Multilitteratus Incognitus

I've been dabbling with the OER "week" in introduction to open education  this week. I have to say that I've been a big proponent of OER (from a theoretical standpoint) for quite some time now.  I do believe that it is important for educators (especially those in public institution) to share their contributions for free and feed them forward.  The actual implementation is what I am stumbling a bit on in that it generally takes more time to go through OER resources in order to find something that works best in your  course sequence, and at times you don't even find that. A complaint that came across in OERu's #OCL4ED workshop was that it was more time consuming going through OER to find what might work well in your course, compared to going with some publisher's pre-packaged (and not-free) materials. That being said, there were a few quite interesting resources in the readings. For example, A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources  is a nice (and fre...

This past week I also looked at the OCW module of #ioe12. The assigned video was the announcement of the OpenCourseWare project back in 2001 (more than 10 years ago! Who would have thunk it!).  Now, reading about the OCW back then, I got the impression that these were going to be courses  and not just materials. That OCW would be something like what MOOCs are today rather than a publisher or materials. When I first looked at OCW I was really disappointed.  These were not courses!  They were materials, exams, readings and course notes.  Some OCW materials were more "complete"than others, so an interested student (with loads of motivation and resourcefulness)  would be able to  self-study, but some materials were really incomplete and not conducive to self-study.  I saw this as a major #fail. This really colored my perception of OCW. At this year's NMC conference (11 years later!) I did attend a session on OCW and my misconceptions abo...

Seems like this will be the summer of professional development :-) On a tip from Igne I signed up for the Mobile Learning Manager certification course which is a self-paced learning program to certify managers of mobile learning initiatives. I think the US equivalent would be a training manager, focusing on mobile learning.  The course is a bit rough around the edges (which is why they wanted some guinea pigs this time around ;-)  ) but so far it's enjoyable!  More on this as I experience more. On a tip (or rather blog post) from Serena Turri, I saw that OER Foundation is offering a free five week course on Open Content Licensing for Educators . This course is free to join and offered on Moodle.  At this point they are already on Week 3, so I have to catch up a bit - but luckily (contentwise) I am not a n00bie, so I can really jump in an start interacting :)  More on this, as I interact more.