Open Yale Courses

Yale University has joined the OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement and is now offering free courses through Open Yale Courses. These courses are free and open to anyone who would like to participate.

Seven departments (astronomy, English, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology and religious studies) at Yale are among the first at the university to offer classes via the Open Yale Courses initiative.

The Open Yale site describes the program as follows:

"Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to seven introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.

Open Yale Courses reflects the values of a liberal arts education. Yale's philosophy of teaching and learning begins with the aim of training a broadly based, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used.

This approach goes beyond the acquisition of facts and concepts to cultivate skills and habits of rigorous, independent thought: the ability to analyze, to ask the next question, and to begin the search for an answer.

We hope these courses will be a resource for critical thinking, creative imagination, and intellectual exploration."

The Open Yale Courses have been funded and supported through grants from the William and Flora Hewitt Foundation, as well as the Yale Center for Media and Instruction. Open Yale Courses have also integrated Creative Commons licensing into their course materials.

Additional Resources

• Open Yale Courses
  
• Didactics World > Bridging the Digital Content Divide
  
• Creative Commons > Education
  
• Education Guardian Weekly > Reading Poetry at Yale...
  
• Didactics World > Open Content Provision Through ccLearn

Podscope -Podcast Search Engine

Podcasts are great learning tools but sometimes finding podcasts to use in your curriculum can be can be an arduous task for educators. Not if you use Podscope.

Podscope is an audio-video podcast search engine that searches podcasts for "key" words.

If you're a Nursing Educator searching for podcasts about nutrition, thats easy with Podscope. If you're an elemenatary level teacher looking for book reviews you're in luck, you can find them easily with Podscope.

To seach Podscope all you need to do is enter 1 word or more for a word search. Then before you can blink Podcope searches podcasts for those spoken words and the search results with links to the actual podcasts appear.

Podscope makes it so easy to find podcasts for your teaching and for student learning. But be careful, you might find yourself listening to hours of super podcasts....just be forewarned...

2008 Webware 100 Winners

The 2008 Webware Top 100 Winners have been announced- go check them out.

Now you have plenty time to brainstorm ideas for projects to use these Webware Winners for your own productivity or creativity, or with your students.

Library of Congress- New Interactive Website

Take your students on a field trip to the Library of Congress .

"This Library of Congress Experience will offer “hands-on” interaction with rare cultural treasures in ways that inspire and engage"

While you're going why not invite another class to go along? Then come back to an Elluminate Live Vroom and have the classes share their Library of Congress Experience with each other virtually. Neither class has to be in the same school or on the same continent.

Virtual Field Trips and communication software like Elluminate are a great way to connect kids to experiences they could have never had before without leaving school. Now new technologies provide the means to open our classroom doors to a world of experiences.

Ecto for Social- Collaborative Learning

EctoLearning is a Personalized Learning Environment for organizing class content for students to access online.

"Ecto lets you create interactive learning items and entire courses using your own content including RSS, YouTube, and Wikis. Content is user-generated, user-rated, and shared in the vast open Ecto library."

Ecto also you to share content and connect with others globally.

And best of all, access to EctoLearning is free.

Community + Web 2.0 = Learning

In a recently published article in the April 2008 Sloan-C View Patricia McGee, Associate Professor of Instructional Technology at The University of Texas at San Antonio focuses on Community + Web 2.0 = Learning. Professor McGee poses, “The question really becomes: How can we facilitate the natural formation of community regardless of the technology available to us?

Here is my reply ….We, humans, are social, gregarious beings. We love to talk with others, seek information from others to solve problems, and learn new things that excite and motivate us to create, innovate and invent. We have evolved and progressed over time, but always find a way to meet that basic human need for social gathering. What also has evolved over time is how we gather together.

Remember when gathering around the water cooler was a means to connect socially with people in your office and learn inadvertently from coworkers? I do, but most of the ‘Net Generation doesn’t. They have grown up digitally with some type of technology at their fingertips. Today ‘s Digital Natives connect with others differently than the digital immigrants, preferring social networks like Second Life, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Connecting and meeting virtually now is common place to Digital Natives who text friends to find where or when to meet or go online to a friend’s MySpace page to see what the friend has been doing lately. Learning is social. People now gather information from others through online social networks, and inadvertently learn about many new things. Information that was once gathered around the water cooler is now gained through a cell phone, mobile device, or computer.

People are already beginning to wonder what will be the next MySpace or Facebook tool that we, being 'social beings', embrace to connect with others? Whatever the tool, it will need to be easy-to-use, integrate with the devices that are already in the hands of the Digital Natives - something they are already familiar with- that will send them to the next dimension where they will continue to learn from others, but in a new way. The device itself will be the platform for new social networking software that allows for social interaction just like discussion forums, listservs, and email allowed us to exchange information, keep in touch, and learn en-route.

Technology's innovative tools provide a new means to do something people have always done- learn from others in a community of practice and from communities they choose to join. We are social creatures, gregarious in nature. It’s not really about the way in which we interact- online or face-to-face, but about meeting our need to be social. The technology serves as the tool that allows us to meet around the water cooler in IM, Facebook or Second Life and learn from others. It provides the opportunity for social learning.

Educators, on the other hand, need to be knowledgeable of these tools and use them in learning situations to reach the Digital Natives with their tools of choice. An educator’s job is to help student on their path to lifelong learning. Whether we use SMS texting, Twitter, Meebo, Second Life to connect students doesn’t matter, but providing an option for “the water cooler” is important for the students entering into a community of practice and for their continued learning within the community. Technology will continue to evolve and student’s ‘tech-a-tuitive-ness’ will rapidly increase in response. But the students’ need to be social and learn from others will persist. They will just do it through different mediums. Educators need to keep abreast of the new innovative communication and social networking tools and see how they can utilize them with their students. Learning doesn't take place in a vacuum, but through interactions with others.

Over the years ‘techies’ flocked to the James Bond 007 movies to see what new far-fetched technology gadgets Sean Connery would use. The gadgets helped him connect to others and allowed him to brave new worlds. The openness of the Web 2.0 provides the environment ripe for innovation of new technologies even more 'far-fetched' than Bonds. It’s just a matter of time till someone reaches over to try something, find it exciting, and then connects to others in their social network to share what they found. We will just have to wait.

But in the meantime, educators should utilize these new tools in the context of their curriculum and embed them into their course design through interactive learning activities that keep students engaged, connected, interacting, and learning socially.

Create Google Docs Forms

Try sending your field trip parent forms using Google Docs -Forms.

"Create a form in a Google Docs spreadsheet and send it out to anyone with an email address. They won't need to sign in, and they can respond directly from the email message or from an automatically generated web page....

Creating the form is easy: start with a spreadsheet to get the form, or start by creating the form and you'll get the spreadsheet automatically....Responses are automatically added to your spreadsheet."

You can even make your life easier by adding the Google Docs Forms gadget to your iGoogle homepage for easy access.

Google Forms is a slightly different twist on an old task. It might help you be more efficient and organized than trying to keep track of all those paper forms.