Grainne Conole of OpenLearn presents a view of how Web 2.0 technologies can influence pedagogical approaches.  The models and ideas in Conole's presentation are worth considering by learning design professionals whose task is to facilitate the construction of online courses. (The video from the Eduserve Foundation Symposium 2008 was cited by iThinkEd.)____JH

David Wiley announces the startup of Open Education News. This is another site to add to your list of rss feeds to monitor happenings in the field of open education. ___JH

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"The young field of open education is gaining momentum and energy. As additional projects, foundations, universities, and other participants join the movement, the need increases for a single source to gather, sort, analyze, synthesize, and disseminate news related to open education. As a field, open education is now where the field of open access was a few years ago. Peter Suber's wonderful Open Access News provides an invaluable service to the OA community, and we intend to replicate this service with Open Education News."

"Open Education News is essentially a group blog. A number of individuals from the US, South Africa, and eventually other locations daily monitor the internet for news related to open education. We then aggregate these items and publish them individually with minor commentary. Occasionally we'll publish bigger pieces of our own authorship; analyses and such. If you know of some open education news we should write about, contact David Wiley at david.wiley@gmail.com."

"Open Education News is graciously supported by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation."

This video series from Annenberg Media/Learning.org sets a high standard for online resources. The flash media presentations are exceptionally well produced to include clips from historical records and commentary by historians. Maps, a webography, and transcripts are also included with each module. Registration is required to access the free resources. Viewers who visit A Biography of America will also want to examine other programs available from Annenberg. ____JH

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"Annenberg Media is a unit of The Annenberg Foundation. Our mission is to advance excellent teaching in all disciplines throughout American K-12 schools. Former names of Annenberg Media are: Annenberg/CPB, The Annenberg/CPB Project, and The Annenberg/CPB Math and Science Project.

We pursue this mission by funding and broadly distributing multimedia resources for teachers to help them improve their own teaching practice and understanding of their subject. Annenberg Media makes use of telecommunications technologies—the Internet, including broadband video streaming, and satellite television broadcast—as well as hard copy media to disseminate these multimedia resources, ensuring that they reach as many teachers as possible."

Zaid Ali Alsagoff has revised his OCW/OER list compilations to produce an extremely useful update. Zaid's compilation should be bookmarked for reference by university instructors, students, and support staff. ______JH

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University Learning = OCW + OER = FREE!

• Link to ZaidLearn's Delicious OCW Adventure
• 130+ Free Learning Tools
• 75 Free EduGames

- Zaid Ali Alsagoff (  [ZaidLearn]

Robin Good writes enthusiastically about the benefits of web-based mind-mapping, with a special focus on MindMeister (which is free in its basic version). Robin also includes links to other mind-mapping tools. The mind maps that I create are most often done with a pencil and a yellow pad, but there are advantages in using a shareable, web-based tool such as MindMeister. From a very, very broad perspective all online educational resources can be viewed as variations of a mind or topic map. _____JH

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"Web-Based Mind-Mapping: Outline, Plan and Brainstorm Ideas Together With MindMeister. If you are looking to find an effective way to collaborate, brainstorm, visualize and plan ideas collaboratively online, much beyond what voice and text chat can do, it is the time you give a good try to the mind-mapping experience.

A roles and responsibilities mindmap collaborative mindmap created with MindMeister

Thanks to unforgettable MasterNewMedia editor Antonella Pastore, who first covered mindmaps in 2004 (!), mindmaps have been on my radar for quite some time, but with the recent advent of online, collaboratively editable mindmaps the opportunities to reap significant benefit from these tools has just exploded.

The great thing about collaborative, web-based mind-maps is the ease with which you can visualize spatially while giving very precise text labels to ideas, tasks, projects and to the relationships between them. These two characteristics by themselves when mixed with ability to watch and edit in real-time the same visual map with others creates a truly effective, useful and memorable way of collaborating productively at a distance."