AGENDA  for 1-14-08, CEO Breakfast

Jane Hart's articles and list of free applications for eLearning.

More information at: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?author=Jane%20Hart

A wide variety of free tools are available for eLearning!

Software Applications for eLearning!

© 2008 John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler. Text illustrations © 2008 Susan E. Haviland. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 16–32

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0

John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler

John Seely Brown is a Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost at the University of Southern California (USC) and Independent Co-Chairman of a New Deloitte Research Center. He is the former Chief Scientist of Xerox and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Many of his publications and presentations are on his website (http://www.johnseelybrown.com). Richard P. Adler is a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto and Principal of People & Technology, a research and consulting firm in Cupertino, California.

Comments on this article can be posted to the web via the link at the bottom of this page.

In studying and/or promoting web-technology, the phrase Web 2.0 can refer to a trend in web design and development — a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services (such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies) which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users.

MyiCourse.com is a free, web-based, e-learning platform that is "just right" for those
faculty members who want the freedom to create their own on-line educational site, but do not have the budget, servers, IT department support or programming skills to access the typical e-learning solutions.

Our mission is to provide software that helps users create and post their own educational materials, at no cost. We do not believe all of life’s necessary learning is contained within the walls of universities or between the binders of books. We want to democratize knowledge for those who wish to learn. Come help us flatten the world!

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University. This site itself is created using Moodle, so check out the Moodle Demonstration Courses or read the latest Moodle Buzz.  

For more information about Moodle, use this link: http://moodle.org/

A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of relations, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, trade, web links,

When I talk to others regarding eLearning they are:

• Either afraid of it or puzzled by it,

• They seem to either embrace it or rationalize rejecting it,

• Most try to compare it to the past with no picture of the future.

The more I think about what elearning has become and its acceptance in the marketplace and in institutions, it takes on the presence of this quiet "Knowledge Worker's Guardian Angel".