Open EDU Resources

ITC eLearning, 2/21/10
Jim Groom
Featured Presentation

A Sermon: “For Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things?” Jim Groom, Instructional Technologist, University of Mary Washington An exhortation, or how “small pieces loosely joined” combined with open source applications has come to bring a new Great Awakening upon the world of educational technology. A moment which affords a re-imagination of teaching and learning through distributed publishing, re-purposing, and syndication. Jim Groom is an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He has been working for over a decade in education with a consistent focus on the development of teaching and learning in higher education. In addition to his extensive experience teaching at the college level, for the past four years he has worked primarily in the field of instructional technology, developing and writing extensively about open educational publishing platforms such as UMW Blogs: http://umwblogs.org.

Open EDU resources – aggregating information using RSS and blogs & wikis
Syndication Orientated Architecture - RSS

Notes:

Jim Groom has made UMW Blogs a brand. Through his excitement on these resources, others have become infected with his passion. UMW have more blog users than they have students. 4,521 blogs, 3,558 users, over 1 million page views and 275,000 unique visitors in the past year.

The general public are using search engines that are bringing visitors to the information that students and faculty are doing simply because they are making this information open to the web (ex: economic studies, financial crisis and economic depression blog).

Student created research sites (ex: historical research creating a rich resource that aggregates research from other open sources on the web)

As a result of blogging and education studies, students at UMW are seeing increased Google use because their open source information is populating the web quickly.

Literary Journals
students are using the work they are doing at UMW to frame themselves as professionals.

If we can create these different sites using WordPres MultiUser, why can’t we create a space where faculty and students statewide can aggregate a singe space to share information and collaborate? This would span beyond individual schools. This would be an academic publishing space, that would not be hard to do or expensive, it would simply rely on participation by others.

We have a tremendous amount of power to reimagine what educational resources are. We can start coming up with examples of how and what online learning can become.

Allow students and faculty to publish information in many different ways, then aggregate this syndicated information in centralized, organized spaces (blogs).

How are these resources getting used at UMW?

ePortfolios
Students are creating blogs to generate their own portfolios. The can also aggregate work they do in group blogs, wikis and other syndicated spaces back to their own spaces (portfolios).

Department Blogs
Syndicate what faculty members are doing into a department blog

Clubs & Organizations, Studying Abroad

Colleges and universities do not need to own the data created by students, rather manage the flow of data.

Google Public Calendars
Aggregating faculty calendars into a single location making this information more accessible to students.

Support
syndicate and element of support from UMW Support into your own college support blog. Schools need to share information that they are working on.

Creating your own web spaces and online identities using open source blogs, CMS, RSS, etc. Through individual interests, students can then become more immersed in their studies.

How are schools going to collaborate? Use your students and faculty and give them spaces that their excited about. This will become resources that will live well beyond their time.


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Links:

Khan Academy - YouTube educational content/resources
http://www.khanacademy.org/

Elmcity Calendar Curation Project
http://blog.jonudell.net/elmcity-project-faq/

NC State on Twitter
http://twitter.ncsu.edu/

MOOC – massively open online course
http://openeducationnews.org/2008/07/30/mooc-massive-open-online-course/

Banned and Dangerous Art
http://bannedart.umwblogs.org/

P2 – an open source interface created by folks at WordPress
http://p2theme.com/

WPTouch Plugin – allows mobile users to view blogs
http://www.bravenewcode.com/products/wptouch/

Looking for Whitman – an aggregated site with 5 different universities (collaborative space) a fascinating example to see what universities can do to share information and collaborate.
http://lookingforwhitman.org/