Bookmarks

Interesting Links/bookmarks for personal use or sharing with others
Bookmarked Reclaim Open Learning (open.media.mit.edu)

The internet is an amazing place for learning. But recent high-profile forays into online learning for higher education seem to replicate a traditional lecture-based, course-based model of campus instruction, instead of embracing the peer-to-peer connected nature of the web. The networked and digital world offers an unprecedented wealth of resources for engaged, interest-driven, lifelong learning. Reclaim Open Learning intervenes in this debate by supporting and showcasing innovation that brings together the best of truly open, online and networked learning in the wilds of the Internet, with the expertise represented by institutions of higher education.

Reclaim Open Learning is a collaboration between the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub at UC Irvine and the MIT Media Lab. The thematic initiative is supported by the MacArthur Foundation.

Bookmarked Teaching with WordPress (blogs.ubc.ca)

This is an open online course on Teaching with WordPress, running June 1-26, 2015. Join us to talk about and experiment with, among other things:

  • open education, open pedagogy and design
  • WordPress as a highly customizable framework for teaching and learning
  • examples of instructors and learners using WordPress sites in many different ways for multiple purposes
  • plug ins, applications and approaches for creating, discussing, sharing and interacting with each other

Throughout the course, you’ll be creating your own WordPress course site, so that by the end you’ll have a beginning structure to build on with your learners.

Bookmarked Connected Courses: Active co-learning in higher ed (Connected Courses)

Mission

Connected Courses is a collaborative network of faculty in higher education developing online, open courses that embody the principles of connected learning and the values of the open web.

Our goal is to build an inclusive and expansive network of teachers, students, and educational offerings that makes high quality, meaningful, and socially connected learning available to everyone.

Our Course on Connected Courses

For Fall 2014 (from September 2 to December 12, 2014), our major focus is on running a course for developing and teaching connected courses. The course is designed and taught by faculty from diverse institutions, some of whom are the folks behind successful connected courses such as FemTechNet, ds106, phonar, and the National Writing Project CLMOOC. You can find the syllabus here, and the people involved here.

A cool concept here and also an example of a course built on WordPress with a planet-like syndication model that allows people to post on their own websites and syndicate their content into the course via RSS. I suspect that Alan Levine built the site and that it’s based on FeedWordPress.

It’s not quite as open as or as “simple” as the IndieWeb News model which allows individual syndication by means of webmention, but it certainly gets the job done and is an excellent example of how this model works.

Bookmarked Food Forward - Southern California's Largest Urban Gleaning Nonprofit (Food Forward)
Food Forward fights hunger and prevents food waste by rescuing fresh surplus produce, connecting this abundance with people in need, and inspiring others.
I saw this organization featured on tonight’s episode of PBS NewsHour. Definitely worth looking into. I’m curious if they sell to the general public? Maybe interesting to set up a company that does garde manger?
Bookmarked Library Extension (for web browsers) (Library Extension)
Library Extension lets you instantly see book and eBook availability from your local library
Definitely going to have to check this out! I can see it coming in very handy on sites like Amazon.com and Goodreads.com.

h/t to E-books at libraries are a huge hit, leading to long waits, reader hacks and worried publishers

Bookmarked How to Cook Without Recipes by Glynn Christian (Portico)

Gone are the days when cooking skills were handed down through the family. Recipes, which were originally memory aids, have become a set of measures and rules to follow slavishly, whether we understand them or not. And while people have been inspired by up-beat and accessible celeb chefs, they're nearly all restaurant chefs rather than home cooks. The art of cooking, in short, has been lost. How to Cook Without Recipes is all about setting the home cook free. This wonderful little book will teach you to understand the recipes you follow, why they sometimes go wrong, and how to cook independently to make better use of them and invent their own. Glynn Christian begins by taking the reader on a fascinating journey through the history of recipes, and explains how a useful aide memoire became a set of shackles for would be cooks. He explains how to learn to taste, and to understand what ingredients go together, giving you the tools to create your own recipes. And if you still insist on using your cook books, he explains how to 'read' the recipes of the big names where you should take notice of them, and where you should do your own thing. How to Cook Recipes A cook book, in every sense, with taste.

Book cover of How to Cook Without Recipes
Referred to by Peter Hertzmann in a paper about food communication.
Bookmarked Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R by Gareth James, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie and Robert Tibshirani (faculty.marshall.usc.edu)

This book provides an introduction to statistical learning methods. It is aimed for upper level undergraduate students, masters students and Ph.D. students in the non-mathematical sciences. The book also contains a number of R labs with detailed explanations on how to implement the various methods in real life settings, and should be a valuable resource for a practicing data scientist.

For a more advanced treatment of these topics: The Elements of Statistical Learning.

Slides and videos for Statistical Learning MOOC by Hastie and Tibshirani available separately here. Slides and video tutorials related to this book by Abass Al Sharif can be downloaded here.

book cover
I’ll note that the author has a downloadable .pdf copy of his text on his site.
Bookmarked Understanding Concept Modeling by Winston Perez (conceptmodeling.com)
Ideas and concepts are different. In fact, they operate in two separate, radically different worlds that few have been taught to distinguish. One carries the “surface layer” and “whole” of the idea. The other, deeper layer carries essence, the structure of essence. and the activity of essence. Concept Modeling is about the art, science and philosophy that is concept. It is the missing discipline and here is the place to learn about that discovery made on February 6, 1989 by Winston Perez.
Bookmarked FOAF-a-matic -- Describe yourself in RDF (ldodds.com)
FOAF-a-matic is a simple Javascript application that allows you to create a FOAF ("Friend-of-A-Friend") description of yourself. You can read more about FOAF in Edd Dumbill's "XML Watch: Finding friends with XML and RDF" article, at the FOAF homepage on RDFWeb, and also the FOAF vocabulary description. In short though, FOAF is a way to describe yourself -- your name, email address, and the people you're friends with -- using XML and RDF. This allows software to process these descriptions, perhaps as part of an automated search engine, to discover information about your and the communities of which you're a member. FOAF has the potential to drive many new interesting developments in online communities. Ben Hammersely's "Click to the Clique" article for the Guardian Unlimited website further explores these ideas.