ccLearn

Creative Commons today announced the formation of a new division, ccLearn. This group is "dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources" and has a stated mission "to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers."

That's very exciting. If you've heard me speaklately, you know that I am a very big advocate of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. I believe that this movement coupled with massive collaboration has the opportunity to reshape education by providing valuable resources needed to differentiate instruction.

Stay tuned for more info on this as it develops.

How we learn

I've been reflecting on how we teach and learn...not with students, but with colleagues in professional development.

Unfortunately, many of us (myself included) don't always model the use of the strategies we know are most effective for learning. Many PD workshops or presentations are the typical "sage of the stage" fair. And I've heard from several different teachers in master's programs about how dry their graduate courses are.

Good teaching and learning involves students being engaged and active in their own learning. Technology isn't a necessary component of this, but it can certainly be a useful tool.

As I've started incorporating tools like blogs and wikis in workshops, I've found that many participants are more engaged. A large part of this is providing options (differentiating instruction). Some people would rather post to a blog; others would rather write notes on post-its; still others would rather just sit and talk. I'm even starting to see the value of Twitter and virtual environments as learning tools.

Everything we can add to the mix provides more tools to reach learners, whether they are peers or students, and that all leads to more engaged learning.

Side benefit of Web 2.0

Here's a nice side benefit to Web 2.0: When the batteries on your laptop die, you can just grab another one and keep working!

What a great time this is!

I'm getting ready for a whirlwind 10 presentations in 5 days next week at MAHETC and elsewhere. I'm doing a lot of new stuff, including a keynote called "My Virtual Digital Brain, Thriving on the Chaos of Information Overload."

Thriving on the chaos pretty much sums up this year for me. I really can't remember a year when I've done as much personal learning in a while. There are so many exciting new things going on, and I'm really psyched about the opportunities for all of us (including, but not limited to, kids) to expand our learning.

If you'll be in Salisbury (and especially if you're a reader of this blog or a listener to Karen's Mashups), make sure to stop by and say hi. You'll recognize me as the girl whirling around like the Tasmanian devil.:)


Image: Credit Joanna Field; copyright K12 Handhelds

Open video

Here's another good site for "copyleft" video: The Open Video Project.

Some of the video is from NASA and other government sources, but the site is much better organized and easier to search than most government sites.

Animal Alphabet

As a part of the fun I'm having contributing to Wikijunior (part of Wikibooks, offering free, open content textbooks), I've taken an animal alphabet book there and made video and ebook versions of it.

They're available for viewing and download here.

There are versions for the desktop, various handhelds, iPods, and even a Mobipocket ebook version. (One of the not-fun things about creating video is all the format issues. I think we've put about everything up here, but let me know if anything's been missed.)

If you haven't ventured into the world of contributing to wikis, Wikijunior is a great place to start. (Try the Human Body book or Ancient Civilizations.) The more people who contribute to these free "copyleft" resources, the better they will be. If you're not sure how to start, try something small like fixing an error or just adding a couple sentences. It's a lot of fun!

Differentiating Instruction with Mobile Technology

At NECC last week, I presented a session called "Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate and Enrich Instruction." The ISTE folks had wanted to podcast the session, but I wasn't crazy about the legal agreement they were using. (It wasn't Creative Commons and gave pretty extensive rights to Apple.)

So....I created my own digital version of this session for folks to download:

Audio only (MP3)
Video version (streaming, for viewing in a browser; loads faster, but lower quality)
Video version (WMV, 320x240, for Win download)
Video version (MOV, 320x240, for Mac download)
Video version (M4V, 320x240, for ipod download)

If anyone is interested in a higher resolution version to share with folks who weren't able to attend, email me, and I'll try to send you a CD.

For those who are interested, I audio recorded this with a very inexpensive Olympus WS-100 pocket recorder. I edited the audio in Audacity and brought it all into Windows Movie Maker for editing. The visuals included exported jpgs from my presentation slides and screen-capture videos made with Camstudio. I used HandShare to create the Palm movies (which is the same software I used to present). Creating the whole thing took about 4 hours.

It was a lot of fun making this and was a good way to reflect on my own style of presenting (and hopefully refine it for upcoming events).

I hope this is a useful resource for you all.