Open Learning Network

  by  Pink Sherbet Photography 

The message is getting through and we are happy to see a lot of new members signing up to the site. However, we have had some problems with spamming and have had to put a system of manual approval in place for new registrations, so please bear with us if there is a delay in you being able to fully participate in the groups and posting comments on messages (particularly if you are signing up at the weekend).  Sorry for any disappointment and please don't let this put you off. If you have any postive suggestions for improvements, please add comments to this story.

Many bloggers are familiar with copying embed code from sites like YouTube and Slideshare to include the content in their blog posts. Now there's a simpler, more robust way...

I've tried to write a plain English tutorial, for a non-technical and technical audience - all you need is experience authoring content in a blog or content management system like Drupal or Moodle.

The OpenLearn project offers a lot of courses that you can take for free, or even remix. When you have the time to sit in front of your computer this is great, but what about those other times you can't spend time looking at your computer, but the opportunity to learn might brighten up your day? These times might include occasions such as a long car journey, when you are off jogging or waiting at a bus stop.

If you are a regular user of Twitter and follow folk who go to conferences you might have noticed that they have a tendency to highlight points they feel are noteworthy. It is a real change from just taking notes and communicating them to people upon return, now you can follow a conference even if you are not there. The information arriving in your Twitter stream though is raw, unsorted and delivered unevenly over time. What if you wanted to make some sense of it? One of my favourite tools to help with such a challenge is FreeMind, which is open source software that deals with mind maps. The only problem is getting the information out of Twitter and in to FreeMind. So why FreeMind and not another mind mapping tool? In the end it comes down to preference, you might just be able to use another tool you prefer here, it might even make your life easier. The reason I picked FreeMind though, is that it is quite an easy way to get into mind mapping techniques, it is fairly easy to use and, rather significantly, it is quite easy to generate files that it can use. FreeMind cannot read directly from Twitter though, so we need something to search Twitter and make those results into a file that FreeMind can use. Once we have the results in a mind map we can delete the ones we don't need and rearrange the others to get a coherent picture of what was said.