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ULearn08

Jim Tittsler — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:03:40 +0000

This week is devoted to ULearn08 a huge gathering of teachers from across New Zealand (during their school holidays!) that attempts to inspire and inform them about the latest in teaching, learning, and community.

I’m particularly interested in some of the topics that will be discussed at the pre-conference workshops, including the use of Web 2.0 tools to amalgamate a personal learning environment and the discussions surrounding bringing the advanced network to the NZ schools sector.

Deploying WikiEducator Content

Jim Tittsler — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:43:57 +0000

WikiEducator has an energetic and supportive community that is collaborating in building Open Educational Resources. Many organizations still are tied to traditional Learning Management Systems for delivering online content to their students. I am experimenting with a way of packaging content taken from a WikiEducator collection in standard IMS Content Package and IMS Common Cartridge formats. The web service takes a URL pointing at a collection and produces a standard ZIP file for download and deployment in an LMS.

The tool is written in Python and makes heavy use of the BeautifulSoup HTML parsing library.
http://edu.OnNZ.net/wikieducator/package

EDtalks

Jim Tittsler — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:15:06 +0000

CORE Education has started a collection of short video interviews related to education, on topics ranging from inquiry and assessment to technical tools.
http://EDtalks.org/

Connectivism & Connective Knowledge

Jim Tittsler — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 22:33:13 +0000

I am looking forward to participating in the Connectivism & Connective Knowledge course which kicks off this week. It has been dubbed a MOOC, a Massive Open Online Course, because there are currently 2 facilitators and over 1900 participants registered. The introductions posted in the course Moodle suggest a huge range of backgrounds and expectations so it will be fun to see how it plays out.

From the Edge

Jim Tittsler — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:21:12 +0000

I am a computer software/hardware geek that has been living in Gisborne, New Zealand for the past couple of years working on eXe. eXe is an Open Source desktop tool that allows teachers to author their content and package it in standard formats for use in learning management systems.

Gisborne bills itself as the “First to See the Sun,” as it is located just beyond the international dateline at approximately 178 degrees east. It is a small town of less than 40,000 known for its agriculture, white wine production, and surfing.