SP4Ed: Scenario Planning for Educators

I’m a technologist that works with the Open Education Resource Foundation.  I see huge similarities between the way awareness of Open Source affected the computing world and the way Open Education can change the world for learners.  I enjoy writing tools that facilitate the interchange and reuse of these educational resources.

For the SP4Ed course, we are experimenting with a variety of loosely coupled software components.  The goal of many of them is to bring content from the participants’ favorite mediums into a single aggregated “feed” that everyone can monitor.  Participants can use their favorite blogging or microblogging services to reflect on and extend course content, with it all visible in a central location.

Who knows, I might even learn a bit about scenario planning (and effective teaching of adult online learners) along the way.

 

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ULearn08

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

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

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

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

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.