Open Learning Network

Achieve and the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) have announced a new tool for users to rate the quality of OER for teaching and student learning. The tool will allow educators to rate the quality of these resources for teaching and student learning, align these resources to the Common Core State Standards, and evaluate the extent to which the individual resources align to specific standards.

In the spirit of openness and continuous improvement (and trying out available tools), we have set up a free account on Uservoice for suggestions on how to imporve this website.  Please have a look here: http://olnet.uservoice.com/

Cloudworks also has a Uservoice page set up for suggestion: http://cloudworks.uservoice.com/

Uservoice allows you to add ideas and also give weighted voting to your own and ideas added by others.

At OLnet, we are involved in many different types of fascinating research partnering with organisations, institutions and individuals worldwide in order to achieve a better understanding of what it means to learn, teach and research in an open world. "My OLnet Research E-book" will focus on introducing different sections of my personal research together with evidence, links to relevant information and useful tips depending on the topic.

Relevant Research:

  by  edtechie99 

Charles Severance visited for a week from 7-11 June. Here is a really great video report of what he did while he was in the UK with the OLnet team.

We had the honour and joy to welcome Prof Jenny Preece at OLnet on the 8th and 9th of April. Jenny Preece together with Ben Schneiderman have created the Reader-to-Leader Framework, a framework supported by extensive references to the research literature that explains what motivates technology-mediated social participation in online communities.

We have been trialling Google Docs as a method of colaborating as a team on shared documents. I just thought I would record some frustrations that I have with the Spreadsheet version.

Twitter initially started as a micro-blogging service, but quickly developed into a social messaging tool used effectively to quickly communicate messages to a group or several different groups of people.

I went to one of the weekly technology coffee mornings that are held in our unit (Institute of Educational Technology) on Wednesday.  It isn't always easy to fit in the time to go, but all of those that I have managed to get to so far have been really interesting.  I find it useful to give me an overview of the technology but also to get a sense of who is doing what in this huge organisation that is the Open University.

Sunday afternoon. Keep checking my watch. Just logged onto Skype to have a discussion about the experience of creating Smarthistory.org, a multi-award winning Open Educational Resource with founders, Drs Steven Zucker and Beth Harris. Dr Steven Zucker is a specialist in 19th and 20th-century art and theory and is Dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology. He has received awards for excellence in teaching and authors essays and articles in prestigious art history journals. With Dr. Beth Harris, he created the FIT digital image library and organized conferences on technologies reshaping the practice of teaching art and art history. Dr Beth Harris was an assistant professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology when she created Smarthistory with Dr. Zucker. She has taught both online and in the classroom and also directed FIT's large distance learning program. She is currently Director of Digital Learning at a museum in New York City. Beth is a Victorian Studies specialist and editor of Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century (2005). With  Steven Zucker, she co- authored "The Slide Library: A Posthumous Assessment in the Service of Our Digital Future,” in Teaching Art History with Technology: Case Studies (2008).