REL 2014
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, February 25, 2014
We're running a MOOC en français starting next Monday on Open Educational Resources (OERs). There's a page available where you can sign up. It's not a long MOOC - 10 weeks - and it will feature a variety of interesting participants. The MOOC was created by the L’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) and was developed by the Université de Moncton. I will be facilitating and a good numner of NRC people are also contibuting (see the introductory video for more).
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IndieAuth.com: Sign in with your domain name
2018/09/28

It's a bit complex but it's simpler than OpenID was. I'm still looking into it. More...

Open Design Kit
2018/09/28
This is "a living collection of guides and best practices to help you to make and design openly. The Kit was originally incubated at Bocoup and became a community-owned project in Summer 2017." There's a dozen or so 'methods' with links to activities and applications. More...

Defining OER-Enabled Pedagogy
David Wiley, John Levi Hilton III, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2018/09/27
I really think this is last year's issue, and that most people have moved on, but I would be remiss if I didn't document David Wiley's definition of OER-enabled pedagogy in this article. "We define OER-enabled pedagogy as the set of teaching and learning practices that are only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions which are characteristic of OER." As the authors note (in the very next sentence), pedagogy is not usually defined in terms of copyright. More...

IBM Predicts Age of Open Media
In concord with my own projections: “The winners will be more open, will deliver protected information through variable packaging and pricing, will know their consumers and business partners intimately, and will deliver media to them how, when, and where they want it.” This applies to e-learninmg as well as media. More...

Fundamental Issues With Open Source Software Development
The five major issues outlined in this article correspond with my own experience, especially bad user interface, poor documentation. The other issues speak more to the functionality of the software: feature glut, programmer centered design, and blindness to good features in commercial software. More...

Institutional Archives Registry
Listing of known Open Archives Initiative (OAI) repositories with numbers of records and growth charts. So far, something like 180 repositories are listed (view them by type and by country of origin by clicking 'browse') though as Stevan Harnad indicates in his email, there are more out there. More...

(Mis)Leading Open Access Myths
Nice and relatively short (a dozen pages or so) rebuttal from BioMed Central to the "myths" being presented to the British House of Commons select committee investigations into Scientific Journal Publishing. More...

Using ICT to Share the Tools of the Teaching Trade: A Report on Open Source Teaching
Rod Paley sent me this very nice case study of the Kaleidoscope Learning Object Repository which explains, more clearly that just about any document I've seen, what a learning object is, how it's used, and the role of learning object repositories. More...

Dan Pontefract: Open Thinking
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2018/09/06

Do you take the time to pause and reflect. Do you allow your mind to wander? Are you organized? Do you take account of facts? Are you willing to revisit a decision? Are you in charge of your focus? Are you acting with reserve and patience. More...