Making OER available on multiple platforms
Suzanne Hardy, James Outterside, Roger Griset, Andy Beggan, OER13, University of Nottingham, June 23, 2013

Any presentation that begins with a slide featuring kittens is worth passing along. The presentation included CC-licensed cake (samples of which were unfortunately not available online). The first presentation is from Suzanne Hardy and James Outterside. The presentation describes a series of OER tools and repositories such as PublishOER, SupOERglue, and the RIDLR learning registry. There's an Elsevier connection I don't quite get, but you can download the code and do it on your own (go to the 15:32 minute for URLs). Next is a talk from Roger Griset on Open Apps, and finally Andy Beggan on Making OER available on multiple platforms (at 35:20) which focuses especially on creating eBooks. Some interesting remarks about the different platforms (45:00 minute mark). Also interestingly, 77 percent of the downloads were iBook, 18.5 percent ePub, and only 4.5 percent OER downloads.

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Learning Artifacts
Eric Sheninger, A Principal's Reflections, June 23, 2013

I appreciate the attempt to explain and justify the creation and use of learning artifacts, but I think it needs to be done with more caution than done here. Eric Sheninger cites with reference to Donald Clark a 'knowledge creation spiral' (pictured) that explains how artifacts lead to declarative knowledge, which in turn leads to procedural knowledge. But the epistemology here is mostly fiction. There's no mechanism for (for example) an artifact to insert the proposition "water is liquid" (to use an example from Clark's page) into our heads, and from this, no procedural knowledge follows at all. And without a mechanism, the theory is indistinguishable from magic. Artifacts are useful, but not as generators of propositions.

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Using Action Research to Investigate Social Networking Technologies
Lisa Worrall, ,, Katy Harris, Electronic Journal of e-Learning, June 23, 2013

I do feel an obligation to read and as appropriate link to journal papers, because this wouldn't be much of a newsletter if I didn't. But sometimes I feel it's a stretch. This is a case in point. The article describes an action reserach project around provision of discussion support in a professional development website. The article seems divided on whether iot wants to explain and justiofy action research, or whether it wants to focus on the actual research. The authors are not helped by the fact that the discussion support area went generally unmonitored and unused. So we have eight pages of journalese to tell us that "learners want websites that are frequently monitored, that they feel that they ‘own’, with private chat room options, to encourage them to ‘donate’ some of their finite time on the website, with greater confidence that other users will be on the website at the same time for synchronous chat opportunities." I think a couple of tweets would have accomplished the same result, which is what is so wrong with academic publishing generally. Here's more from the same issue of the journal.

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