iterativelearning

Cost is always an issue for educators in the humanities and so that’s why Open Educational Resources handbook wiki should get some attention.

One of its most immediate benefits that I see is the directory of alternative, open source equivalents to otherwise expensive, proprietary electronic office and design tools. For example, in my quick skim of the Compose section, I found an entry and link to an open source equivalent to Adobe InDesign — Scribus.

But that’s only a small part of it. This wiki, of course, encourages contributions and covers quite a wide array of categories pertaining to pedagogy and subject-specific content areas (e.g., accounting, math, physics). Resources like this make this wiki worth revisiting

Credit: Creative Commons blog

I haven’t had much time to check out Second Life, but after skimming through the most recent issue of Technical Communication, I’ve moved it up the priority list. Marci Araki and Saul Carliner have a good piece on using these sorts of environments to communicate technical and educational content and Stephen Bronack, et al. have a promising essay that considers aspects of design.

In the world of online teaching and learning, one of the persistent goals has been interactivity. While such a term has unfortunately become a tired cliche, one of the key challenges is to design something that moves more in the direction of recognizing the unique affordances of online contexts. For example, lots of faculty feel limited by discussion boards as they seem to merely reproduce existing face-to-face paradigms (i.e., teacher calls on student and student responds). We’re seeing progress with Web 2.0 tools (wikis, blogs, podcasting), but it seems that game worlds present the possibility of another significant evolution.

For those like me who haven’t had much of a chance to explore this, Araki and Carliner include a helpful starting point – the Second Life Education wiki. There’s also a Sim Teach blog – From where I hover.