Find, Author, and Share Open Textbooks

Beyond the resources we've talked about, what I have
found quite startling has been Google Books...It
actually saved me big time because I was taking
a grad course, the text had not arrived and I was
able to discren enough to use for the paper I had to write. There are also a few of the traditional sites (Blio/etc.) that have a lot of free stuff that I have occassionally used for my students.
More to come!!!!

Thank you Una and Kelly for a great community meeting! There are so many resources available to us out there - it can be overwhelming!!
I use some of the most popular repositories such as MERLOT, OLCOS, WikiEducator.
And, some of the most common OER search engines are available here http://blog.curriki.org/2010/07/02/look-no-further-for-oer-search-engines/

Carina

Hi Folks:

As promised, below are the resources I shared at Thursday's meeting.

• Folksemantics: OER Recommender Widget, & Greasemonkey Firefox Extension for Mozilla Firefox. This add-on floats above your web pages, analyzes key words on page and Add links to your web pages that point to related open educational resources. The widget (a more complicated process) will
o Analyzes the content of your web page.
o Helps users find resources that match their interests.
o Recommendations adapt based on usage and feedback data.
o Facilitates discussion, sharing, and rating of resources.
o Configure the number, appearance, and sources of recommendations.
o Free download at: http://www.folksemantic.com/
• Una’s Advanced Google search tip
o Statistics > Wikibooks
• Some regular sources
o Wikibooks: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
o Wikiversity: Information about, and links to resources: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources
o OER Commons: http://www.oercommons.org
o Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/education
o EducaNext Beta (requires free registration) This is a repository where you can publish your open materials, and check out those of others.: http://www.educanext.org/dotlrn/index
o Eduforge: Open source learning lab (requires free registration), geared to open-source computer applications: http://www.eduforge.org/
o Floss Manuals: An open-access users’ Manual site (how cool is that?): http://en.flossmanuals.net/about
o Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME): general information, links to open-access resources and so much more: http://www.iskme.org/
o UNESCO-OER: Information about, and links to open-access content sources: http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=30822&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_S...
o EdTek Resources for Teachers: much of the content is open-access or copyright friendly: http://www.edteck.com/wpa/pages/resources.htm
o Smarthistory: Smart History is a free, open, not-for-profit art history textbook (great source for open-access images): http://www.smarthistory.org/
o Scientific Commons (site currently down): http://www.en.scientificcommons.org
• Open Access College/Univeristies
o Carnegie Mellon University: Open-access college courses – Okay, this college does it all! You can also get a access to create and post your own open-courses on their site: http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/forstudents/freecourses
o Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative – gotta check this out: http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/initiative/research/158
o The Gateway (The Gateway to 21st Century Skills) : http://www.thegateway.org/
o OpenLearn University: http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/
o iTunes U: College courses and learning objects – download iTunes free at: http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
• Open Access Images and Media
o EduTube (free registration required): http://www.edutube.org/
o YouTube EDU: http://www.youtube.com/education?b=400
o Wikimedia: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
• Open Access Search Engines
o Truman State University Pickler Memorial Library: http://library.truman.edu/search_articles/open-access.asp
o OCLC The World’s Libraries Connected (open-access and copyright materials): http://www.oclc.org/oaister/
o Open Access Webliography: http://www.digital-scholarship.org/cwb/oaw.htm
o OpenDOAR (a directory of open access repositories – Google): http://www.opendoar.org/search.php
o University of the Philippines Los Barios – open access Journal Search Engines list: http://ovcre.uplb.edu.ph/index.php/open-access-journal-search-engines
o De Montfort University, Leicester – Open Access search engine: http://www.library.dmu.ac.uk/Resources/Openaccess/index.php?page=357

Kelley

Just attended a webinar, "How to introduce Open Educational Technology resources, open source tools and CC licensed learning objects to teacher education students and why it is important” on College Open Textbooks Community. I was able to add to my list of OER resources that I’ve gleaned from this class so far. You all probably already know about these sites, but it was interesting and fun for me to see them.

http://www.gimp.org/ GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

http://inkscape.org/ An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

http://tuxpaint.org/ Tux Paint is a free, drawing program for children ages 3 to 12 (for example, preschool and K-6). It combines an easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who guides children as they use the program.

http://openclipart.org/ Open Clipart Library: This project aims to create an archive of clip art that can be used for free for any use.

http://mediawiki.org/ MediaWiki is a free software wiki package written in PHP, originally for use on Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis, including this website, the home of MediaWiki.

Now, the interesting part, the presenter of this session is from Iceland and some of the sites she showed are in Icelandic. Google did a good job of translating for me! She uses wikis a lot.

http://is.wikibooks.org/ Welcome to the Icelandic part of the Wiki Book . Wikipedia is an open partnership, which aims to provide free books in all languages.

http://is.wikibooks.org/wiki/N%C3%A1msefni wiki lessons written by education students

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Wikimedia Commons, a database of 8,585,733 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute. For the embedding of Wikimedia Commons' resources in Wikipedia articles, see Wikipedia:Wikimedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikimedia_Commons Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is an online repository of free-use images, sound and other media files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, from which uploaded files can be used across all Wikimedia projects in all languages, including Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource and Wikinews or downloaded for offsite use. The repository contains over eight million media files.

http://www.wikispaces.com/content/wiki Free Wikis

http://tikiwiki.org What is Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware? Tiki is a powerful web-based application created by a large team of contributors. Tiki is an ideal tool for you to build and maintain your Website/Wiki/Groupware/CMS/Forum/Blog/Bug Tracker or any other project you can imagine running in your browser window. Tiki is free, both Free Software (as in "Free Speech") and Free of Charge (as in "Free Beer"), and for everyone! It has all the features you need "out-of-the-box"

Found this interesting, but lengthy (1 hour) panel discussion about open textbooks. Must be at a conference, but I couldn't figure out which one. It was at University of British Columbia, July 2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikWU6H-AqMA