Monday, August 27, 2007

Intro to Open Education

David Wiley, who works at Utah State University (USA), has a great weblog, called iterating toward openness. This title is quite right I think; only by iterating, which implies making mistakes etc, we will reach more openness. One other aspect of David Wiley that I like very much, is that he sets an example of who to "do" openness. He just does it!
So, today he is starting his "Introduction to Open Education" course! There are already over 20 participants, from all over the world, signed up.
David is using a wiki to manage his course, nothing else. he expects that participants use weblogs to work on their assignments. How about that? We don't need fancy virtual learning environments, with all those roles.... Blackboard, eat your heart out ( I am referring to their claim on a certain patent here ).

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Wordprocessing on the web

We all know Google Docs (do we?). But innovation moves quickly in this era of Web 2.0. So, the next big thing is Buzzword. On eHub they call it The First Real Word Processor for the Web. The killer feature of Buzzword, apparantly, is that that what gets printed is exactly what's on your screen (or the other way around). Buzzword does this by using Flash technology. Don't get excited, yet, Buzzword is still in the invitation stage, which means that only invitees get to see and use it (and ofcourse they should write about it, as eHub did).