Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

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eLearning News: Worldreader

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

As we have discussed in previous articles, one of the great benefits of eLearning is the ability to deliver educational and training materials all over the world without having to worry about geographic constraints. Thanks to current and emerging technology, access to information can be as convenient as your nearest WiFi hot spot.  With all of the technology and technical gadgets we have at our disposal today, it seems as if an education for all people across the globe could be more than just a dream.  One organization, Worldreader, is doing everything it can to make that dream a reality.

Worldreader is a not-for-profit organization whose goal is to make books available to every person on the planet using e-reader and e-book technology.  One of their goals is to make e-books accessible to 1 million children by the year 2015.  Worldreader works with publishers, book and e-book retailers, and government agencies to achieve this mission.  According to the Worldreader website, “Worldreader.org’s mission is to make digital books available to all in the developing world, enabling millions of people to improve their lives.  Emerging e-book technology is sharply reducing the cost and complexity of delivering reading material everywhere. We are developing the systems and the partnerships to get e-readers — and the life-changing, power-creating ideas contained in e-books — into the hands and minds of people in the developing world, where profit-seeking entities are not focused.” They believe that when you remove the difficulties that traditional paper books present (transportation, cost, storage, tracking and management, logistics, etc.), sharing knowledge via e-books and e-readers makes education and literacy for all people possible.

Education and literacy are two major driving forces behind economic growth and Worldreader hopes to support these two key factors with its iRead program.  The iRead pilot study launched in November of 2010 at the Orphan Aid Primary school in the village of Ayenyah, Ghana.  The pilot study was overwhelmingly positive.  Teachers and students were provided Kindle e-reader devices and given training on how to use these devices.  The sixth grade students and teachers were able to successfully use the Kindles within a matter of days.  The students were not distracted by the novelty of the Kindle device and quickly became absorbed in what they were reading.   The built-in dictionary was found to be very useful by the students, especially those who were learning to read and those who were new language learners.  It was also found that the students in this pilot program ended up reading more often and in higher quantity than their peers who were not involved in the program.  While the overall results of the pilot study were positive, there still remain some technological and logistical challenges that will no doubt be fairly simple to alleviate.

If you would like to view a detailed report of the iRead pilot study or to learn more about the Worldreader program itself, you may visit the Worldreader website at www.worldreader.org.  You may also follow their progress on Facebook at facebook.com/worldreader and Twitter @Worldreaders .

The Guidelines for Open Educational Resources

Thursday, January 5th, 2012

In a recent article we discussed Open Educational Resources (often referred to as OER) and shared a great resource for finding and sharing  theses OER, the OER Commons website.   As a reminder, OER refers to educational resources created by various individuals and organizations that are made available for use by students, teachers, and other educational staff free of charge. The OER Commons is one great place to start if you would like to find quality educational resources that are open for usage, sharing, and manipulation.  However if you would like to find out more about the when, how, and why regarding OER usage, the recently released Guidelines for Open Educational Resources will be worth checking into.

The Guidelines for Open Educational Resources was created by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and was launched at the UNESCO General Conference in Paris, France at the end of 2011.  These guidelines were developed after the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education noted that eLearning and the usage of OER make access to a quality education a greater possibility for many people.  The document itself, which may be found by clicking on this link, states, “their [the Guidelines] purpose is to encourage decision makers in governments and institutions to invest in the systematic production, adaptation and use of OER and to bring them into the mainstream of higher education in order to improve the quality of curricula and teaching and to reduce costs.”

This twenty two page document is presented in an organized and user friendly manner.  The first section discusses the purpose and rationale for the creation of these guidelines and how OER impact higher education.  This section also provides a brief background of open licensing and the emergence of OER and talks about the potential OER have to influence the world of education.  The second section of this publication is broken down into five subsections, each detailing OER guidelines for governments, higher education institutions, academic staff, student bodies, and for quality assurance or accreditation bodies and academic recognition bodies.  Each of these subsections is divided into easy to read list format with a brief description of each point in the respective lists.  The Guidelines for Open Educational Resources ends with two interesting and useful appendices, “Useful knowledge, competencies and skills for effective OER use in higher education,” and “Promoting more effective and inclusive education by designing OER for the diverse needs of students.”

Given the vast array of OER available, The Guidelines for Open Educational Resources provides an excellent starting point for enabling those in the field of education to use OER appropriately and effectively.  This document provides a useful framework of standards to encourage and support the use of OER in higher education on a continuing basis.  If you would like to learn more about the Guidelines for Open Educational Resources or to read the document in its entirety, you may access it here: http://www.icde.org/filestore/Resources/Handbooks/GuidelinesforOERinHE.pdf

British Newspaper Archive Now Accessible Online

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

Last week, we shared an article about a few of the more popular forms distance learning may take such as blended learning, mobile learning, and rapid learning.  In the field of ICT (Information and Communication Technology), advancement and changes can happen so quickly that keeping yourself abreast of all of the new developments can be quite an exciting challenge.  eLearning and ICT in general are often considered to be constantly moving forward.  However, we should also keep in mind that eLearning isn’t just about the future; eLearning can be a link to the past as well.

Just last week, the British Newspaper Archive made available online approximately sixty five million newspaper articles which span the last 300 years.  The British Library created this fully searchable archive of full length articles comprising over three million pages with additional pages being added daily.  The newspaper articles were culled from local and regional newspapers in the United Kingdom, with the articles dating back to 1800.

Thanks to this unprecedented project, users will have the opportunity to perform virtual searches of millions of historic newspaper articles from the convenience of their own homes or any place they may access the Internet.  Prior to the launch of the British Newspaper Archive, people wishing to access these newspaper articles would have to travel to the British Library newspaper depository in Colindale, North London where a collection of 200 local and regional newspapers was housed.  Online searches of the newspaper archive can be made using a keyword, name, location, date, or article title.  Users can search through news articles, family notices, letters, obituaries, and advertisements.

The technological end of the online archive creation process is quite interesting.  For the past year, the archiving team at the British Library has been scanning approximately 8,000 digital images per day from the original source newspaper pages.  Because the team had access to these original volumes, they were able to include some of the most rare and fragile articles contained in the collection.  Some of these articles are not even available for public access other than their current availability online.

The scanners used in this project were Zeutschel A0 scanners that created very high quality digital images of each article with a dpi of 400 and 24bit color.  The very large paper size of some of the articles coming from the turn of the 19th century produced extremely large digital files, some being as large as 400MB.  An electronic text file is also created from many of the image files by passing the image file through an optical character recognition program.  This aids in making the text of the articles a searchable format.

In addition scanning original source articles, the archiving team also scanned a large amount of existing microfilm that was created by the British Library throughout the last several years.  While the quality of the microfilm scans is not as high as the scan quality produced by the original documents, the time taken to create these scans was significantly lower.  The microfilm scans still produce an acceptable image at 300dpi.

This extensive archiving project will take about 10 years to finish with a total of 650 million estimated articles.  If you would like to access this wonderful resource, the British Newspaper Archive may be found online at http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ . You can even keep up with the latest news around the British Newspaper Archive by following them on Twitter @BNArchive .

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