Mozilla and Creative Commons teach practical open education skills

Mozilla, in collaboration with ccLearn and the Peer 2 Peer University, launches a practical online seminar on open education.

This six week course is targeted at educators who will gain basic skills in open licensing, open technology, and open pedagogy; work on prototypes of innovative open education projects; and get input from some of the world leading innovators along the way.

The course will kick-off with a web-seminar on Thursday 2 April 2009 and run for 6 weeks.

Weekly web seminars introduce new topics ranging from content licensing to the latest open technologies and peer assessment practices.

Participants will share project ideas with a community of peers, work on individual projects, and get feedback from experienced mentors. We will also take a close look at some of the most innovative examples of open education projects, and speak to the people who designed them, including:

• The Open Source Software courses at Seneca College;
• David Wiley's Introduction to Open Education;
• The open blog infrastructure at Mary Washington University; etc.

The course is targeted at educators who want to help shape the open education future. Participants should have some knowledge of web technologies, or open content licensing, or open pedagogy (or all three), but don't need to be experts.

Interested in participating? Head over to the course wiki, and submit your project idea!

Course outline: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/EduCourse

Sign-up page: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/EduCourse/SignUp

For questions about the course or the sign-up process, contact:

Philipp Schmidt
Peer 2 Peer University
philipp AT peer2peeruniversity.org

Contact Mozilla:

Frank Hecker
Mozilla Foundation
hecker AT mozillafoundation.org

Contact ccLearn

Ahrash Bissell
ccLearn
ahrash AT creativecommons.org

2008 K12 Open Minds Conference

If you have an interest in Open Source Software and its benefits for K-12 schools, I hope you will consider attending and/or presenting at the 2008 K12 Open Minds Conference, September 25-27, in Indianapolis, Indiana.

This is an unparalleled opportunity to talk with teachers, administrators and technology staff from around the U.S. and the world. Here are some important links:

• General conference information at http://www.k12openminds.org
• Call for speakers information at http://www.k12openminds.org/conference/call-for-speakers/
• Sponsorship information at http://www.k12openminds.org/sponsors.html/

The conference expects more than 600 attendees, from the US, Europe, Asia and North and South America. Dozens of sessions that address teaching and learning, leadership and policy, and technology and infrastructure issues related to open technologies make this conference a "must attend" event.

Featured Speakers include:

• Donna Benjamin - Executive Director of Creative Contingencies and board member of Open Source Industry Australia;

• Alex Inman -- Director of Technology at Whitfield School, St. Louis, MO - an Essential School using open source;

• Chris Lehman -- Principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA.;

• Dr. David Thornburg - Director of Global Operations for the Thornburg Center and author of several books including, When the Best is Free.

Related Resources

• Open Yale Courses
• Didactics World: Bridging the Digital Content Divide
• Textbooks, Piracy & Old Media

Yale University Launches OCW

Yale University has joined the OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement and is now offering free courses through Open Yale Courses that anyone in the world is free to participate.

Seven departments (astronomy, English, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology and religious studies) at Yale are among the first at the university to offer classes via the Open Yale Courses program.

The Open Yale site describes the program as follows:

"Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to seven introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.

Open Yale Courses reflects the values of a liberal arts education. Yale's philosophy of teaching and learning begins with the aim of training a broadly based, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used.

This approach goes beyond the acquisition of facts and concepts to cultivate skills and habits of rigorous, independent thought: the ability to analyze, to ask the next question, and to begin the search for an answer.

We hope these courses will be a resource for critical thinking, creative imagination, and intellectual exploration."

The Open Yale Courses have been funded and supported through grants from the William and Flora Hewitt Foundation, as well as the Yale Center for Media and Instruction. Open Yale Courses have also integrated Creative Commons licensing into their course materials.

Additional Resources

• Open Yale Courses
• Didactics World > Bridging the Digital Content Divide
• Creative Commons > Education
• Education Guardian Weekly > Reading Poetry at Yale...
• Didactics World > Open Content Provision Through ccLearn

K12 Online Conference

Announcing the 2nd Annual K12 Online 2007 convention for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice.

The 2007 conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26 of 2007, and will include a pre-conference keynote during the week of October 8. The conference theme is “Playing with Boundaries.”

Additional Resources

• K12 Online 2007
  
• Upcoming.org > K12 Online
  
• Flickr > tag > k12online07

AFT Resources for Teaching AIDS & Darfur

I recently had the privilege of attending the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) conference in Washington D.C. where my colleague Karon Weber and I had the opportunity to present Yahoo! for Teachers at a workshop being held at the 2007 AFT QuEST Conference.

One thing that really struck me was how progressive the AFT is in their approach to teaching as well as their positions on social issues. There were several booths that centered around what the AFT membership could do to support AIDS Advocacy, Genocide Awareness in Darfur, and Democracy in Africa.

"As men and women of conscience and as educators committed to the dignity and worth of all humanity, we have a responsibility to speak out against injustice on behalf of vulnerable and disenfranchised peoples across the globe." ~ 2006 AFT resolution on Opposition to the Genocide in Darfur

The AFT-Africa AIDS Campaign is a multi-country campaign in partnership with African teacher unions to provide resources to fight the spread of this disease. The impact of AIDS in the teaching community is staggering.

"This year in South Africa, more than 1,000 teachers will die of AIDS. In Zimbabwe more than 30 percent of the country's teachers carry the HIV virus. Many school age children have lost a parent to the epidemic. Throughout Africa, the statisics tell a similar story--teachers' lives lost and whole education systems endangered (Source: AFT-Africa AIDS Campaign)."

Here are some of the excellent resources complied by the AFT to help teachers educate their students on issues related to Africa, HIV and AIDS.

• Jim Lehrer NewsHour > Sudan
• Connecticut Coalition to Save Darfur > Teaching Resources
• Understanding Sudan
• Choices Program > Darfur Lesson Plans
• Darfur is Dying > Interactive Games

Related Resources

• debaird.net + Africa
• American Federation of Teachers
• AFT AIDS Campaign (pdf)
• Flickr > tag > Darfur

Derek Baird
Community Manager, The Digital Alliance Foundation

Edutopia on Flickr

The George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF) has long been an advocate of helping teachers use technology to support instruction and student learning in the classroom. This month's edition of Edutopia, their online community and print magazine, has a feature article on using Flickr in the classroom.

The article, written by Amy Standen, features interviews with Tim Lauer, Flickr Community Manager Heather Champ and several other educators on how they use Flickr in their classroom.

At the end of the article, Amy lists several education oriented groups created in Flickr. These groups (and there are quite a few!) are an excellent way to find out how your colleagues are using Flickr in their classrooms.

So read the article, check out and join a Flickr education group today! Also worth noting:

• Flickr has over a million photos with a Creative Commons license that you are free to use in classroom projects.

• You can create a private Flickr group where you control both membership as well as the content in the group. This is a great way to create a "micro-Flickr" for your school and/or classroom.

• There are a TON of Flickr hacks (like Spell with Flickr) created by and for members of the Flickr community that you can use to make some fun and creative art projects. Huge Big Labs (aka FD's Flickr Toys) has an excellent (and free!) collection of Flickr projects. Thanks FD!

• Jeff Utech, the uber edublogger behind The Thinking Stick (always a must read!) has posted a Flickr tutorial over on YouTube.

Related Links

FlickrEdu: Social Networking Goes to School

Flickr + Creative Commons

debaird.net + Flickr

Open Content Courseware

via OpenCourseWare Finder: Find open educational resources by typing in the search box or selecting tags from left to right. Browse the results in real time below and find what you're looking for!

The OCW Finder currently shows results from:

• MIT OCW
• Utah State University OCW
• Johns Hopkins School of Public Health OCW
• Tufts University OCW
• Foothill De-Anza SOFIA
• Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
• Harvard OCW
• OER Commons
• Connexions