March 2011 Blog Posts (10)

On March 17th, Eric Frank of FlatworldKnowledge came to Bronx Community College and gave a presentation to the English Dept. faculty. Although I have talked to individual colleagues and run a workshop, I have not been able to create enough momentum to move along the open textbooks agenda on campus. A teaching fellow from the Office of Institutional Technology was at the presentation, and she has blogged about it. Rather than rehash what she said, I'll just link here to her…

Blog post can be viewed here:

http://collegeopentextbooks.org/blog/?p=1025

This Moodle 2.0 book for teachers written by Mark Rollins might be of interest to those of you using that learning management system. It also introduced me to another self-publishing site  http://issuu.com

This is available as an Open publication and you…

An insightful post from J Reynolds Community College in Virginia regarding OER and the way it breaks down barriers to learning ...

"In a recent post, English Professor Miles McCrimmon discussed the ways in which Open Educational Resources (OERs) are impacting the traditional approaches to and soaring costs of textbooks in education. Along those same lines, I've been thinking about…

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of giving a Discovering Open Textbooks workshop at the Los Angeles Trade Tech College with about 30-35 faculty and staff from LACCD.   Many faculty and staff were looking for affordable textbook solutions and were already seeking out open or free educational resources to incorporate into their classes.   Disciplines represented ranged from Art, English, Spanish, Labor, Chemistry, Oceanography, Business, Computer Applications, Career Planning, Music, Theater,…

Last Friday, I completed my first Open Textbook Workshop.  I had ten in my audience, and while I stumbled around trying to get the technology to work, everyone was impressed by the information.  Thankfully, our Dean of Computer Science and Math "enabled" me out of my confusing situation, and then we moved along pretty smoothly.  

I made a special effort to have our bookstore manager present, and she was great.  She told me about how the bookstore managers across our state…

A Hybrid Solution to Increase COT Offerings

As we all know, it takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to write a college textbook. (In my case, I feel that I aged 5 times faster when creating each of my brainchildren—a highly stressful though rewarding process indeed.)

Therefore, it does not sound so reasonable or logical to expect authors to make their textbooks completely free, does it?

At the same time,…

Pat Lockley, OER Tool developer, from University of Nottingham has developed the amazing XPERT tool that allows you to search for OER subjects in the following formats: (pictures, sounds, videos).  When you select the desired item, it will created the open license and embed into the object.  Saves loads of times when you are looking for open images to include in instructional or other educational materials.

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"Nice (short) video by David Wiley re: open textbooks…"…