Wikis and Transatlantic Collaboration

Jürgen Wagner and Verena Heckmann, from the E-Learning department of the Landesinstitut für Pädagogik und Medien [LPM] in Saarbrücken, Germany are hosting a free webinar on the topic of 'How to Use a Wiki for Transatlantic Collaboration'

* Date: Tuesday 9th February 2010
* Time: 7pm - 8.30pm (GMT)
* Venue: http://breeze.lpm.uni-sb.de/transatlantic

Guest speaker is EFL teacher Mélanie Auriel from France. Although the webinar is primarily aimed at foreign language teachers, it should be of great value to anyone intending to engage in collaborative projects.

30/1/10 Update: Full recording of the webinar is now available.

Full details of the event are included below:

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Useful Resources From the OER

The goal of the OER movement is to "equalize access to knowledge worldwide through sharing online high quality content. Open Educational Resources are digitalized materials offered freely and openly for use and reuse in teaching, learning and research".

In supporting this, the OER wiki provides links to many useful resources including:
* Portals and gateways
* Repositories
* Development and publishing initiatives
* Software and tools
* Teaching using OER

Also, the recent publication "Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace", which brings together background papers and reports from the first three years of activities in the UNESCO OER Community, is available for download.

This publication captures "the conversations between leaders of some of the first OER projects, and documents early debates on the issues that continue to challenge the movement. The publication will provide food for thought for all those intrigued by OER – its promise and its progress".

Well worth checking out as well as the OER Commons mentioned in an earlier post.

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Building Content on WikiEducator

You can, now, join in with a "dynamic and exciting community of educators who believe passionately that learning materials should be free and open to all" by adding your own content to WikiEducator.

By joining WikiEducator you can make a contribution way beyond the confines of your own classroom.

Content on WikiEducator is organised into three sectors: primary, secondary and tertiary. There is also a separate section for professional development.

In WikiEducator, I came across this interesting link about using a wiki to create simple games/stories. One of the many interesting and useful links and resources that have already been included.

Several major projects are also listed such as ALISON, a free global learning experience, mentioned previously on this blog!

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Technorati Tags: alison, professional development, wiki, wikieducator

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Wikimedia - Bringing it all Together

Wikimedia Foundation is "dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge".

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, is probably the best know of the projects. However, the others are also beginning to take off.

Wiktionary is a multilingual, free web based dictionary. Definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations are all included in Wiktionary, which is the lexical companion to Wikipedia.

Wikiquote is a compendium of quotations from notable people and creative works in every language. Currently, the English version has 14,089 pages containing thousands of quotations and proverbs.

Wikibooks provides a free collection of open-content textbooks that can be edited by anyone. The teacher's toolbox is but one example!

An online library of free content publications is provided at Wikisource. You can read the full text of many books such as Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

The contributions on Wikinews are from volunteers "whose mission is to present reliable, unbiased, relevant and entertaining News" that is written from "a neutral point of view to ensure fair and unbiased reporting".

Wikimedia Commons is a database of over 2 million freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute. As with the Creative Commons Search Site this is an excellent starting point for finding freely usable material.

Looking for information on any species? Then check out Wikispecies, which covers Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Bacteria, Archaea, Protista and all other forms of life!

Wikiversity is a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Free content, multimedia learning materials, resources, and curricula for all age groups can be hosted on Wikiversity. The learning material about Narrative Film Production is a featured resource.

Also have a look at Downloadpedia (reference wiki for free software) and Wikivid (free software video tutorials from around the web).

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Technorati Tags: creative commons, downloadpedia, wikimedia, wikivid

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Software Encyclopdeia Wiki

Downloadpedia is "a web-based, free content software encyclopedia project". Downloadpedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world and it's contents can be edited by anyone with Internet access. Software lists are included for three different platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux.

Downloadpedia can only get better and better as more and more lurkers turn to contributors and extra software references are added! My first contribution, this week, was to add a reference for Alice - a "teaching tool designed as a revolutionary approach to teaching and learning introductory programming concepts".

Downloadpedia is a real treasure chest first discovered on Paul Hamilton's blog, where you will be able to find many more treasure chests!

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Technorati Tags: alice, downloadpedia, linux, mac, programming, windows

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