week 1.Comments on different open online education projects

Open University (UK) Open Content Initiative

LearningSpace has an klear and well structured interface, but it takes a little while to look around. It offers a great deal of different fields and provides flashmeetings and videobloggs among other things.

Rice Connexions - TED Talk Richard Baraniuk - Talks about the Connexions project

Connexions seems to provide a meeting space for specifically the educational field. The interface is clear and easy to navigate In. it also had a good virtual tour of the website.

MIT OpenCourseWare

A bit different from the first two, this site provides online courses in a wide range of fields. The only problem was that most of the courses notes were dated a some years back and I didn’t find many newer courses. It seems like the interest in contributing isn’t that big. I was also quite bothered about the big “donate now” signs…

LeMill.net

The best thing about LeMill is that you can choose form a good selection of languages you seldom find as an option. It feels like it is a community for Europe. The freedom of choosing ones own language is good, but it also makes the learning environment a bit difficult to use because of the postings and discussions in languages one doesn’t master. LeMill doesn’t yet have a very large database (or so it seems)

http://wikiversity.org/

Wikiversity is quite clearly structured and easy to use – interface familiar through the use of Wikipedia. Wikiversity seems to hold a lot of material, also in the field of education and has nice demos.

Week 1. Response to “OER: What they are and why do they matter”

As a newcomer in this field I was surprised over how vast OER is and how it is connected to areas I didn´t think of. Some of these areas include politics, economy and the copy write law – all somehow some kind of background factor to open educational resources. But I also found it striking and wonderful that there are a lot of people who want to do something for society without political or economical reasons in first hand.

An interesting point sated was that the field of education is in a sense unique, that by contributing with knowledge there are no losers – but everybody can gain from it - David´s statement “…knowledge is inherently a non-rival good. In this view, knowledge is, indeed, a public good.”

As one new to the field of open sources, I started wondering about things as how reliable was the material? Is there someone controlling it or is everyone responsible? There are probably a lot of people wanting to do good, but don’t have as much knowledge as they should – or how about if someone deliberately wants to sabotage? On page 26 Tuomi defines tree levels of openness, who defines/or controls these specific levels? These are probably quite naïve questions and thoughts, but with no prior knowledge and experience…;)

Even so, without prior experience in this area, I still am amazed about how OER will transform the educational field, and how the individual probably becomes more and more responsible for one´s own learning processes and the continuation of learning. Learning isn’t something you do in restricted areas and forms, but a part of everyday life – therefore it is interesting to see how we relate to informal learning and how we can “show our informal knowledge” for example in applying for a job.

And last, Tuomis text (page5) “Cognitive technologies will be used to repair defects in learning styles and to compensate the effects of aging” was a mind opener. It seems like we still limit online learning to meet but a few learning styles - it will be interesting to see (or be a part of) this development.

My intro

Hello!

My name is Annika. I work part time as an arts teacher in secondary school and at the same time studying for my masters degree at the university of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland, the virta3 program. This means that most of our courses are online! I am also personally interested in how to adapt education in new learning environments. I´m taking this course because , apart from some personal experience , I feel that I know next to nothing about this important feeld.