On this site we have a curated collection of open textbooks that align with the top 40 highest enrolled 1st and 2nd year post-secondary subject areas in British Columbia. But there are many other places to find open textbooks that have already been developed and are ready for adaptation or adoption. The following resources contain existing open texts and other teaching resources that are openly-licensed and free for educators to use and adapt to their own needs.
Category: Education
ISKME's digital librarians have curated collections of Open Textbooks and full courses to help leverage OER in your classroom. Whether you are looking for more affordable options for your students, or dynamic content to inspire your own teaching and learning practice, this hub, organized by discipline and provider will help you discover the resources you need at your fingertips.
Axel Dürkop (axel-duerkop.de)With Zocurelia you can increase the fun of reading online literature together. The browser tool shows the activity of a reading community directly in the context of the texts being read and discussed. This way learners can be motivated to participate and join the discussion - hopefully hypothetically. In this article I will explain my motivation, ideas and decisions that led to the development of Zocurelia.
For those interested in online reading groups, journal clubs, OER, open education, marginal syllabus, etc., Axel Dürkop has created quite a lovely little tool that mixes Zotero with Hypothes.is.
Using his online version (though the code is open source and it looks like I could pretty quickly host my own), it only took me a few minutes to mock up a collaborative space using an Econ Extra Credit group I’d tried to encourage. This could be quite cool, particularly if they continued the series past the first recommended textbook.
I could easily see folks like Remi Kalir using this as part of their marginal syllabus project and allowing students to recommend texts/articles for class and aggregating discussions around them.
First of all, I wanted to learn more about how to inspire learners to read. And this means for me as an educator to create a technical and social environment that is welcoming and easy to participate in. ❧
Annotated on March 03, 2020 at 08:01PM
I want to have ways to show learners that I chose the texts for them, as I’m convinced that empathy is motivating. ❧
I quite like this idea as a means of pedagogy.
Annotated on March 03, 2020 at 08:03PM
Why Manifold? from Zach Davis on Vimeo.
Despite the widespread application of digital technologies in higher education there is scant evidence to suggest that these have had a significant impact on student learning. (Bainbridge, 2014, p1)
Some great material here. Revisit this again soon.
Last October Doc Searls gave the Ostrom Memorial Lecture for the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. In his lecture he carries on what I believe to be an incredibly unfortunate tradition. I’ll call it, “the dance of the not commons.” It’s an incredibly simple dance. Step one (right foot)...
This week, I’ve been delighted to be able to catch up with Adam Procter, academic, games designer, open advocate, and long-time supporter of Thought Shrapnel.
We discussed everything from the IndieWeb to his PhD project, with relevant links below!
Show notes
- Adam’s website / Southampton uni staff page
- Nodenoggin (and alpha app / project code / project feedback forum)
- Adam’s PhD work / blog
“Less talk, more grok.” That was one of our early mottos at THATCamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp, which started at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in 2008. It was a riff on “Less talk, more rock,” the motto of WAAF, the hard rock stati...
THATCamp was non-hierarchical. Before the first THATCamp, I had never attended a conference—nor have I been to once since my last THATCamp, alas—that included tenured and non-tenured and non-tenure-track faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, librarians and archivists and museum professionals, software developers and technologists of all kinds, writers and journalists, and even curious people from well beyond academia and the cultural heritage sector—and that truly placed them at the same level when the entered the door. ❧
I wish I’d known about them before they disappeared.
The only equivalent conference I’ve been to with this sort of diversity was the Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Dodging the Memory Hole conferences. That diversity really does make things magical.
PSA: You can get a C in organic chemistry and still be a doctor.
— Jack Turban MD (@jack_turban) February 25, 2020
and if you’re *really* careful, you can get a D in Chemistry and win the Nobel Prize!
“Chemistry was my worst subject in high school! I imagined my chemistry teacher aspirating his cornflakes when he found out his worst student had won the Nobel Prize!”
Peter Agre was awarded the 2003 Chemistry Prize. pic.twitter.com/h2AaNmR945
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) August 4, 2019
Some sketch thoughts about OER to come back and revisit
Does anyone/organization maintain a wiki or centralized repository of OER textbooks? (Especially a consortium of institutions which provide financial support).
It should contain a list of people/departments who’ve adopted (an indicator of quality).
It could maintain lists of people with technical expertise that can help to reshuffle pieces or allow customization? Maybe create easier methods for customization with related UI.
How to best curate resources and put them into a searchable repository for easy later use?
Can we create an organization that somewhat models the instutionalization of traditional textbook publishers that organize and track their assets? This institution should be supported by a broad array of colleges and universities as a means of supporting the otherwise invisible labor that is otherwise going on.
How can we flip the script to allow students to choose their own materials instead of allowing professors to do this? Their economic pressure alone will dramatically help the system. (Especially the hidden labor issues.)
11 a.m. Mountain Time
Librarians from Utah State University and one faculty member will talk about their experiences marketing and promoting open educational resources to interested faculty at their institution.
- Erin Davis, Distance Education Library Services Coordinator, Utah State University
- Dr. Avery Edenfield, Assistant Professor in Technical Communication and Rhetoric, Utah State University
- Shannon M. Smith, Scholarly Communication Librarian, Utah State University
- Rachel Todd, Open Educational Resources (OER) Coordinator, Utah State University
The title of this mini-conference session wasn’t as apt as its description, but it did give me a handful of ideas about how we need to reframe our approach to textbooks in higher education.
Institutions and individual departments need to better take on the work of creating and curating materials for their students. We have to stop relying on faculty, who are already overburdened with their own issues and troubles, from passing the textbook and learning materials burdens on to their students. By inter-mediating themselves into the natural market between publishers and the students who buy those materials, they’re allowing their laziness in requiring specific textbooks and supplementary materials, many of which either aren’t actively used in many courses or which students don’t/can’t use even when they’re assigned, to allow the publishers to dramatically overcharge for their services.
By simply going from a required textbook(s) to a list of ten or more recommended resources with a variety of price points would completely obliterate the gouging we see in big publishing, particularly in the largest lecture classes. Layering OER efforts on top of this will help even further.
Please vote for the following resources from 2019 in the DH Awards 2019. Have a look over the resources in each category and then fill out the form linked to at the bottom of the page in order to vote. For frequently asked questions please see http://dhawards.
Two families, both making big investments of time and money to involve their kids in sports. But the investments they’re able to make are very different. In Part 5 of “Contested,” our series on sports, society and culture: Sports and the American Dream.
Composite Photo: Thomas Schmidt, left, video still by Ian McClerin, and Jalani (“JT”) Taylor, video still by Hannah Colton.
This is an awesome and eye-opening episode. The misconceptions about sports as a “way out” are apparently even worse than I thought they were. The statistics about becoming an elite physician being better than being a pro athlete are just stunning. The availability heuristic we’re given with relation to sports constantly on television and in the media is apparently heavily hampering a lot of people specifically and society at large.
Very few people really make any money through sports. Less than 5,000 men and women all-in make a living by doing it.
There are more black cardiologists in the US than there are black men in the NBA. The odds of getting an elite job by going to medical school are infinitely better than trying to get into professional sports.
Alan Levine (CogDogBlog)If you are just syndicating a few feeds into your own site, or maybe for a single class of students, it’s not much work to manually add the feeds. Collecting them can be as simple as asking students to email you the address for their blog, or collecting them via something like a Google Form. Many of us dream of a single one button solution, but my experience in creating at least half a dozen of these sites are is… feeds can be messy.
Alan, this series is great. Coincidentally I came across it courtesy of Greg McVerry (#) after having spent some time over the past few days discussing feed discovery with David Shanske who recently wrote a small WordPress plugin for helping to uncover RSS feeds for tags and categories. Today he wrote some broader thoughts about feed discovery you may appreciate.
In addition to all of this, since you’re a coder, you might also appreciate some of the more advanced feed discovery code David has written into the Yarns Microsub Server for WordPress (code on Github). You may be able to build some of the discovery bits into some of your syndication hubs/planets in the future.
Of course, like FeedWordPress and the relatively similar PressForward plugin, you might also be able to bend Yarns into an aggregator in similar ways.
Steel Wagstaff at Pressbooks has been talking to me for the past few months of a relatively new feature of Pressbooks where, when you clone a Pressbooks book it will now bring over all the H5P acti…