iBerry

As promised in 'Plans for 2010' we are making make it easier for users to create accounts and flag their requirements as Registered Users. If you have already registered please check your profile and revise it if necessary as some changes have been made to the layout.

iBerry does not go out of its way to encourage visitors to become Registered Users (see Registration FAQ) and we have absolutely no wish to create a closed community but it can be rewarding to have your profile accessible to other Registered Users in order to find people with similar interests ("peer-matching") or perhaps for professional reasons. If you register you can edit your profile at any time and it will be available for at least a year after your last login. You are free to make contact with others, or not, and without revealing private email addresses. There is no system of 'friends', 'followers', 'pokes' or advertising!

If you are logged in you can list the profiles of all Registered Users or just those with particular interests, or from a particular country. The main links are given in the tables below but these will only work if you are logged in of course!

Special Interest Networks - profiles of registered users:

The links below give profiles from the 5 countries with the largest number of Registered Users in the order of numbers from each country.

Country Networks - profiles of registered users:

It is interesting to know that there are now more Registered Users from India than the whole of North America! It's good to welcome so many Indian visitors but difficult for us to include much of the Indian OCW that has recently appeared via NPTEL etc. - advice and help needed please!

The following summarizes iBerry's plans for 2010. We depend on the efforts of Registered Users and anyone else who cares to help. Your input is appreciated and feedback of course is always welcome - please contact us!

Computer Science & IT is the latest of iBerry's OCW2 presentations to be completed bringing the total to a grand two (the other is OCW2 Maths). To recap, the purpose of the OCW2 Project is to help fill the gap between existing Open Courseware (OCW) and its effective use by online learners.

Please enjoy whatever celebrations the end of the year may bring !

We also wish everyone a happy and prosperous New Year.

How do you use iBerry? - if at all! This is the question we ask ourselves from time to time and, to be honest, we have a very incomplete idea of who our visitors are and why they bother to come. Now that the Open Courseware Directory is becoming larger and at the same time we are developing the OCW2 Project, there is more work involved and we are concerned about the cost effective use of our very limited resources. In broad terms, our mission is is to foster free and accessible Higher Education by every appropriate means but there are obviously many ways of going about this (see About iBerry and also The Open Global Education Network).

Working on the 'support' page for 'OCW2 Computer Science and IT', I've been trying to locate sites where online learners can find good general advice on Computer Science and IT from experts or other learners. There are numerous computer-related forums available. (Earlier this year we looked at Learner Support Sites in general.) Some forums have yet to achieve a critical mass of users so queries tend to get no replies. Others are more popular but are mainly concerned with the types of problems encountered by computer users while yet others focus on the specifics of particular gadgets, specialist programming languages etc. These can be very useful sources of information as far as they go but are not very suited to online learners who want to stand back and take on Computer Science at a fundamental level before (perhaps) moving onto more specialist areas of practice.

It's been busy at The Academic Porthole so I can't stop to ruminate at any length but here are a few of the (disconnected) things that have diverted us:

• I have (at last) finished the first version of Programming and Software Engineering in our OCW2 Computer Science and IT project. There's so much good OER material on Computing out there that selecting exactly what to include is not so easy - so we would really appreciate some feedback PLEASE, expert or not!
• iBerry is now on Twitter as iBerry_. Like many people we are only gradually beginning to appreciate its worth and have doubts as to how much time should go into tweeting as opposed to less immediately appealing exercises (such as updating the Open Courseware Directory!). Anyhow, we have also embedded Twitter search widgets within iBerry for the hashtags, #OCW, #OER and #EdTech and will be interested to see if there is a demand for this.
• Connexions - WikiEducator OER Remix Project - We were very pleased indeed to see Connexions and WikiEducator getting together on this project. Earlier this year we had pointed to the benefits of greater communication and co-operation developing between the few education sites that go further in supporting online learners than simply providing searchable repositories or links to Open Courseware - see Learner Support Sites - first impressions.
  

Why should I register with iBerry?

The first 3 pages of Version 1 are now more or less complete: Computer Science and IT, About Computer Science and IT and Basic Computer Science & IT. These pages contain numerous open resources aimed at motivating and introducing this topic to the online learner at a basic post-secondary level. More pages, along the same lines as OCW2 Maths, will be added in due course. Comments are welcome!