• 03Feb
    Author: Katherine Pisana Categories: Educational Technology, Mind Amplifying Tools Comments: 2

    2009-02-03-post

    As I’ve just started studying (online) again, my mind is tuning back into things it normally only focuses on when I’m in hard-core academic mode. This morning, for example, (well, actually, for the last two mornings) I’ve been reading through the introductory materials on both of my course websites, and I ended up going through a lot of information related to library resources and referencing tools. The most common bibliographic and bookmarking tools that we’re being recommended are RefWorks and Furl, respectively.

    refworksRefWorks is only available to us while we’re registered students. After that, unless we’re affiliated with an organization that pays for access OR unless we want to pay for an annual subscription ourselves, we loose all of our research collections at the end of the academic term. Basic translation: if you want to be able to access the information you collect and store using RefWorks over then next 6-8 months, this might not be your best choice.furl

    Furl, on the other hand, is a social bookmarking service with many features, accessible from anywhere and free to all. Although they’re not direct substitutes, if I hadn’t already been hooked on Zotero when I first learned about Furl, I probably would have given Furl more of a chance.

    Now we get to the reason for this post! I wanted to share a bibliographic management tool with you that I have found to be invaluable during my courses of study (and tangential resource endeavors). Zotero is a free, open source Firefox plugin that allows you to capture resources as you come across them and organise them into neat research collections. I find it thoroughly enjoyable and intuitive to usezotero

    Zotero allows me to make sense of the piles of information I collect each time I brave the plethora of resources available within just a few clicks of a mouse. To help bring my point home, imagine that if all the files and links I collected were stacks of random pieces of paper covering every square inch of my inevitably invisible imaginary desk, then Zotero would be like the magical fairy that instantly organises all the information into a beautifully systematic filing system that I structure and that is completely aligned with my thought processes. Essentially, it allows me to know where to find stuff when I need it – whether I’m on or off line.

    It also lets me summarise reference collections almost instantly. Let me show you… I’ll share a report I generated from a collection of resources I built relating to online language learning. It generates the report in html format, so I just saved that page as a pdf file which is now available to you simply by clicking here.

    Now that I’ve got you hooked ( 😉 ), let’s watch the video intro together (the video below opens in a new tab/window):

    Zotero even has a social feature called Zotz that allows you to share your reference collections with communities. More info below:

    Here’s an exhibit I just generated. The Zotz add-on still needs a little ironing out, but it’s an exciting new development of an already exceptionally functional information management tool.

    There’s even a WordPress plugin available that helps Zotero better recognise the information in your blog entries which makes for more seamless referencing of this type of information as well. From the screenshot below, you can see the little additional icon that is displayed in your address bar once this plugin is activated. When you’re viewing a WordPress blog, once you click on this icon, a window pops up (as seen below) asking you which of the entries available on the page you’re on you would like to add to your Zotero collections.

    zotero-plugin-screenshot

    Lots of other screencast tutorials are available for those interested in exploring the tool further.


  • 31Jan
    Author: Katherine Pisana Categories: Educational Technology, Mind Amplifying Tools Comments: 12

    I’m not sure how much longer I’ll have access to my Sprouts, and as a result, I’m not sure how much longer the Sprouts that I’ve published on this blog will be accessible. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough resources to recreate all of my Sprouts in alternative formats, but there is one in particular that I would like transfer here into this post so that the information can continue to help those interested. This way, we can also build upon it as a community and let it grow.

    On 02 Jan 2009, I published a collection of links to various reusable learning object repositories that provide access to free electronic learning tools covering a broad scope of disciplines. I’ve transferred them below (listed in alphabetical order) in case that Sprout becomes inaccessible in the near future.

    I wholeheartedly encourage teachers, tutors, teaching assistants, instructional designers, learning technologists, librarians, students (both formal and informal) and anyone else who’s interested to take a look at what’s out there. These are resources for all levels of learning (K-12 through to higher and continuing education) and the list even includes some resources for the mobile learner. They can help you create blended/e-learning lesson plans, stimulate discussion among peers about how to begin integrating technology into your curricula and support your students in the development of connected learning strategies. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are accessible resources out there, produced by people with subject expertise and a genuine intention to share information with the world. Take advantage!

    Please note, all links below will open in new windows/tabs.


    Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education A national organization whose mission is to support and advance undergraduate statistics education, in four target areas: resources, professional development, outreach, and research.


    The CITIDEL Repository is a resource to discover Computer Science education and research materials. It is an integral part of National Science Digital Library (NSDL) which serves the community of computing educators.


    The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning/distance education knowledge, resources and technologies.<br /> COL is helping developing nations improve access to quality education and training.


    A place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.


    The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) is a distributed community effort involving educators, students, and scientists working together to improve the quality, quantity, and efficiency of teaching and learning about the Earth system at all levels.


    The Digital Scriptorium is an image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research. It bridges the gap between a diverse user community and the limited resources of libraries by means of sample imaging and extensive rather than intensive cataloguing.


    DSpace is the software of choice for academic, non-profit, and commercial organizations building open digital repositories.  It is free and easy to install


    Australia's free online network for educators edna provides a range of digital resources for education and training. It’s a network of the education and training community that includes government and non-government schooling systems, early childhood, vocational and technical education, adult and community education and higher education.


    We invite you to Learn, Connect, and Create with high-quality teaching and learning resources in applied science and math, engineering, computer science/information technology, and engineering technology for use by K-12 and university educators and students.


    The Exploratory Project is a research project of the Brown University Computer Graphics Research Group with the goal to begin the groundwork for a next-generation approach to Web-based educational software.


    FLORE is a free repository of French language educational resources. It is meant to help the user find appropriate sites and specific learning objects to learn or teach French. FLORE is designed for faculty and students in post-secondary institutions and it offers over 1000 online resources with annotations such as content descriptions and peer reviews.


    FORA.tv is the leading interactive viewing experience of the smartest, most entertaining video content in the world. —The world of ideas and knowledge—all drawn from the live-event speeches, discussions, interviews and debates going on everywhere all the time at the world’s leading conferences, ideas festivals, think tanks and other major centers of thought and discourse.


    More than 1,500 federally supported teaching and learning resources are included from dozens of federal agencies. New sites are added regularly.


    The BCcampus OER Portal is an initiative by BCcampus to create awareness of the availability of high-quality freely available open educational resources from both BC and beyond. Here you will find FREE TO USE learning resources that you can use to supplement your own course materials or learning. Some of these are from BC-based projects while others are from Open Educational Resource projects from around the world.


    freereading is a high-quality, open-source, free reading intervention program for grades K-3. This open-source instructional program helps educators teach early literacy. Because it is open-source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. FreeReading contains a 40-week scope and sequence of phonological awareness and phonics activities that can support and supplement a typical kindergarten or first grade core or basal program.


    Gateway to 21st Century Skills


    Organizations from around the world have formed a global alliance to make shared online learning resources available to educators and students around the world.


    The Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) is a digital library that provides freely accessible digital teaching resources of the highest quality that meet the needs of today's health sciences educators and learners.


    ide@s provides Wisconsin educators with teacher-reviewed, standards-aligned lessons, interactive tools, video, and other resources for use in curriculum development and classroom instruction.


    iLumina is a digital library of sharable undergraduate teaching materials for chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and computer science. It is designed to quickly and accurately connect users with the educational resources they need. These resources range in type from highly granular objects such as individual images and video clips to entire courses.


    Intute is a free online service providing you with a database of hand selected Web resources for education and research.


    The Learning Exchange is our digital library of learning resources for social services and social work education and training. The resources include information sheets, official publications, interactive learning resources, video clips, case studies and radio broadcasts, all of which may be used for non-commercial, educational purposes.


    iTunes U, part of the iTunes Store, is possibly the world’s greatest collection of free educational media available to<br /> students, teachers, and lifelong learners. With over 100,000 educational audio and video files available, iTunes U has quickly become the engine for the mobile learning movement. It puts the power of the iTunes Store in the hands of qualifying universities so they can distribute their educational media to their students or to the world.


    Jorum is a free online repository service for teaching and support staff in UK Further and Higher Education Institutions, helping to build a community for the sharing, reuse and repurposing of learning and teaching materials.


    Enjoy Great Content Educator created lessons and activities Rich with movies, images and podcasts<br /> Special collections from content providers. Meet Others In this unique social network for educators Locate colleagues from around the globe<br /> Find peers across a variety of content areas. Collaborate Online Use new Web 2.0 tools to engage with others Create and manage your own custom groups Share content, news, polls and conversations.


    Learnodes.com is a blog that showcases the richest digital-edge nodes for learning, individual and in clusters. At learnodes.com, in some instances, several nodes from a single subject are included in single posts, causing those posts to become small landing pages in the open internet for their subjects. Learnodes.com showcases nodes of learning content that include OERs — the open educational resources of universities and other teaching institutions. GoldenSwamp.com features learning content created by individual experts, academic institutions, libraries and archives, business and government projects and laboratories, and other open online sources.


    LearnOutLoud.com is your one-stop destination for audio and video learning. Browse over 15,000 educational audio books, MP3 downloads, podcasts, and videos.


    LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.


    LoLa is an exchange for facilitating the sharing of high-quality learning objects. It contains materials for use across the curriculum, with a particular focus on<br /> modules for Information Literacy.


    The Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) is an electronic warehouse of ideas, examples, and resources (represented as


    Putting Educational Innovations Into Practice Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. Share advice and expertise about education with expert colleagues. Be recognized for your contributions to quality education.


    MIT World is a free and open site that provides on demand video of significant public events at MIT. MIT World's video index contains more than 500 videos.


    MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources (MSTIR) is a collection of teaching materials, including case studies, simulations, deep dives,<br /> and industry, business and country overviews that MIT Sloan provides as a free teaching resource open and available to the world.<br /> Similar to the course syllabi and materials found on MIT’s OpenCourseWare site, these materials carry a creative commons license<br /> allowing them to be downloaded, copied and distributed.


    Funded by the LSC and available free to all authorised organisations in the post-16 sector, the NLN materials represent one of the most substantial and wide-ranging collections of e-learning materials in the UK.


    NSDL is the Nation's online library for education and research in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics.


    The best free cultural & educational media on the web.


    The OpenLearn website gives free access to course materials from The Open University. The LearningSpace is open to learners anywhere in the world.


    OLI course designs improve learning outcomes Using intelligent tutoring systems, virtual laboratories, simulations, and frequent opportunities for assessment and feedback, OLI builds courses that are intended to enact instruction – or, more precisely, to enact the kind of dynamic, flexible, and responsive instruction that fosters learning.


    The OSP Collection provides curriculum resources that engage students in physics, computation, and computer modeling. Computational physics and computer modeling provide students with new ways to understand, describe, explain, and predict physical phenomena.


    Bringing the Power of Browser-based Authoring to Students, Educators and the World.


    PhilPapers' purpose is to facilitate the exchange and development of philosophical research through the internet. Our service gathers and organizes philosophical research on the Internet, and provides tools for philosophers to access, organize, and discuss this research.


    The Real World Learning Objects (RWLO) Resource Library is an online repository of Internet-based unique and compelling learning objects designed so that community college faculty can easily access and adapt for use in their classes.


    The SMETE Digital Library is a dynamic online library and portal of services by the SMETE Open Federation for teachers and students. Here you can access a wealth of teaching and learning materials as well as join this expanding community of science, math, engineering and technology<br /> explorers of all ages.


    The Sofia initiative was launched by Foothill-De Anza Community College District in March of 2004. The goal of Sofia is to publish community college-level course content and make it freely accessible on the web to support teaching and learning.


    For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online. A computer and an Internet connection are all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience.


    With over 2000 videos available online, the Teachers TV website is an invaluable resource for any busy education professional. Watch videos when you want and download great resources including lesson plans, worksheets and more.


    Inspired talks by the world's leading thinkers and doers.


    UCL Eprints collects the work of UCL researchers and makes it freely available over the web, helping the worldwide scholarly community to discover UCL research. Institutional repositories like UCL Eprints complement the traditional academic publishing and scholarly communications processes. They raise the visibility of research and help to maximise its impact. UCL researchers are encouraged to deposit a copy of each journal article, conference paper, working paper, and any other research output, in the UCL Eprints at the earliest opportunity, ensuring that their research reaches as wide an audience as possible.


    VAIL is an online laboratory that facilitates learning, research, discussion, and innovation regarding academic integrity issues that face the 21st century classroom. Faculty, administrators, and students are encouraged to use VAIL resources and share their experiences and ideas with one another.  VAIL seeks to bridge the gap between the concept of academic integrity and its application and enforcement in the digital age.


    LOR (Learning Objects Repository) is a project undertaken by VCILT - University of Mauritius. Here you can access a wealth of teaching and learning materials as well as help our LOR Community to grow.


    A free resource from Wolfram Research built with Mathematica technology. Created, developed, & nurtured by Eric Weisstein with contributions from the world’s mathematical community


    If you have other free resources to suggest – ones that you’ve found helpful – please let me know and I’ll include them in the list!


  • 02Jan
    Author: Katherine Pisana Categories: Educational Technology Comments Off on What’s an RLO???

    2 Jan 2009There is so much educational content freely available on the web that it can certainly seem challenging to know where to find the high quality materials from the reputable sources. Very often, when I work on the development of courses, module, programs, workshops, etc. that integrate some level of eLearning into the mix, I inevitably see teachers reach the point at which they realize how many more tools technology could enable them to provide to their students, but at the same time, how much time and energy and effort and know-how it would take to develop their learning resources. That’s my cue to start talking about reusable learning object (RLO) repositories!

    Learning objects are quite tricky to define. I attempted to clarify the definition by creating my own learning object about learning objects. Have a look at it below:

    Get Adobe Flash player

    In order for teachers to be able to ‘start off running’ when they initiate the development of a new eLearning initiative, I recommend browsing through the plethora of learning resources readily available online. It’s a much more empowering approach than reinventing the wheel. Besides, why don’t we focus on what we’re good at?! Why should an accounting professor be expected to learn the skills required to develop an online module teaching his or her students about the magic that is the balance sheet? Why not just tap into the global educational community and share with one another?

    To help make the process of sharing a bit easier, I’ve put together a collection of learning object repositories that provide access to free materials. Have a look at the collection below and see if any of these digital libraries could help make your life a little easier!

    Get Adobe Flash player

    Before I end this post, I just wanted to share the learning resource that I came across today while browsing. It’s a video entitled ‘Focus on Educational innovation‘ – part of the MIT World video library. It’s well worth watching.

    Particularly Dick Yue’s presentation starting at 34 min 36 sec as he discusses the evolution and impact of MIT OpenCourseWare.

    Or Shigeru Miyagawa as he talks about Star Festival – an initiative that injects support, resources and hope into urban schools in American to create the perfect tasting STEW of acceptance and integration! His talk starts at 55 min 29 sec.

    And then there’s Henry Jenkins who talks to us about computer games and the extent to which their ubiquity has enabled them (or the gamers that play them!) to infiltrate into the classroom. Are video games trivial? Are they time wasters? Or, is there some pedagogic value to them? Have a look at what Henry has to say starting at 1 hr 12 min 10 sec. In particular, I found his statistics very revealing. For example, did you know that one third of MIT students surveyed admitted playing games that were not part of the instructional activities during classes!!

    The question and answer session that starts at 1 hr 36 min 09 sec also broaches some interesting topics like, for example, what the difference is between the online resources for a course actually being taught to MIT students and the resources available through MIT OpenCourseWare for that same course.

    Here’s the video below:

    From: Virtually Scholastic