Another word I didn’t know: ‘editathon’

Editathon  I’m not too fussed that I didn’t know this word. It’s a new(ish) one, dreamed up just a few years ago to identify “an event where people develop open knowledge around a specific topic”. I chanced upon it when browsing the site for OER16, the 7th Open Educational Resources Conference, Open Culture, held on the 19th-20th April 2016 at the University of Edinburgh. One of the presentations outlined the journey of a group of 50 people who jointly created pages in Wikipedia by means of said ‘editathon’. Continue reading

Sebastian Thrun, an ‘oily charlatan’?

I’ve written a couple of times about Sebastian Thrun, and not always in complimentary fashion. In the first piece from 2012 I could be accused of calling him a ‘knucklehead’. The second in 2013 was more a tracking of his change of heart and mind, from messianic mission to hard-headed business. Continue reading

More on OER from IRRODL

Yes, I know I regularly extol the virtues of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL). That’s because it’s good, very good. Its latest special issue (Vol. 14, No. 2, 2013) has just been published, and you can view it all (you should know by now that it’s open access) at Open Educational Resources: Opening Access to Knowledge. Continue reading

I had Volume 1, Number 1 … and lost it!

In your journal collection (those of you who still possess such ancient tomes), do you have any first issues? On your shelf, is there a Number 1 from Volume 1 of a journal? I have just one, and you wouldn’t have to guess too hard to know that it’s from Distance Education, launched in Australia some 32 years ago. It was a great start to a great journal, one that has been a stalwart in the field for both new and established researchers and practitioners. Continue reading

More on WikiEducator

A couple of posts ago, when rabbiting on about Wikis, I mentioned WikiEducator, which has rapidly grown to become a leader among Wikis with an educational focus. In particular, its strong refrain is a call to arms to support the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement.

Continuing on this theme, and if you’d like to know more, have a look at one of the latest CIDER sessions (emanating from Athabasca University), titled WikiEducator: A return to the traditions of the academy? Continue reading