Open Source
Call for papers: ePIC 2013 - The 11th conference on ePortfolio and Identity
Following the rich discussions triggered by the presence of Mozilla Open Badges at ePIC 2012, the 11th ePortfolio and Identity Conference intends to explore further the concept of 'openness' in relation to the themes traditionally addressed by the conference. In particular, as ePortfolio and Open Badges are containers of personal data, what is their place in what some predict as the next big revolution: Open Me — open personal data?
The conference will take place on 8-10 July, 2013
Deadline for abstracts submission: 11 March
Contemporary media (digital, social and mobile) is transforming the landscape of identity, education, employment, culture, technologies and politics. The centralised, top-down, mass media model on which most of our institutions are based is facing assaults from the emerging decentralised, bottom-up, networked, agile social knowledge media. While old power centres are being challenged, new ones are appearing: they are based on the systematic collection, analysis and exploitation of the mass of data produced in our daily life. And we are busily coding our actions and thoughts for Google and Facebook to monetise them. In this context, how can we create the conditions for the emancipation of individuals towards a truly open society?
Authors are invited to address ePortfolio and identity issues in relation to:
- open ePortfolio and open badges
- open identity and open data
- open learning and open educational resources
- open assessment and open accreditation
- open employment and open business
- open architecture and open infrastructure
Key conference questions, in relation to ePortfolio and identity, may include (but are not limited to):
- How to support individual and community learning?
- How to contribute to the identity construction process?
- How to facilitate the recognition and accreditation learning?
- How to support lifelong learning, orientation and employability?
- How to support the acquisition of 21st century skills?
- How to create an ePortfolio architecture and infrastructure?
Deadline for abstracts submission: 11 March
OER Sverige
OERSverige.se är hemsidan för ett samarbetsprojekt kring öppna digitala lärresurser (Open Educational Resources, OER) som arrangerar nio webbinarier i ämnet fram till maj 2013. Vem som helst kan delta kostnadsfritt.
Projektet drivs av ett antal högskolor i Sverige genom ITHU samt av nätverket Dela! och finansieras av .SE (Stiftelsen för Internetinfrastruktur). Läs mer om projektet.
Öppna digitala lärresurser kallas på engelska Open Educational Resources (OER). Det är lärresurser som är tillgängliga på internet och fritt kan användas, kopieras och spridas och i många fall även bearbetas. En öppen digital lärresurs har en angivelse, eller upphovsrättslicens, som visar under vilka villkor den får användas, kopieras, spridas och bearbetas. Creative Commons är den vanligaste licenstypen. Internationellt är OER-rörelsen stark.
Call for proposals 'ICT Policy Support Programme 2013'
The European Commission has published its call for proposals 'ICT Policy Support Programme 2013' (ICT PSP), which is coming under the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).
The ICT PSP supports the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) - one of the seven flagship initiatives of the Europe 2020 Strategy -and is aligned with its priorities. It aims to stimulate smart, sustainable and inclusive growth by accelerating the wider uptake and best use of innovative digital technologies and content by citizens, governments and businesses.
The programme addresses obstacles hindering the use of ICT-based products and services and barriers for the development of high growth businesses, notably SMEs, in this field. In addition to illustrating and validating the high value of digital technologies, it will foster the development of EU-wide markets for innovations, thereby enabling every company in Europe to benefit from the largest internal market in the world.
The call encompasses three themes of crucial importance for the realisation of the DAE: a cloud of public services and smart cities; digital content, open data and creativity; and ICT for health, ageing well and inclusion.
Contact person: To see the official call announcement, please consult: Participant portal
To see partnership requests for this call, please consult: CORDIS Partners Service
The Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.
As well as providing a simple repository list, OpenDOAR lets you search for repositories or search repository contents. Additionally, we provide tools and support to both repository administrators and service providers in sharing best practice and improving the quality of the repository infrastructure. Further explanation of these features is given in a project document Beyond the list.
The current directory lists repositories and allows breakdown and selection by a variety of criteria - see the Find page - which can also be viewed as statistical charts. The underlying database has been designed from the ground up to include in-depth information on each repository that can be used for search, analysis, or underpinning services like text-mining. The OpenDOAR service is being developed incrementally, developing the current service as new features are introduced. A list of Upgrades and Additions is available.
Developments will be of use both to users wishing to find original research papers and for service providers like search engines or alert services which need easy-to-use tools for developing tailored search services to suit specific user communities.
More information on the project is available here.
Speakapps: applications to practice oral skills
The SpeakApps project focuses on creating a free and open source online platform that gathers ICT-based applications and pedagogies to practice oral skills online.
The SpeakApps platform would thus serve a community composed of foreign language teachers and their students with:
- Easy access to innovative and interactive online tools for learning and teaching languages.
- Virtual classrooms to carry out pedagogical activities.
- Exercises and tools for managing materials for synchronous tasks.
- Technical and pedagogical guides to assist SpeakApps users.
- A common space to exchange ideas and methodologies.
SpeakApps, granted by the European Lifelong Learning Programme (LLP), aims to fill these gaps by designing a popular language learning site supported and built by a large community that enjoys and takes advantage of the possibilities offered by e-learning.
Open Education Week: call for participation!
This year Open Education Week takes places on March 11-15 and features a series of events, workshops, project showcases, and webinars from around the world. If you care about sharing knowledge, reducing barriers to educational access, and helping to grow the amount of free and open educational resources (OER) available on the web — join Creative Commons and many other organizations and institutions by answering the Call for Participation.
Simply submit your proposed activity by January 18. Activities may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Provide a Project Showcase highlighting some aspect of open education in your project, organization, region or country
- Offer a webinar or virtual Question and Answer session on a topic of interest
- Create or share basic resources about the open education movement
- Host a local event during Open Education Week
- Form a Working Group to address a common problem or opportunity
- Propose another activity—we invite you to be creative!
- Contribute your skills to creating, organizing, coordinating or spreading the word about Open Education Week
As part of Open Education Week, Creative Commons and its affiliates are hosting and participating in local events and webinars on OER, Version 4.0 of the CC licenses, the Open Policy Network, School of Open, and more. In addition, the School of Open will officially launch its first set of courses that week, including courses on copyright and Creative Commons for educators. Courses will be free to take and free to reuse and remix under P2PU’s default CC BY-SA licensing policy.
To participate in Open Education Week, visit http://www.openeducationweek.org.
To be notified when School of Open courses start, sign up for the School of Open announce list. If you’d like to get involved in building courses for launch, visit http://schoolofopen.org.
UK universities embrace the free, open, online future of higher education
The Open University launches a UK-based platform for massive open online courses (Moocs) that will rival established providers in the US.
Students from the UK and around the world will have free access to some of the country’s top universities thanks to Futurelearn Ltd, an entirely new company being launched by The Open University (OU). The universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, King’s College London, Lancaster, Leeds, Southampton, St Andrews and Warwick have all signed up to join Futurelearn.
Futurelearn will be independent but majority-owned by the OU. It will:
Bring together a range of free, open, online courses from leading UK universities, that will be clear, simple to use and accessible;
Draw on the OU’s expertise in delivering distance learning and pioneering open education resources to underpin a unified, coherent offer from all of its partners;
Increase accessibility to higher education (HE) for students across the UK and in the rest of the world.
European Ministerial Level Conference on Opening up Education
The Ministerial Conference "Opening up education through technologies: Towards a more systemic use for a smart, social and sustainable growth in Europe" to be held in Oslo, Norway on 9-11 December 2012.
The goal is to dedicate particular attention on how education and training systems can fully reap the benefits of modern technologies so as to create innovative ways of accessing learning content, building creative learning environments and fostering virtual learning communities.
Elearning Europa will be live-tweeting from the event.
Sufficient return on public investments in education and our ability to innovate are today more important than ever for future growth, competitiveness and strong social cohesion. The conference will constitute a unique opportunity to capture the key issues that matter for a systemic approach to educational innovations which facilitate quality 21st century education for all.
Input from the recently closed EC Consultation on the topic of "Opening up Education - a proposal for a European Initiative to enhance education and skills development through new technologies" will be presented at the Conference.
As part of the Cyprus EU Presidency Program during the second half of 2012, the Conference will bring together Ministers of Education from the Member States of the European Union, candidate countries, as well as the EFTA States. The debates will be stimulated by key notes from highly profiled international experts from both academia and the private sector and will aim at identifying good practices at national level.
UOC continues to innovate in Educational Technologies
The Office of Learning Technologies publishes its 2001 Projects Report
Since 1994, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) has led the way to online learning, making it possible to take education to a higher level, and further available to society. The Office of Learning Technologies (OLT) at the UOC designs and develops a number of immersive, open, accessible and engaging learning experiences for its more than 55.000 fully online students and teaching staff.
The UOC-OLT has just published its 2011 Projects Report, outlining a sample of its latest projects, building on information and experiences that facilitate and improve the experience of an extremely diverse group of students and faculty. For instance, some cases aim at the integration of social networks and cloud services within the Campus, while progress is also made in the area of inclusion of people with a wide range of disabilities, making UOC a more inclusive University.
Many projects have been made in collaboration with other partners such as universities (University of California at Berkeley, Dublin City University, University of Yaoundé I), companies (Orange) and networks (IMS Global Learning Consortium, New Media Consortium).
Summary of projects' list:
· Learning and Teaching Tools: class virtual DicWiki (generator of a dictionary for any field of knowledge), eAssessment, Google Apps (incorporating Google tools for virtual classes), PACPlagi (online tool to detect plagiarized studies of Internet), SimAula (simulation of a virtual classroom tool in teaching students who want to practice), SpeakApps (online platform for practicing speaking skills).
· Community Tools: Geolocation for Learning (Learning Geolocation 4, gives information on the location of other students of the UOC-phase pilot, iLike (application where students can give opinion about the operation of a subject), Questions and Answers (knowledge provided by students on the functioning of the UOC by means of a system of questions and answers), Technipedia (platform to promote entrepreneurship for youth in Africa)
· Mobile Tools: augmented reality (increases the vision of a landscape, a building, etc..; designed as a tourist application), content adaptation for iPad, Mobile Campus, MyUOC Mobile.
· Management Tools: Learning Apps (space where teachers and students can build their place of learning), tools to support the reading and writing applications for the UOC (checker, translator, etc...), project SOC (virtual training Employment Service of Catalonia).
· User-centered design and support projects: Cube-U (object connected to the Internet to communicate by changing color or visual icons, information on the campus, for example, when mail is received, how many students are connected, etc.), Laboratory Mobile Accessibility (to evaluate accessibility and usability of websites and mobile applications), Blogs Support (online spaces where teachers and students can answer questions about possible problems with class tools), and tools to support people with visual impairments.
About the Office of Learning Technologies:
The Office of Learning Technologies is headed by Llorenç Valverde (vice-rector for Technology, UOC) and Magi Almirall (OLT Director). The Office plays a main role in the application and creation of online learning design and development methodologies with the sole objective to help evolve online education, and ensure all learners have an engaging and effective experience.
Would like to receive a copy of the 2011 OLT Projects Report? Then, please, send your request at learningtechnologies@uoc.edu.