January 2011 Blog Posts (11)

Please watch our short video on Kickstarter

WHAT IS SMARTHISTORY?



Smarthistory.org is a Webby-award winning, free and open educational resource for the study of art history. Smarthistory was created by two art historians, Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, each with twenty years of teaching experience, who saw an opportunity to use conversation and the web to make art history accessible to their students. The Smarthistory…

On January 25, 201, I did a Webinar for the Distance Learning Advisory Board of NJEDge.Net (the higher education network for the state of NJ)

The session overview:  Unlike commercial e-books, open textbooks are accessible online at no cost, very affoEdrdable as a print book, and are licensed to allow faculty to legally access and reformat copies of the text at no additional cost.  The educational material inside open textbooks is similar to…

I created a site (using LibGuides) on electronic textbooks to support my presentations on OER and open textbooks.

It has sections on open textbooks that utilize some of the materials from the advocate training materials.

It's work in progress - feel free to reuse sections and offer suggestions for additions.

http://pccc.libguides.com/etextbooks

Cable Green was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education in an article called "State of Washington to Offer Online Materials as Texts" by Martha Ann Overland. I loved the article because it promotes all of the things I am so excited about in education right now: free, openly licensed textbooks, open education resources, and the creation of communities that are creating freely accessible learning materials.…

Here are the presentation slides from the Mid-Pacific Information Communication Conference, January 6, 2011, on Finding and Authoring Open Textbooks.   Great feedback from participants and lots of engagement around the importance of affordable textbooks and enabling instructors to work together and share their instructional materials.  Archive to live session coming soon.…

The Chancellor’s Office for the California Community Colleges is in the process of researching Open Education Resource (OER) courseware and/or modules for Intermediate Algebra for a special project under development.  If you know of any OER courseware/modules that the Chancellor's Office can review as a part of this research effort it would be greatly appreciated.  Please send that information or any links to information on this topic to LeBaron Woodyard, Dean of Academic…

When I first considered open source textbooks, I gave little thought to discipline considerations.  After much discussion with many colleagues, it occurred to me that the push for awareness and adoptions might be benefited with some discussion among like disciplines. …

The second volume in the Writing Spaces open textbook series for first year writing classes is now available for free download (Creative Commons licensed PDF) and for purchase in print. There are twenty-one new essays to complement the chapters already available in the first volume. View the Writings Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 2 page for the table of contents and more information.

Back to School: Free Access to Classes from Top Universities

This article is an introduction to Einztein, a new "Social Learning Network".

My first search was "quarks", which retrieved only one resource, but a good one -- a freely available Annenberg video: Physics for the 21st Century.

The HCC Libraries have been adding links to…