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10 Open Education Resources You May Not Know About (But Should)

10 Open Education Resources You May Not Know About (But Should)
This week, the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 years of OpenCourseWare. The movement to make university-level content freely and openly available online began a decade ago, when the faculty at MIT agreed to put the materials from all 2,000 of the university’s courses on the Web. With that gesture, MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch an important educational movement, one that MIT President Susan Hockfield described in her opening remarks at yesterday’s meeting as both the child of technology and of a far more ancient academic tradition: “the tradition of the global intellectual commons.” We have looked here before at how OCW has shaped education in the last ten years, but in many ways much of the content that has been posted online remains very much “Web 1.0.” But as open educational resources and OCW increase in popularity and usage, there are a number of new resources out there that do offer just that.

http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/05/05/10-open-education-resources-you-may-not-know-about-but-should/

Medical Tales Medical Tales These are true tales from the medical profession. A man comes into the ER and yells, "My wife's going to have her baby in the cab!" I grabbed my stuff, rushed out to the cab, lifted the lady's dress, and began to take off her underwear. Suddenly I noticed that there were several cabs, and I was in the wrong one. Dr. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Table of Contents American psychologist Abraham Maslow broke new ground in psychology by putting emphasis on the best people instead of broken people. Instead of studying cars in a junk yard, he moved to a new car showroom. Prior to his time, psychology was limited to the spinal reflex theory of Sechenov (1863) and Pavlov (1927), the behaviorism of Watson (1913) and Skinner (1948). While contemporary psychology at the time was wallowing in the mud of human misery, Maslow studied the values of the best men and women in history. He asked what made people like Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt exemplary?

Xerte - Open Source E-Learning Developer Tools Welcome to The Xerte Project! The Xerte Project is an initiative to provide high quality free software to educators all over the world, and to build a global community of users and developers around our tools. The project began in 2004 at the University of Nottingham, when work began to create a Flash-based runtime engine that would help the in-house multimedia development team speed up the development of interactive learning materials, and provide a platform for re-using good solutions to common problems that developers were typically solving every time they began a new project. Accessibility, in particular, can be a difficult issue for content developers, and an early goal was to provide the very best support for high levels of native accessibility. To begin with, the tools were aimed at technical users: essentially the engine provided a library of useful classes that developers could access by writing XML to structure content, and writing code to develop interactivity.

Long Overdue Fusing Plastic Bag Tutorial - StumbleUpon I realized this afternoon that I basically explain this technique to an Etsy Labs visitor at least once a day, but had never put the instructions online. So, here it is. Fusing! 5 Ways To Hack Your Brain Into Awesomeness Much of the brain is still mysterious to modern science, possibly because modern science itself is using brains to analyze it. There are probably secrets the brain simply doesn't want us to know. But by no means should that stop us from tinkering around in there, using somewhat questionable and possibly dangerous techniques to make our brains do what we want. We can't vouch for any of these, either their effectiveness or safety. All we can say is that they sound awesome, since apparently you can make your brain... #5.

Top 10 Most Important Historical Finds For as long as there have been civilizations on earth, man has been curious about his ancestors. Our need to connect to our past fuels the study of anthropology and the many important sites and artifacts uncovered through archaeology have opened our eyes to the lives of those that came before us. 10. Qin Shi Huang’s Terracotta Army A farmer in Xi’an named Yang was drilling for water when he found the Terracotta Army in 1947.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs Maslow's hierarchy of needs, represented as a pyramid with the more basic needs at the bottom[1] Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" in Psychological Review.[2] Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. His theories parallel many other theories of human developmental psychology, some of which focus on describing the stages of growth in humans. Maslow used the terms "physiological", "safety", "belongingness" and "love", "esteem", "self-actualization", and "self-transcendence" to describe the pattern that human motivations generally move through. Maslow's theory was fully expressed in his 1954 book Motivation and Personality.[5] The hierarchy remains a very popular framework in sociology research, management training[6] and secondary and higher psychology instruction. Hierarchy

Free and Open Source Authoring Tools for e-Learning As an e-Learning consultant I was always a fan of open source software. Why? The answer is simple. Wild and Woody Related Content Woodworking Basics Learn the basics of woodworking with this book — or buy it for a young friend or family member with ... "I capture the power of saplings. . . and want some chairs to dance." Study: Intelligence, cognition unaffected by heavy marijuana use By William J. Cromie Gazette Staff The new study of cognitive changes caused by heavy marijuana use has found no lasting effects 28 days after quitting. Following a month of abstinence, men and women who smoked pot at least 5,000 times in their lives performed just as well on psychological tests as people who used pot sparingly or not at all, according to a report in the latest edition of the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Top 10 Civilizations That Mysteriously Disappeared Throughout our history, most civilizations have either met a slow demise or were wiped out by natural disasters or invasion. But there are a few societies whose disappearance has scholars truly stumped: 10. The Olmec

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