I am joining the initiative of Jane Hart and Clive Shepherd about Seasonal Greetings addressing. And It is my way of saying Happy New Year and to wish you all your desires, ideas and ambitions come true! Knowledge is around us and our important task is to identify, grab and utilize it. This time I suggest to you a set of links to eCards related not only with presenting learning and education topic, but also eCards that can be used for achievement of learning experience.
It turned out that microblogs are important tools not only for networking, communication and learning, but also for forming communities of practices.
Here I am offering you a few lists with educators who like Plurk and Twitter. The aim is to bring together the teachers who have the same interests and also to easily help new educators to connect with other professionals.
The cause for this post that prompt me is an article that I am writing about Web 2.0 technologies and how they support my teaching and students learning this semester. So I use Edu 2.0 for LMS, Start pages for personal development and many, many widgets for concepts/theory presentation, collaboration and communication (the widgets are not integrated with institutional services - as it describes in an article: iGoogle and gadgets as a platform for integrating institutional and external services).
I do not find much shared practices via Internet about how widgets effectively can be used in a teaching/learning processes.
But I am impressed by an article by Mark Marino with title: Widget-Based Education. The start page Pageflakes is used as a platform for a lesson realization, widgets integration and the built page allows users to rip, share, or repurpose any of its content. Shortly the main ideas behind widget-based education are (conceptually they are similar to SCORM):
- building a single composed lesson or lesson that can be spilled out into more lessons in a page (panel in a start page, but it can be realized on other platforms, for example eLearning 2.0 systems)
- using widgets to address particular learning activities
- personalization of lesson plan according to learner needs and objectives and adapting the content to the concrete learning style (different learning objects - text, video, interactivity)
- created set of learning objects (via widgets) easily to be translated in other pages/platforms and in this way to be reworked and repurposed
- all of these pieces have to work together, offering complementary pedagogical strategies.
Mark is developed a page of widgets around a single lesson called “the topoi” :
So, I think that it is a good idea a digital repository (or repository system) to be created with educational widgets and widget-based lessons, that can be flexibly managed and reused in different platforms (here I think about the architectures (technical, functional) of my dreamed platform, but this is another question that maybe I will discuss another time). In this way the gained experience can be shared and disseminated.
Also, I offer you to watch the following great presentation about Widget Ecosystem and Economy by Jo SanKu:
This week I had a trip together with my friend Toshka who is a librarian in American University in Bulgaria. She uses Web 2.0 technologies in her job and has nice ideas for implementation. It was a great pleasure for me to discuss how these technologies support libraries and education. Toshka shared her practical experience in this area and explained to me how one scientific library can tend to the success of scientific research and result dissemination. Also, how to back readers in the libraries and how can one learning process be supported. According to Wikipedia, Library 2.0 is a new way of providing library service through new Internet technologies, with emphasis on “user-centered” change and interaction. The best practice shows that Library 2.0 provides a wide range of instruments for easy finding and access to information and knowledge. One successful model at this moment for better access is an article as a portal, where one article is connected to different databases.
The example for an article as a portal provided by Toshka is presented in the picture bellow. The example is for an article that is part of collection of SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online). SciELO is a model for cooperative electronic publishing in developing countries. It is connected to:
Google Scholar - Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.
WorldCat is the world's largest network of library content and services. It provides collection and services of more than 10 000 libraries worldwide.
PUbMed is a service of the USA National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.
AGRIS is the international information system for the agricultural sciences and technology. To date, 240 international and intergovernmental centers participate.
The DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals in different languages.
Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources. It's designed to find the information scientists need. Quick, easy and comprehensive, Scopus provides superior support of the literature research process.
LILACS (Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences) provides searching service via a big database.
