I was privledged to meet and share a hotel room with Lucie deLaBruere an extrodinary educator and blogger and fellow hot-tub lover from Vermont.  Her write up of the open minds conference is awesome!  http://www.infinitethinking.org/2008/09/open-minds-momentum.html

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The article is entitled, "Analysis: How multimedia can improve learning - New research sheds light on students' ability to process multiple modes of learning" and provides a nice, easy summary of the research in this area.

Highlights include a quick summary of the learning theory:

Student preconceptions of a curriculum must be engaged in learning process. Only when the student has the opportunity to correct misconceptions, build on prior knowledge, and create schemas of understanding a topic will learning be optimized.

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OERCommons is a site organized around searching and sharing open educational resources.  They have partnered with major open education resource providers to build one community around sharing and reusing these resources.

Update: Annorate is a web service for sharing ratings and annotations of web pages. The source code is available so you can run your own annorate service. 

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Recently I attended a conference "Enabling the Age of Immersive Education".

The best presentation was by Daniel Laughlin Research Scientist, NASA Learning Technologies. He was able to use Learning Thoery to give a very clear presentation that reinforced commone sense, but helped to organize understanding of the topic.  This is definitely a goal for me.

A definite highlight of the conference was the hallway conversation with a photographer, writer and oral historian from Roxbury.  She helped  me really understand what I'd like to see done with Immersive Environments.   As Daniel from NASA explained, our beliefs are burnt into our synapses.  If we want to challenge those beliefs, especialy about emotional issue like racism and identity we have to invoke emotions while we teach. Thus, to deeply understand history, in a way that allows us to change our current beliefs, we have to have empahty with the people and cultures we study. I think emersive technologies, in the hands of artists like this woman could have the potential to do this. 

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This quote from Mary Lou Jepson, the CTO of OLPC and designer of the amazing, low power, sunlight readable display inside it, shows why the OLPC will change the world while Intel just wanted to sell CPUs.

"Mary Lou Jepsen: Where to start: Classmate is more expensive, consumes 10 times the power, has 1/3 the wifi range, and can't be used outside. Also, the Classmate doesn't use neighboring laptops to extend the reach of the internet via hopping (mesh-networking) like the XO does. So not only is the XO cheaper than the Classmate, the XO requires less infrastructure expenditure for electricity and for internet access. In Peru we can run off on solar during the day and handcrank at night for an additional $25 or so per student – this is a one-time expense – the solar panel and the crank will last 10 or, perhaps, 20 years. Just try running electricity cables up and down the Peruvian Andes for that cost while making sure it's environmentally clean energy. The Classmate isn't as durable as the XO, and its screen is about 30% smaller, the batteries are the type that can explode and only last 1-2 years and can't be removed by the user and harm the environment. The batteries are expensive to replace: $30-40 per replacement. The XO batteries last for 5 years and cost less than $10 to replace. Finally, the XO is the greenest laptop ever made, the Classmate isn't – this matters a great deal when one proposes to put millions of them in the developing world."

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Public Domain Reprints calls itself "an experimental non-commercial project to re-print public domain books". This sounds like a great idea to me. Of course, not everyone can afford to reprint these books and they are all available online for free. It definitely is more affordable than printing it yourself on your inkjet printer. Saves time and the result is much nicer, too.

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Stephen Downes presents his personal list of 10 blogs worth reading that did not win an Edublogs award. There looks like some very interesting stuff here.

One example is OU Profiles  Facebook application. This allows folks to let others know what Open University courses they are studying. This is a good complement to our Open Learning Search Facbook application that allows users find, then share, open learning content.

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We have been interested in Open Courseware and other open leanring resources for a long time now. Dave Bauer and Caroline Meeks attended the Open Education Conference in 2006 and we were inspired.

Time and again research in education show that people learn better when they work together, and as we work with OpenACS, the obvious place to help would be to build communities around open lear(ning materials, but it seemed tricky to build a critical mass of users to make the community successful. Ideally users would form their own groups and help each other take advantage of these resources.

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