Why haven’t I tried this yet?

Found this review of Calameo buried in my bookmarks, and am wondering why I haven’t used it yet?  Has anybody used Calameo as a tool for creating OERs?  Or even as a type of online course manual?

The OER project has its own home…

…and it’s over here, in case you want to follow it.

The OER project

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

originally uploaded by semaphoria

Today is the day that I’m launching a personal project that I’ve been brewing for a while.  My interest in what is happening in the OER world right now has extended to a desire to try and understand what the self-directed student experience would actually be in attempting to use OERs to learn a topic area that would normally be measured as a degree level course.  

I’m having a bit of deja vu right now, since for my MA thesis in 2001, I spent 2 months documenting and journaling my attempt to use only freely available internet resources and tools to learn Spanish, using a free 56k internet connection (remember those?).  At the time, there were a lot of Spanish grammar exercises for the beginner, grammar resources, some really interesting Latin American webzines, and I was even able to catch the odd telenovela from Venezuela from some television streaming sites.  I was able to stream CNN en Espanol all day long (which I don’t think they let you do anymore), so I had a steady news stream in Spanish as background noise.  I attempted a few chat rooms to interact with some ‘real’ Spanish speakers, and spent some time sending emails to a Spanish friend.  I felt I had a lot more fun learning a language this way than sitting in a language class (which I’ve done a lot of in the past), but I’m by nature pretty self-directed so it wasn’t a big leap.  However, I also learned that I spent a lot of time looking for the appropriate resources and cobbling together some sort of course.  I clocked all of my time spent in ‘learning’ mode, and at the end of approximately 40 hours, I signed up for the DELE ( the TOEFL equivalent in Spanish) and found that I had progressed from beginner to low intermediate level, which is line with what would have been expected from a typical Spanish language course at UBC.  

Fast forward to 2008, where I’ve had a nagging desire to get on top of basic quantitative research methods and the statistics that go along with those, but no desire or time to sign up for a class.  Therefore, I’m launching myself into this project, which consists of using OERs to learn undergraduate level statistics appropriate to quantitative research methods in education.  I’d love to be able to find the perfect course package waiting for me through a search at the OpenCoursewareFinder, but I suspect I’ll be doing some patchwork between OER Commons, the OpenCourseWareFinder, and ItunesU.  I’ll be on a high speed connection this time, but I won’t be purchasing any textbooks or software in order to keep costs down and accessibility high. Since I’m interested in language and translation issues around OERs, I also plan on searching for courseware in all of the 3 languages I can actually read (English, French, and Spanish). I’ll document it on this blog somehow, and follow the same methodology as I did in 2001.  

Obviously, I hope to be successful in learning statistics (and not for the purpose of obtaining credits or credentials), but I really hope to learn more about OERs, searching OERs, and engaging with them as student in some meaningful way.  Specifically, what advantage will the OER initiatives provide that Google couldn’t provide in my 2001 experiment?  Will it speed up the assembly of course materials into some meaningful learning package? Will it provide me with a more structured learning plan?  Will I be seeking networks of experts to help me out in the absence of an instructor?  Will I know when I’ve been successful?  Will I wish I just went out and bought Statistics for Dummies?

EDEN research workshop

I’ve been meaning to gather my thoughts on the European Distance Education Network (EDEN) Research Workshop that I recently attended in Paris.  It was my first time attending a European conference, and there was a lot to like. Paris is one of those places that you have to visit at least once in your life, so the location got top marks.  Actually being inside the UNESCO building was admittedly surreal.  The airport-like security to enter the building was one thing, but once inside, the combination of the highly preserved mid-century artifacts and architecture (photos coming) along with energy that only a world organization headquarters can provide made the epic adventure in and out of Charles de Gaulle airport worth the trouble.

I have mixed feelings about the EDEN research workshop itself, partly due to my own inflated expectations.  Research workshop suggests less presenting, more discussion, neither of which happened.  Keynote panelists went way over their time, creating a domino effect that lead to confusion during the workshop sessions, where presenters rushed to get through their presentations at the expense of discussion periods. Some keynotes were also left with no time–I for one would have like to have heard more from Sara Guri-Rosenblit from the Open University in Israel. There was a lot of talking to, at the expense of discussing with (and way too many government officials saying very little in too much time), which lead me to feel extremely frustrated by the end of Day 2.  Plus, this being Paris, and conference fees in the 500 Euro range, I expected a little more quality coffee and snacks, neither of which seemed to be available in any sort of abundance.  On the plus side, the wines from Bordeaux at the end of Day 2 were a nice touch.

The theme of the conference was Open Access, and the big takeaway for me was realizing that many of us are talking about different things when we talk about Open Access.  In fact, one of the keynotes from the US even ranted a bit about individuals not respecting copyright agreements, which had a few of us shaking our heads and wondering whether she’d travelled to the wrong conference, and had me wondering what exactly about the semantics of open and access lead her to adopt this position.  However, there is value in recognizing how vastly different we are, and I realized that perhaps the Canadian in me has lead me to adopt a view of open access that is undoubtedly left of centre.

On the plus side, I had the pleasure of meeting some key distance education people who have made such a contribution to DE that I consider them celebrities.  This is the really nice part of attending a conference in person, and the informal conversations that came with this were the highlight of this conference for me, and are one of the reasons that I’ll attempt to attend the next one.

Some of the sessions were recorded (I’ll try and post the link when I can find it), and the papers are being made available, but only temporarily and only to members, if my information is correct, which seems like a bit of a contradiction in the context of the theme of the conference, and the considerable effort that went into the excellent Six Journals Call.