Open Learning Network

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Sorry that the weekly newsletter has not appeared for a month.  I could say that is because there was no news, but unfortunately more like too much.  I have been on leave for two weeks and then a significant number of the team, including me, were at Open Ed 2010 and Mozilla Drumbeat.

Blog posts from team members about the events:

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The Literature review of the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education that Giota Alevizou and Grainne Conole have been working on is now available in the public domain. The report was commissioned by the Higher Education Academy on the uses of social media in higher education. Click here to see the report: http://bit.ly/b08uY2#HEA

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Patrick has a long article on the Creative Commons blog - "OLnet’s Patrick McAndrew (@openpad): Open Education and Policy - http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/23521 via @creativecommons"

£1k each for 10 best UK OER case studies submitted by 1 Nov 750 word template: http://bit.ly/cCGQwz

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Karen has set up an OLnet Scribd account: http://www.scribd.com/OLnet If anyone has any documents that they want to share this way, please contact Karen.

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The OLnet team welcome this week two new OLnet Fellows and one returning Fellow - Jia Yimin, Elsebeth Sorensen and Jenny Preece.  Background information on each and a brief description of their research projects for the period of their Fellowships are given in last week's newsletter: http://olnet.org/node/472

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Grainne Conole has contributed a chapter to the recently published book "Web 2.0-based E-Learning: Applying Social Informatics for Tertiary Teaching". 

Her chapter entitled "Stepping Over the Edge: The Implications of New Technologies for Education" considers the impact of Web 2.0 technologies on education and, in particular, how these new technologies are changing learning and teaching practices.  For further details see: http://igi-global.com/Bookstore/TitleDetails.aspx?TitleId=40272&DetailsType=Description

(Written by Karen) Janet has done an excellent job in editing the report written by Pauline Ngimwa on "OER Readiness in Africa" into a print on demand format that will also be available as a PDF for free download.  The file was uploaded on Tuesday 8 Sept and can be viewed (or ordered) here: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1578859. We have ordered one printed copy as a proof and if that is OK will order a few more.  Once we are sure that the printed version is acceptable, we will do a general promotion of the PDF and printed format.

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OLnet's Andreia Inamorato dos Santos took part in a round table discussing ‘OER as Learning Objects’ at the 16th International Conference on Distance Education – ABED (Brazilian Association for Distance Education) using Flashmeeting on the 2nd September 2010.

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Your Ideas: What could Search Engines Do (to Make Finding Educational Content Easier). The Question: Could commercial search engines do a better job? What could a commercial search engine, or search engine company, do to make organizing, finding and accessing educational content easier and more effective?  To give your comments, ideas see: http://www.learningregistry.org/news/yourideaswhatcouldsearchenginesdotomakefindingeducationalcontenteasier

http://bit.ly/90Jkyg. The report offers a summary of strand activities and also includes individual strand synthesis work too.

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Karen has set up an OLnet podcast area on the KMI server.  There are two podcasts in it so far:

1. Presentations by OLnet Fellows: http://podcast.open.ac.uk/pod/OLnet_Fellows (which has Scott’s IET Coffee Morning Presentation)
2. All of the presentations from the Learning in an Open World Conference in June 2010 http://podcast.open.ac.uk/pod/OUConf10