Finding OER

[Ida Brandão]

This Week 6 is entitled «CURATE». In Wikipedia, a curator «(from Latin: curare meaning "take care") is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or archive) is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material. The object of a traditional curator's concern necessarily involves tangible objects of some sort, whether it be artwork, collectibles, historic items or scientific collections. More recently, new kinds of curators are emerging: curators of digital data objects and biocurators.»

 

It's amazing the amount of curation tools that are available today. I use some of them regularly, such as Livebinders to collect thematic articles and publications, Pinterest to collect images and vídeos under several thematic boards, Vidque to gather videos  about education (disruptive and alternative). I've used Pearltrees but haven't updated it lately, and Scoop.it (two themes I maintain updated: Educonnect and Special Education).The possibility to organize one's own sources of iformation is very useful. I've explored other reference tools such as Mendeley, Readcube,etc

 

The first activity proposed for this week is to explore OER repositories and there are many that I suppose are not used as often as we should, because some of these databases are really huge and some are a little bit difficult and not efficient to explore. When we compare the time we take to search them with the time we take searching Google (Google Scholar / Google Images / Google Vídeos) we realize how fast and powerful Google is.

 

Among the repositories suggested when I tried «Learning Universities-OCW+OER», powered by Google it responds much faster than other ones.

 

 I must confess that I didn't read the tutorials that these repositories suggest to learn how to make more effective searches, and some of them require that we take the time to get better results.

 

I decided to take some examples of these searches in the diferent OER repositories:

 

Connexions - searching for «web accessibilities«,  took me to this interesting academic article: Universal Design for Access and Equity - http://cnx.org/content/m42278/latest/  

OER Commons - browsing for «accessibilities»  brought me to Perkins webcasts for visual impairments - http://www.oercommons.org/courses/perkins-webcasts/view - and  Conversations: A Personal Reflection About Deafblindness - http://www.oercommons.org/courses/perkins-webcasts/view 

Temoa - browsing for «universal design for learning»,  took me to an article «Designing Adaptable Learning Resources with Learning Object Patterns» (2005) - http://journals.tdl.org/jodi1/article/view/60; browsing for «educational resources software», took me to a simulator on Genetics - http://star.mit.edu/genetics/index.html 

University Learning = OCW+OER - browsing «universal design for learning» took me in seconds to a long list of videos on UDL (Google powered). Though I was familiar with many of the videos listed in this search, I came across webinars from Univ Maryville, St Louis  - http://www.youtube.com/watch?=INS1i5LND5w&feature=share&list=PL2E9EDB12DBC63060 

Univ Oxford podcasts - browsing for «global warming», this conference on the impacts on Northeast Brazil - http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/open

OpenLearn - browsing «accessibility» - found a module on Accessibility of eLearning - http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/professional-development-education/accessibility-elearning/content-section-0  

OCW Consortium - browsing «special needs» - redirected to Univ Nottingham open course Thinking about Dyslexia - http://unow.nottingham.ac.uk/resources/resource.aspx?hid=ee4bb1f5-96b1-49b6-e70a-76e33381802d

 Intute - browsing «universal design for learning», ed to Universal Design Education website - http://www.udeducation.org/

JISC Digital Media took me to:

      UbuWeb where I found a precious audio recording of late '20s, Bertold Brecht singing two songs from "Die Dreigroschenoper" - http://www.ubu.com/sound/brecht.html 

      Videoart.net - a creative video - Necessities of life - http://videoart.net/home/Artists/VideoPage.cfm?Artist_ID=1435&ArtWork_ID=5198&Player_ID=10

British Universities Film & video - Univ. Warwick - browsing at random - Celebrating Doikens - http://bufvc.ac.uk/gateway/link.php/site/1390

BBC - Adam Curtis the Medium and the Message - Rupert Murdoch; a portrait of Satan - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/rupert_murdoch_-_a_portrait_of_1

 

[pmi...@liv.ac.uk]

Nice work, Ida, and some great finds. I'm afraid I limited myself to Jorum and blogged my experience here http://tidalblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/olds-mooc-week-6-curation-and-caffeine.html

[Bob Ridge-Stearn]

Hi Ida, I've got the impression you found some interesting things, not necessarily exactly what you were looking for? I am in the middle of similar explorations though searching for content by medium, but am currently busy elsewhere and have had to leave it for a while. I too have spotted great things along the way but sometimes have been unable to find what I want. What strikes me is that our liaison librarians (I work in a university where each discipline has a dedicated librarian to help them) should be familiar with these OER repositories and search tools and should have better luck than me in finding things. Maybe they already know all about them. When I get back to uni, I'll ask.
Bob R-S.

[Marion Manton]

HI Bob

in my experience some librarians are very knowledgeable about OER and others not at all, however as you say it is an obvious link - I think it was Tony Hirst who first suggested to me that you should be able to find OER in library catalogues along with books and articles - and when you start to think about it, it does make sense.

Marion

On Saturday, February 16, 2013 12:45:12 PM UTC, Ida Brandão wrote:

[Briar Jamieson]

Ida, as always your posts amaze me in their detail. Thanks for sharing.

Briar