Michael Rees's Library tagged openscholar →  View Popular, Search in Google

Results of publicly funded research will be open access – science minister
New policy announced by David Willetts to make research freely available challenges business models of academic publishers

openscholar

Glogster EDU is the leading global education platform for the creative expression of knowledge and skills in the classroom and beyond.  We empower educators and students with the technology to create GLOGS - online multimedia posters - with text, photos, videos, graphics, sounds, drawings, data attachments and more.

openscholar

"Today, more than ever, academics and professionals need to question the value of publishing in closed journals. Forget for a moment the ludicrous prices many publishers charge for personal and institutional subscriptions. Think about the audience. Just how many people will actually read an article in a closed journal? 10? 20? 50? 100? The answer for most closed journals is - not very many. Conversely, publishing in an open access journals can increase the audience dramatically. Essentially, because they are free and online, open access journals are read more widely."

openscholar

"...a new build-your-own-textbook service called AcademicPub, which arranged payment of royalties and compiled the material for publication. His students were given three options for buying the book: Download a digital edition for $14.95, get it in paperback for $27, or go for the hardcover for $45."

openscholar ebooks micropub

Top Free Learning Resources Online

Europeana: A digital library with 4.6 million items from libraries, archives, museums and other institutions across Europe. Read Charles Darwin’s letters or listen to Pavarotti singing Verdi.

The Internet Archive: A vast nonprofit digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts—video, audio, texts, and live music.

Khan Academy: The Khan Academy has over 2000 videos covering basic math through calculus and trigonometry, physics, biology, chemistry, banking, finance, and statistics. The videos are short—5 to 15 minutes long—simple, and entertaining. They’re all made by Sal Khan, a 33-year-old former hedge fund analyst who started making them to help tutor his young cousins.

LearnFree: 750 free lessons on basic computer skills, reading and math.

Library.nu: Half a million free books. May not be exactly legal. Browse at your own risk.

MIT Open Courseware: The oldest open courseware site, with 1,900 courses on everything from history to physics. A favorite for science and math.

Open Courseware Consortium: This site has even more courses, from 200 institutions, including MIT. To search, go to the “Courses” tab.

OpenCulture: A well-edited blog and site chronicling “the best” cultural and educational media on the web. They have lists of free online courses from top universities and free language lessons.

Open Learning Initiative: The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon has 13 free complete courses in topics ranging from physics to logic to French. The courses are highly interactive, using video, animations, and lots of embedded quizzes and assessments so you know how you’re doing. The site requires a signup and sometimes you may have to download some software.

Open Textbooks: A catalog of open textbooks that are free to read online.

Quia: On Quia, you can create your own games and quizzes to test yourself, or take thousands of quizzes—flashcards, matching games, word searches—that other students and teachers have created for the ultimate study guide.

Saylor Foundation: Saylor lists 241 original courses on the site, for which the material comes from around the web.

Scribd: Scribd is a place to find free books and presentations on almost any topic, uploaded and shared by the authors.

Slideshare: Slideshare is a collection of free PowerPoint presentations, sometimes with audio. It’s a good place to learn about up-to-date topics like design, technology, and music.

TED: TED (for Technology, Entertainment, Design) has an excellent collection of 300-plus short video lectures by scientists, authors, artists, political figures, and more. Browsing the site is sure to be enlightening and can give you clues about fields you might want to study, like behavioral economics or biophysics.

Textbook Revolution: A student-run site with links and reviews to textbooks and other educational resources. Many are available free as PDFs, viewable online as ebooks, or websites containing course materials. You can also use the site to find descriptions of books that aren’t free, and find where they may be cheaper.

Wikiversity: Wikiversity has a wide variety of multimedia course materials. Courses are run through the site, meaning students at universities create and publish course modules for other students’ use. Like Wikipedia, you can participate in the community by editing course material (a great way to test and expand your own knowledge) or by joining discussions in the “Colloquium” section.

YouTube and YouTube EDU: Don’t forget to search YouTube for lectures and presentations on any topic you find interesting. YouTube EDU contains content that’s been tagged “education,” which may include quirky things like Tina Fey’s 2011 book talk at Google.

openscholar

1 Promote active learning – Under a constructivist learning model, it is essential for students to be actively engaged in their learning. This can mean a variety of things, but most importantly, it means that learning cannot be passive. Your students must be doing something either to initially learn the material or to reinforce the learning provided through lecture and reading. This article from the International Conference on Technology and Education, titled “Strategies to Incorporate Active Learning into Online Teaching,” outlines several tactics that instructors can use.

2 Create a community of learners – A community of learners provides accountability and learning-focused interactivity. It is one of the things that happens naturally in a successful F2F classroom, and is more challenging to replicate online. Challenging does not mean impossible, however, and incorporating some or all of this list from Engaged Learning of  10 things you should and should not do to create a virtual community, will help guide you in involving students in your online classroom.

3 Make coursework authentic – Though making coursework reflect what professionals in the field do is challenging, it is well worth the reward in terms of student interest and the feelings of accomplishment and confidence that it inspires. This overview of authentic learning for the 21st Century from EDUCAUSE provides an excellent background on the ways in which you can incorporate authentic learning into your online curriculum.

4 Connect students to real-world mentors and experts – In much the same way as providing authentic learning experiences, connecting students to active professionals in the field gives them a sense that they are engaging with their intended professional field in deep and meaningful ways. According to Lave and Wenger, students learn most effectively when they can interact with insiders in their area of study, preferably in the actual context in which they intend to work. Edutopia provides a resource about how to connect students to real-world experts in the teaching profession, while FacultyFocus offers a how-to guide for connecting online students to leaders in the business world.

5 Incorporate social media into the instruction – According to this article from iePlexus, which reviews survey data from the Sloan Consortium, students want social media in their classes. Today’s students are generally so tied in to their social networks that utilizing them in an online class is essentially as normal as talking. If students are interested in using a particular tool, the instructor has an inherent advantage in terms of creating interactivity and engagement with that tool. Faculty Focus provides advice on how to best integrate these tools into the online classroom.

6 Require collaborative learning among students – An effective way to encourage participation in online learning is to require that students work together to socially mediate the meaning of the course content. Sometimes you, as the instructor, may need to force students into learning in a way that makes them uncomfortable. Collaborative learning exercises often do just that. From the perceived difficulties associated with working with others at a distance, to being responsible for their own learning, students often resist this model of instruction. As the authority figure in the online classroom, you need to require and support collaborative learning as a way to increase both interactivity among students and the retention of the knowledge they create. For a more detailed explanation of collaborative learning, visit this page from the Learning Commons at Evergreen State College.

7 Provide regular and timely feedback – Accountability to an authority figure in the classroom is one of the best strategies for engaging students (Faculty Roles in Student Retention, Penn State). One easy way to accomplish this is through providing timely and meaningful feedback for student work. Not only do you, as the instructor need to be accountable for providing the feedback, but the students themselves need to be accountable for handing in work on-time. Feedback is a two-way street.

8 Encourage critical thinking – Crafting your curriculum around sophisticated, real-world problems that require students to delve into broad societal issues while simultaneously solving practical, discipline-focused problems, provides an excellent way to inspire students. The Foundation for Critical Thinking maintains a resource page to help college instructors better incorporate critical thinking into their classes.

openscholar

But the enormous prices charged for the content in these journals (which produce profit margins of more than 35 percent for the three major publishers who control the industry, according to Monbiot) aren’t the only thing about the journal business that draws fire from critics. One of the biggest issues is that the content in these publications is provided to these journals for free, and in many cases, the research that is being produced is publicly funded via government grants. So private corporations are raking in huge sums for access to research they get for nothing — and even the peer-editing of the articles in most journals is done for free by other researchers.

openscholar

Current academics embody the tension between the culture of expertise reinforced by subscription-based publication systems and the move toward democratizing knowledge embodied by open-access, Internet-based publishing schemes.

openscholar

Research is a pyramid, with previous discoveries serving as the foundation for later research. Unfortunately that pyramid has been built at the same rate for more than 300 years. Acceptable forms of communicating research have not changed in that time. Increasing the rate of discovery will not happen unless we experiment with how rapidly that information is relayed. Open Access publications suggest that we can build each level of that pyramid more rapidly.

By showing more content, openly, we give researchers the tools needed to advance their research. We also enable patients and citizen scientists to have unprecedented access to take control of their diseases and interests. In turn, this will boost research output and lead to new models of communication.

openscholar

Notice what falls lowest as a source of value for professors from the student’s perspective: the very things that serve as the basis of value to the professor’s themselves and the institution’s that support them – research prowess and credentials

openscholar

Lecture at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 18 April 2011: A new talk about open access to academic or scientific information, with a bit of commentary about YouTube Copyright School.

openscholar

Rheingold U. is a totally online learning community, offering courses that usually run for five weeks, with five live sessions and ongoing asynchronous discussions through forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, and social bookmarks.

openscholar

Since we faculty already write and review the articles, and we have direct access to the most efficient distribution system in the history of humanity, why are we still handing over billions of dollars of increasingly scarce resources to journal publishers? You will find that the answers to this question have nothing to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge or the economics of those activities.

openscholar

Recording from @mweller's excellent presentation on digital scholarship is now available here: http://bit.ly/ezLMM0 #cck11

openscholar

1. For-profit universities will begin to understand that they need to adopt the norms of transparency and the culture of openness and sharing that define the nonprofit education world.
2. Educators who work in nonprofits will become less critical of the model of for-profit education, as we start to understand that the market and the profit motive creatives incentives to increase both the quality and scale of higher ed offerings.
3. Any higher ed institution that fails to participate in the open education movement, making available at least some of the intellectual property produced on campus to the larger community of learners / prospective students / alumni, will be at a serious competitive and strategic disadvantage.
4. The action and excitement in the open education movement will gravitate toward student work, as learners move to sharing their course projects (often multimedia projects) on universally accessible platforms (such as YouTube/EDU).
5. Investors will move significant resources into the education delivery and educational technology sectors.
6. Large media, publishing and technology companies will look to grow their knowledge, services, capacities and headcount in the educational sector. This will result in an acceleration of purchases of educational delivery and education technology companies.
7. Students will expect that lecture capture services will be part of the standard course delivery model for middle-to-large lecture classes.
8. Providers of campus media management platforms and lecture capture platforms will begin a process of integration, one that will result in eventual mergers between these companies.
9. The language of the EDUPUNK movement will be co-opted by some for-profit ed tech vendor or for-profit education provider, causing the true EDUPUNKS to re-engage in their critique of the educational industrial complex.
10. Educators, realizing that both gaming platforms and the newest generation of games have far surpassed the traditional course and ed tech methods of engaging learners, wi

openscholar

the MESUR team assessed journal impact across dozens of technical dimensions — such as "betweenness centrality," a metric that assesses whether a publication often serves as a bridge as scholars browse from article to article, a pattern that implies “strong interdisciplinary appeal, high influence, high prestige, and high popularity,”

openscholar

Ultimately, I believe the academic publishing world will, and should, slowly shift toward open access, but the transition will be ugly. The issue boils down to a classic problem in economics: the tragedy of the commons. While the publishing industry and researchers continue to act in their own short-term self-interest by continuing the status quo, we are slowly heading toward an untenable situation where the people producing research papers will not be able to afford to access them.

openscholar

for complex activities that go to the heart of scholarship, once we outsourced them we became reliant on them, and effectively lost control

openscholar

Fast - Technology that is easy to learn and quick to set up. You don't need to go on a training course to use it, or put in a request to central IT services to set it up. This means you can experiment quickly.
Cheap - tools that are usually free, or at least have a freemium model so you can buy any extension out of your own pocket. Animoto is a good example - you can create free 30seconds videos or pay a small one-off fee to create a longer one. Slideshare is an example of a free service. This means you don't need to get authorisation to use them from a budget holder. It also means you don't need to worry about the size of audience or return on investment, which is liberating.
Out of control - they are outside of formal institutional control structures, so they have a more personal element, and are more flexible. 

openscholar

topic of "skills that educators need today". I'm convinced that these key skills are not unique to our era (Dave Cormier gets at this concept as well). A competent educator in any era will be proficient with these skills. Settling on a 6-item list, I detailed the following as key skills for educators in the 21st century (and 20th, 19th, 18th…):

openscholar