Oh, I thought Connexions was running on Plone, but apparently they have combined it with Raptos.
I am slowly adding material to Wikieducator but although media wiki is solid and reliable, I am not very happy with the time it takes to edit the layout or add the info.
Dspace is also on an open source platform (not sure which) and Le Mill serves lots of the Eastern European countries.
In Brazil, conversations about OER are starting from a legal point of view mostly. I have attended one of their first workshops and joined their discussion list.(in Portuguese). From what I could gather, Wikimedia Brazil is also involved and so is the Creative Commons BR.
Barbara Dieu
Posts made by Barbara Dieu
Yes, Gerry. The Flickr Commons has partnered with many libraries around the world, which is a wonderful way to have access to and use primary sources.
Peter Shanks from Australia has put together a nifty tool called Flickr CC, which not only fetches CC pictures from Flickr by keyword but also allows you to modify them. I use it all the time for my presentations and with the students.
I have bookmarked some royalty free photos in delicious.
Peter Shanks from Australia has put together a nifty tool called Flickr CC, which not only fetches CC pictures from Flickr by keyword but also allows you to modify them. I use it all the time for my presentations and with the students.
I have bookmarked some royalty free photos in delicious.
Resources in the Public Library of Science and some of the material in the American Library of Congress can be used and remixed. DSpace allows you to house your resources and so does the Internet Archive and LeMill. There is also The Directory of Open Access Repositories and the OER Commons website.
Ready-made sequences can give me ideas on how to go about things but when creating an instructional sequence , I usually prefer "raw material" or primary sources to make a collage that is adapted to my own context. Then, I post it on the web so that other people can also use it - it would be wonderful if those who used it could pingback, leave a comment on how the activity was carried on or how they have adapted it, but this is very rare.
Have you remixed or revised someone else's materials? What was the experience like?
Most enriching and fun as it is impossible for one person to do or know it all so when you find something that fits your theme or the point you are trying to make, it is just perfect synergy. Brazilian favours an open and free culture of remix: "cannibalism", creolization, baroque, technological appropriation :-)
My students and I have used Flickr CC + quotations on the net to compose environmental posters, presentations, a collection of resources from other sites in an instructional sequence, the headers of a website.
Have you remixed or revised someone else's materials? What was the experience like?
Most enriching and fun as it is impossible for one person to do or know it all so when you find something that fits your theme or the point you are trying to make, it is just perfect synergy. Brazilian favours an open and free culture of remix: "cannibalism", creolization, baroque, technological appropriation :-)
My students and I have used Flickr CC + quotations on the net to compose environmental posters, presentations, a collection of resources from other sites in an instructional sequence, the headers of a website.
I'm Barbara (Bee) Dieu, an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher in a bilingual (French and Brazilian) secondary school in São Paulo, Brazil. I have always shared all the resources I found useful or produced since I went online in 1997 and then built my site (1.0) in 1999 on my own, at my expense and time . (it has not been updated now for some time)
http://members.tripod.com/the_english_dept/
The schooI I work for never wanted to publish anything and only recently had its institutional page up online.
At the beginning, I ran it without any license but then got mad when I discovered some pages of the site, like for instance
http://members.tripod.com/the_english_dept/exos.html
were being framed inside a commercial portal that you needed to pay to log in and access (my own!) resources so put a very proprietary notice on the sides :-)
This page for instance was made together with the students and some teachers (who sent me the complementary links at the bottom of the page), the students were interviewed on their impressions and then made a research in groups on the different continents/countries where English is spoken and found the corresponding flags. (scroll over the map to get the different continents)
http://members.tripod.com/the_english_dept/esc.html
As wikis did not exist at the time (if they were I was not yet aware of them), the kids did it as homework on their own computers (the school was not yet connected) and sent me the info by mail or floppies, which I corrected, copied, pasted into my Dreamweaver and published online.
While some resources were easy to get - like Naomi Klein's movie "The Meaning Behind the Logo (see explanation given on page)
http://members.tripod.com/the_english_dept/logo/index.html
articles from mainstream newspapers/media proved to be a bureaucratic nightmare (a number of email exchanges, sometimes without answer, to various departments)
I had to beg for a special permission to use The Times article as basis for an exercise
http://beewebhead.net/exos/wtc1.html
and I have already breached the initial contract which said the exercise should have been left on that particular page. As I stopped paying for an adless site, the hotpotato pages were all scrambled, which made me move them elsewhere (and lost the pics)
I could not wait until the permission arrived for The Economist article (which complements Naomi's film and is closed behind a paid login), so I shamelessly and painstakinglyy typed it on an html page copying it from my parent's print edition http://members.tripod.com/the_english_dept/logo/prologo.html
not only for my students to be able to read it and be prepared for the debate that year (I could have photocopied it) but also to re-use it in the future for some other activity.
Nowadays I am contributing a little bit to wikieducator with a unit on visual /critical literacy for ESL/EFL teachers (collaboration welcome)
http://wikieducator.org/ELT_Resources/visual_and_critical_literacy
but am having trouble in finding images that I would like to use to illustrate certain concepts
So voilà, a little bit of my grassroots experience with resources online - open and not.
http://members.tripod.com/the_english_dept/
The schooI I work for never wanted to publish anything and only recently had its institutional page up online.
At the beginning, I ran it without any license but then got mad when I discovered some pages of the site, like for instance
http://members.tripod.com/the_english_dept/exos.html
were being framed inside a commercial portal that you needed to pay to log in and access (my own!) resources so put a very proprietary notice on the sides :-)
This site belongs to
Barbara Dieu
EFL teacher and coordinator of the
Foreign Language Department
Lycée Pasteur,
Curso Experimental Bilingue
São Paulo, Brazil
Copyright © 1999-2005 Barbara Dieu.
All Rights Reserved.
No material appearing on any of these pages may be reproduced without prior written permission.
Not that I wanted to restrict teachers or students from using the material but because I thought it was not fair for an educational commercial portal to steal my work = close it in, make money on it without attribution. The explanation given when I complained was that they were charging for filtering information for their clients and other services (but the frame inside which my pages were trapped sported their logo).All Rights Reserved.
No material appearing on any of these pages may be reproduced without prior written permission.
This page for instance was made together with the students and some teachers (who sent me the complementary links at the bottom of the page), the students were interviewed on their impressions and then made a research in groups on the different continents/countries where English is spoken and found the corresponding flags. (scroll over the map to get the different continents)
http://members.tripod.com/the_english_dept/esc.html
As wikis did not exist at the time (if they were I was not yet aware of them), the kids did it as homework on their own computers (the school was not yet connected) and sent me the info by mail or floppies, which I corrected, copied, pasted into my Dreamweaver and published online.
While some resources were easy to get - like Naomi Klein's movie "The Meaning Behind the Logo (see explanation given on page)
http://members.tripod.com/the_english_dept/logo/index.html
articles from mainstream newspapers/media proved to be a bureaucratic nightmare (a number of email exchanges, sometimes without answer, to various departments)
I had to beg for a special permission to use The Times article as basis for an exercise
http://beewebhead.net/exos/wtc1.html
and I have already breached the initial contract which said the exercise should have been left on that particular page. As I stopped paying for an adless site, the hotpotato pages were all scrambled, which made me move them elsewhere (and lost the pics)
I could not wait until the permission arrived for The Economist article (which complements Naomi's film and is closed behind a paid login), so I shamelessly and painstakinglyy typed it on an html page copying it from my parent's print edition http://members.tripod.com/the_english_dept/logo/prologo.html
not only for my students to be able to read it and be prepared for the debate that year (I could have photocopied it) but also to re-use it in the future for some other activity.
Nowadays I am contributing a little bit to wikieducator with a unit on visual /critical literacy for ESL/EFL teachers (collaboration welcome)
http://wikieducator.org/ELT_Resources/visual_and_critical_literacy
but am having trouble in finding images that I would like to use to illustrate certain concepts
So voilà, a little bit of my grassroots experience with resources online - open and not.