Featured Blog Posts – October 2011 Archive (9)

Make sure your students’, faculties’, and administrators’ voices are heard!  The Florida Distance Learning Consortium will administer two surveys. One is for college and university students on textbooks, open textbooks, and OpenCourseWare (OCW). The other survey is for faculty and administrators on digital textbooks, open textbooks, open educational resources (OERs), and OCW. These will be administered to all of Florida’s 28 public colleges and 11 state universities. This is our…

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The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education

(www.iskme.org)…

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Thanks to Ruth Suehle, writer and editor in Brand Communications + Design at Red Hat for the notes.  I was busy finishing my slides for 11:30 presentation on College Open Textbooks' Adopter Communities during the keynote but I was listening :-)!…

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Academic technologist, Javier Atenas, points out that the culture of sharing in education is still in its early stages.  Without encouragement to produce and reuse open educational resources, many academics do not naturally share.   Some potential barriers may be the perceived loss of control with sharing the results of many hours of hard work and secondarily there may be a worry that other academics will criticize their educational materials.  Showing academics the OER repositories to search… Continue

Interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher Education summarizing different options for cheaply building your own textbook which can include both open source and copyrighted materials.

Former California State Senator, Dean Florez shared his thoughts and commentary on the future of digital textbooks on the College Open Textbooks blog.  I wanted to share it with our COT community as well.  

---Sharyn Fitzpatrick (Marketing, College Open Textbooks

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"The 20 Million Minds Foundation (20MM Foundation) announced a new digitally enhanced etextbook for college students based on open content. The non-profit has set its sight on producing open source etextbooks for the top 25 courses taken by undergraduates in the nation, with general statistics being one of largest of such courses.

Starting today, Collaborative Statistics 2nd Edition is now available and provides students with an interactive experience using videos, applets, graphics,…

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Athabasca University Press conducted research on how open access effects readership, print sales, and citations of articles and texts comparing their open access university press with three other traditional Canadian university presses.  No significant impact was shown on print sales for open access vs. copyrighted materials but significantly greater readership and citations of open access materials was found.

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As a thank-you for my presentation Dispelling Myths about OER and Open Textbooks, EDUCAUSE sent me a great new blogging tool. It has a beautiful case, nicer than any I have seen for a Kindle or iPad. Attached to it is a stylus that looks like a pen. In fact, I have discovered that any pen or pencil will work. This blogging tool does not require batteries or external power. In fact, it has no on/off switch so I think I… Continue