nurture certain fields and disciplines deemed necessary to build capacity in the region-as largely determined by the specific interests of the respective "major" stakeholders-are now growing in importance.
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The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave
The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a comprehensive user manual by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash.\nGoogle Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that's notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you'll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that's evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes. Read more about The Complete Guide to Google Wave.
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DeepDyve - Research. Rent. Read.
By opening the largest online rental service for scientific, technical, and research journals, the company Deep Dyve is hoping to do for academic publications what Netflix has done for movies: make them easily accessible and inexpensive for everyone.\nThe Web site has been an academic-journal search engine since 2005 and unveiled its rental program this week. Now anyone can "rent" an article-which means you can view it on your computer without ownership rights or printing capabilities-for as little as 99 cents for 24 hours. Users can also subscribe for monthly passes. Currently the site has 30 million articles from various peer-reviewed journals.
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Put it in the Depot
The Depot is an assured gateway to make your research Open Access - we provide two main services:\n 1. a deposit service for researchers worldwide without an institutional repository in which to deposit their papers, articles, and book chapters (e-prints).\n 2. a re-direct service which alerts depositors to more appropriate local services if they exist.\nIf you are a researcher based at any university, college or research institution worldwide, and wish to use these services click the Deposit Now link.
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Implementing a Cost Effectiveness Analyzer for Web-Supported Academic Instruction: A Campus Wide Analysis
This paper describes the implementation of a quantitative cost effectiveness analyzer for Web-supported academic instruction that was developed in Tel Aviv University during a long term study. The paper presents the cost effectiveness analysis of Tel Aviv University campus. Cost and benefit of 3,453 courses were analyzed, exemplifying campus-wide analysis. These courses represent large-scale Web-supported academic instruction processes throughout the campus. The findings were described, referring to students, instructors and university from both the economical and educational perspectives. The cost effectiveness values resulting from the calculations were summarized in four "coins" (efficiency coins=$; quality coins; affective coins; and knowledge management coins) for each of the three actors (students, instructors and university). In order to examine the distribution of those values throughout the campus assessment scales were created on the basis of descriptive statistics. The described analyzer can be implemented in other institutions very easily and almost automatically. This enables us to quantify the costs and benefits of Web-supported instruction on both the single-course and the campus-wide levels.
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Access to Open Educational Resources: Report of a UNESCO OER Community discussion
The community thus returned to the issue of access in a new discussion, held in February and March 2009. The new discussion took up the issues first raised in June 2008, and explored access challenges and some of the potential solutions at hand. It was an opportunity to share creative responses from different situations. Broadly speaking, the discussion was conducted in three phases:\nWeek 1: Identification and description of the main problems associated with access, and an initial development of a classification scheme.\nWeek 2: Exploration of solutions and approaches, and their potential for the various types of barriers identified.\nWeek 3: A concrete attempt to develop specific proposals.\nThe present document is the summary report of this discussion. It is divided into three parts, following the themes of the three weeks. Part One gives an overview of the various constraints that limit access to OER, while Part Two documents some tested or proposed solutions or approaches. The access\nchallenges and solutions identified may justify further exploration and follow-up action - proposals for which can be found in Part Three. The form that this follow-up action takes will depend on the OER community.
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Degrees of Openness: The emergence of Open Educational Resources at the University of Cape Town
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide a range of opportunities to share educational materials and processes in ways that are not yet fully understood. In an extraordinary development, increasing numbers of traditional and distance universities are using ICTs to make a selection of their teaching resources freely available as 'open education resources' (OER). The University of Cape Town recently signed the Cape Town Open Education Declaration signalling some senior level support for the notion of OER. In anticipation of an institution-wide roll-out, lecturers and educational technologists at UCT are grappling with the issues that need to be addressed to meet this intent. This paper suggests that careful analysis of existing educational materials and processes is necessary to provide an indication of what can be done to make them more openly available beyond the confines of an individual teaching and learning space. However, the deceptively simple term "open" hides a reef of complexity. This paper endeavours to unravel the degrees of openness with respect to key attributes of OER, namely social, technical, legal and financial openness in an attempt to make the task of identifying where changes could be made to existing teaching materials or processes a little easier for the lecturer and the educational technologist alike. While acknowledging the potential value of content, we contend, however, that it is the opening up of educational processes, which we are calling Open Pedagogy (OP) enabled by the Web 2.0 technologies that are set to play the more transformational role in the collaboration between students and lecturers.
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Increasing education access through open and distance learning in Tanzania: A critical review of approaches and practices
With an area of 943,000 square kilometers, Tanzania has a population of about 34 million comprising more than 120 ethnic groups with diverse cultures and notable income differentials. Over 35 per cent of the people live below the poverty line which makes it difficult for an increasing number of people to access education at secondary, tertiary and higher education levels. The universalization of education and its worldwide acceptance as a continuous or lifelong undertaking, coupled with concerns about educational access and equity, as well as the prevailing level of poverty necessitates the use of various education delivery approaches to enable all citizens to benefit from this public good. The major objective of this paper is to document an discuss the initiatives that Tanzania has taken to expand educational opportunities at various levels using open and distance learning (ODL) approaches. The paper begins by explaining the socio-political context for ODL in Mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar and proceeds to recount the distance education initiatives that have been established over time using both the longstanding traditional technologies and new media and technology. It then analyzes the opportunities and challenges in these initiatives. It ends with the proposal of how to improve both access and the quality of education using emerging educational technologies.
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Educators and the Cape Town Open Learning Declaration: Rhetorically reducing distance
The Cape Town Open Education Declaration and other visionary documents seek to unify and challenge educators in the creation and use of open learning resources. We rhetorically analyse the Declaration which idealizes the educational process and contrast this with the practical challenges which affect the development and use of open educational resources. We draw on classical rhetoric and hermeneutics as analytical tools of such visionary documents that contain little factual information. Without an initial vision, an enabling environment, complete with policies and funding, means very little. We argue that analysing such vision documents is important part in persuading educators to take further steps towards creating, shaping and evolving their own educational practices.
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EU Bookshop
Thousands of EU publications have been made available to the public for free following the launch in Frankfurt of a new digital library, the EU Bookshop. The website hosts an electronic library containing 12 million scanned pages from more than 110,000 historical publications while a further two million pages from more recent documents are also included.
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55 Awesome Online Photo Editors
An online photo editor tool if used professionally can bring a lot of difference to the image. A colossal presence of photo editors available online for free really makes it difficult for user to choose the best one. To help our readers in making the best choice for themselves BestDeignTuts.com has made a collection of 55 online photo editors. Majority of these photo editors are free to use and can be jumped right without any registration.
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Information economy report 2009: trends and outlooks in turbulent times
The Information Economy Report 2009: Trends and Outlook in Turbulent Times is the fourth in a series published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The report is one of the few publications to monitor global trends in information and communication technologies (ICTs) as they affect developing countries. It serves as a valuable reference for policymakers in those nations. It gives special attention to the impact of the global financial crisis on ICTs.
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Digital Learning Management Systems in Africa: rhetoric and reality
This paper reports on a survey of 358 respondents across 25 African countries into their usage of learning management systems. It concludes that while there are some enthusiastic advocates of such systems, the reality is that most African educators as yet have little knowledge about, or interest in, their usage. There remain very considerable infrastructural constraints to be overcome before they can be widely adopted for open and distance learning across the continent, and there is still reluctance in many institutions to develop systems that can enable learning resources to be made available in this way. This does not mean that the potential of high quality digital learning management systems should be ignored in Africa, but rather that much more sustained work needs to be done in human capacity development and infrastructural provision if African learners are truly to benefit from the interactive learning experiences that such systems can deliver.
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Open and Distance Learning in professional development in third world countries
A need to remove barriers in Open and distance learning (ODL) in developing countries is imperative as few are educated and trained in specific job and that there are limited chances for hiring new ones. The few elite available require updating their knowledge and skills due to the fast change of technology. The demand for ODL is increasing due to its flexibility. It is this flexibility that offers opportunities to people with special needs, including those with disabilities, access to higher education and thus contributes to\nequality in education and poverty alleviation programmes.
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