iBerry

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!

• Towards an Open Global Education Network (OGEN) - iBerry's mission is to foster free and accessible Higher Education by every appropriate means. With minimal resources of our own we focus on connection rather than content highlighting different regions of the current OGEN by providing facilities such as the News Aggregator and the Open Courseware Directory. Continuing this approach will involve further use by iBerry of services such as delicious, Twitter and others that offer free educational benefit.
• Support for the Online Learner - we now have a section on learner support and have surveyed some of the best support sites. We also initiated the OCW2 Project as an initial attempt to fill the gap between existing Open Courseware (OCW) and its effective use by online learners. Version 1 of OCW2 Maths and OCW2 Computer Science and IT are now available and OCW2 Engineering is planned. Beyond that our expertise is very limited at present but links to likely Open Educational Resources will be saved under the OCW2 subject headings in the hope that further OCW2 presentations on other topics can eventually be put together; anyone interested in helping please contact us!
• The Open Courseware Directory - the Directory continues to expand but there is now far too much OCW out there to cover comprehensively. However, the 'quality' of OCW varies considerably and some OCW items are clearly more useful for online learning purposes than others. The Directory has always excluded trivial OCW items that do not cover academic topics in the depth appropriate to a "course" (see "about the OCW Directory); but now the bar will be raised and perhaps some sort of 'ranking' system introduced. Anyone of course is always welcome to contribute their own opinion by attaching a comment to any OCW item.
• Peer-matching - this refers to the opportunities registered users have to find others with similar academic interests. Someone studying a particular academic topic or OCW item may wish to contact others with similar objectives or perhaps from the same country as themselves. Any user registered with iBerry has access to the profiles of all other registered users. (Profiles consist of location, academic topics of interest and as much personal information as a user wishes to include.) Contact can be made through iBerry without revealing private email addressses. We will try to highlight this facility and make it simpler for users to flag their requirements.

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?

  Please register only if you want to use one or more of the following features:

  • view profiles of other registered users. (You can communicate with them without revealing your private email address).
  • create message board or OCW items using your own user name
  • customize your displays and set your own local time
  • help others make the best use of Open Courseware by assisting with the OCW2 Project
  • have the opportunity to guide and influence further community development - contact us !

  
  

  Please read through the rest of this FAQ if you are considering registering.

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!

In keeping with our vision of an Open Global Education Network, iBerry has gradually extended the use of facilities provided by free external services such as delicious (iBerry on delicious), Scribd (iBerry on Scribd) and OER Recommender not to mention generous individuals such as Zaid Ali Alsagoff (ZaidLearn's links) and Clayton R. Wright (list of educational technology conferences). However, the downside of an unwalled garden with a multitude of signposts pointing to other places is that not so many people hang around long enough to talk with us! This is a particular problem now that we are into content creation, in at least a small way, with our Open Courseware 2.0 (OCW2) Project.