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

Creating a Flat Classroom

The Seven Steps to a Flat Classroom workshop was created by Vicki Davis, recognized Web 2.0 expert and creator of the Cool Cat Teacher blog, for Atomic Learning.

In the Seven Steps to a Flat Classroom workshop, Davis herself utilizes Atomic Learning’s short, show-and-tell video tutorials to guide users through flattening their classroom by expanding it to include global communities and collaboration tools.

The workshop is a valuable resource for educators seeking to integrate technology and includes over 80 tutorials on topics such as Applying ISTE NETS standards to your project, Connecting Classrooms online, Digital Citizenship and Safety and many more.

View the workshop by clicking here.

Related Resources

• Flat Classroom Conference
• Atomic Learning
• PBwiki Back-to-School Challenge
• Flat Bobby Flickr Project

Amazon.com Partners with OLPC

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has announced that they have partnered with Amazon.com to revive the Give One, Get One program. This program, first launched last year, allows consumers to purchase two XO laptops, one is shipped to the buyer, and the other is sent to a student in a developing nation.

According to PC World, Amazon.com will start selling XO laptops in late November, around the time of Thanksgiving in the U.S. Sales will likely extend through to around the end of December.

Related Resources

• One Laptop Per Child Program
  
• 1:1 Computing: Moving from Theory to Practice
• Gary Stager >> Laptops and Learning
• Seymour Papert >> From Lunch Boxes to Laptops
• The Maine Learning with Laptop Study
• Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI)

Education 2.0 Conference

The Knowledge Bank online conference out of Australia this year is focused on Web 2.0 in education: what it is, how it’s being used today and its potential to radically change education. Steve Hargadon will be giving the keynote address on why "Web 2.0 Is the Future of Education."

You can learn more about the conference by clicking here.

Related Resources

• Social Media, Web 2.0 & Online Course Design
• Mobile Learning: The Next Wave
• MashupEDU: A New Digital Pedagogy

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

Teachers.tv: Online Safety & Social Networks

Teachers.TV, a UK-based professional development site for educators, has a great video on teaching kids about information literacy, social networking and web safety. This is a refreshingly rational analysis and discussion of the issues surrounding kids, web safety and social media.

This video also outlines several classroom activities that teachers can use with their students (and parents) to help them gain a better understanding and awareness of the potential dangers of sharing too much information in social networks.

Related Resources

• Digizen: Digital Citizenship
• Connect Safely
• Yahoo! Safely
• BJ Fogg on Web Credibility
• eSchool News: Online Safety Myths

Call for Papers: 2008 K12 Online Conference

The K12 Online Conference 2008 has just issued a call for proposals. This year’s conference is scheduled for October 20-24 and October 27-31 of 2008, and will include a pre-conference keynote during the week of October 13. The conference theme for 2008 is "Amplifying Possibilities."

Participation in the conference (as in the past) is entirely free. Conference materials are published in English and available for worldwide distribution and use under a Creative Commons license. The deadline for proposal submission has been extended to July 11, 2008.

You can get more information, including the proposal form, over on the K12 Online website.

Related Resources

• Creative Commons
• K12 Online > Ning
• Classroom 2.0