iBerry

So now after a final push we will be moving from 'iberry-Beta' to iberry.com again. In comparison with the 'old' iberry.com we now have the benefits of our new Open Source content management system, Drupal, providing improved facilities for finding Open Courseware (OCW) items under multiple categories and also the ability to comment. Perhaps it should be made clearer that anyone is free to comment on anything; e.g. just 'post new comment' after clicking on the title of an OCW item. Your comment will appear immediately if you are registered and if not, it is likely to appear within a few hours (unless you are a spammer!). I hope more people will add comments, particularly for OCW items as they can become quickly outdated, or even broken before the facilitators have had the time to update.

The facilitators continue to ......

facilitate by revising OCW items and resource pages but would greatly appreciate more help. At the rate I work it would take about a year to revise every external link in iberry.com so the more help we can get the more likely revision times can be reduced to a desirable maximum of about 3 or 4 months. Once again, anyone can revise any existing OCW item or resource pages or submit a new item by making use of comments. If you are registered you can create new OCW items for moderation by the facilitators and if you become a facilitator then you can create and moderate items yourself.

A new and exciting aspect of the improved iberry.com is the potential for supporting an academic community of learners and educators. Such a community must necessarily be self-sustaining as iberry.com itself has little resources and no institutional support and therefore cannot organize and create academic content to any significant extent. I have advertised ( Be a Professor!) for volunteers with the necessary expertise to play a leading role in creating learning products (e.g. subject introductions for the Subject Portholes) and I hope this will help to build up momentum. But yet again, anyone is welcome to submit material to the Subject Portholes that will help others make more efficient use of the vast amount of Open Courseware that is now available.