FREE Content is King!!!

Two posts in one day... it must be school holidays.

I've been organising my bookmarks recently (shock! horror!) and figured out that I have a lot of stuff sitting there that really need to be talked about.

In WA the Education Department is setting up a Online Teaching and Learning Network - which is great but is costing a fortune, and will be closed to anyone who works outside the Department of Education. So any teacher in the independent or Catholic system plus anyone who has skills to produce open content are effectively locked out.

These are 7 Content clearinghouses to find stuff to teach with that are open and encourage participation and in some cases contribution. This group is leaning to high school to University level but OER and Curriki have a lot of k-7 resources.

Intute a UK based service. Intute is a free online service that helps you to find the best web resources for your studies and research.Intute is created by a consortium of seven universities, working together with a whole host of partners.

HippoCampus is a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE). The goal of HippoCampus is to provide high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects to high school and college students free of charge.

Connexions is: a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:
* authors create and collaborate
* instructors rapidly build and share custom collections
* learners find and explore content

I first heard about Connexions on TED.com

Open Educational Resources: born from the creative commons movement. OER content is made free to use or share, and in some cases, to change and share again, made possible through licensing, so that both teachers and learners can share what they know.

Merlot: MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, searchable collection of peer reviewed and selected higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services. MERLOT's vision is to be a premiere online community where faculty, staff, and students from around the world share their learning materials and pedagogy.

MIT Open Courseware: MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.

Curriki : Curriki is an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Dr. Barbara Kurshan: Come in, We're Open (huffingtonpost.com)

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]">

Creative Commons & Open Source

Image via Wikipedia

Copyright for teachers can be a minefield. It doesn't help when it feels like everyone is breaking the rules all over the Internet. Here in Western Australia the Education department scare the bejesus out of its teachers but doesn't offer up any way to get resources that don't infringe on copyrights.

This was all brought on by my girlfriend trying to find clip art and images for her worksheets.

So here is the first of a series of way to get free digital resources without breaking the law...

But first just a few words on creative commons licencing - please be aware that some people do not want you to change the image or music that they have made available please check the licence of the work to make sure you can make derivatives.

Music - Jamendo: it's what is mostly on my iphone. CC licenced music from all genres
Free Music Archive: anaother great source of free CC and Public domain music

Images - Videos and other stuff - the Creative commons search tool will throw up CC licenced content based on your search terms.

Text - Project Gutenberg: Text copies of out of copyright and therefore public domain books.

There is way more than this but it should get you started.

Cheers

Christmas Schlopping

Well I've just spent the afternoon Christmas shopping in the CBD of Perth. I'm always surprised how small Perth City CBD seems, yet it is fairly big compared to some of the cities I have lived and visited around the world.

So I got some of my Christmas shopping done, and picked up the latest Girl Talk album. Yes I still buy CD's on occasion - and this one has blown me away. As an old DJ it is like taking me back to the days behind the decks during the 90's. I've got my headphones on and smiling as he mixes a bit of grunge with club with hip hop with rap and old school rock all in one and it bloody works.

On a sad note George Oats lost her job with Fickr/Yahoo as part of some mass layoffs. George was responsible for the Flickr commons, where public photo collections from major museums and libraries were uploaded with a CC licence. This was a very worthwhile project as it allowed people to tag and make relevent a huge range of public images.

This effects eBeam to some degree as it has a link to Flickr content that is public domain or CC licenced. But the fact this project has now been effectively killed makes me sad.