Imagine webmentions being used for referencing journal articles, academic samizdat, or even OER? Suggestions and improvement could accumulate on the original content itself rather than being spread across dozens of social silos on the web.
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.
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.
David Wiley (iterating toward openness)Last week I promised I would write a few posts about reducing friction with regard to OER. When I use the phrase “reducing friction” in this context, I mean taking things that are needlessly difficult and making them much easier. In last week’s post I talked about how we’re making it ridicul...
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
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.
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…
Very rarely, a book-maker gets to add new tricks to the 500-year-old craft of book-making. We got to do that in producing The Economy.
Originally bookmarked on January 28, 2020 at 01:55PM
Notice how print books have remained ad-free in an age when every other available surface carries advertising – something about print books has kept them immune from the disease of advertising. ❧
Annotated on February 04, 2020 at 09:58AM
Books as websites can be public goods in a way that printed books cannot, especially for the poor. ❧
Annotated on February 04, 2020 at 09:59AM
There are other great teams doing similar work: PressBooks uses a WordPress backend for online book and website development. Booktype, which has been around for a long time, also uses a browser-based editing workflow to produce HTML and PDF books. PubSweet is developing a modular editorial workflow, optimised, for now, for journals and monographs. The MagicBook project is being used at New York University. And our Electric Book workflow uses on- and offline static-site generation to make print and digital books. ❧
Nice list of tools for digital publishing for the book space.
Annotated on February 04, 2020 at 10:01AM
I’m going to write a post or three about some of the friction that exists around using OER. There are some things about working with OER that are just harder or more painful than they need to be, and getting more people actively involved in using OER will require us to reduce or eliminate those po...
We are delighted to announce the full line up of featured speakers for our 2020 OER Conference. Joining The Zemos Collective and sava saveli singh who were announced at the end of 2019, we have now completed the line up with Joe Deville and Janneke Adema.
CORE is launching the 1.0 version of Economy, Society, and Public Policy (ESPP), its free, open-access text for non-specilaists in economics.
This new free, open source economics textbook was developed by polling students from 25 universities about what economics should teach, explains Professor Homa Zarghamee of Barnard College.
New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof thinks understanding the basics of the economy will help you get far in life.
https://www.marketplace.org/2020/01/28/want-to-succeed-take-an-econ-101-course/
College students receive any number of recommended introductory courses. But according to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, one of the key classes you might need to take to succeed in life might be an introductory economics course.
As part of the Marketplace Morning Report’s “Econ Extra Credit” project, host David Brancaccio spoke with Kristof about how an Econ 101 class can provide a student with a robust toolbox that could be used later in life to both understand and address larger issues like rent control or how to fund a tax cut.
“We’ve repeatedly mangled macro economic policy in the U.S.,” Kristof said. “It’s pretty obvious that even lawmakers kind of have no clue about really basic issues, like you know, what a fiscal stimulus is.”
Click on the player above to hear their conversation on the merits of Econ 101, as well as Kristof’s thoughts on how introductory economics has adapted to better reflect real world economic issues.
This interview is part of our “Econ Extra Credit” project, where we read a new introductory economics textbook provided by the non-profit Core-Econ together with our listeners. If you’d like to join us in this project, email MorningReport@marketplace.org and let us know you’re reading along with Marketplace through the end of Spring.
Naturally I worry that the participation rates will start high and end low, but the fact that they’re encouraging their listeners to expand themselves and delve a bit deeper than just listening to their show is fantastic.
And honestly, who couldn’t use an ECON refresher from time to time–particularly one that takes a dramatically different approach to the subject than the one many of us took?
