World Association of Young Scientists

Everybody is invited to submit educational videos to WatchKnow, an educational online platform due to be launched September 20 (preview here) which strives to collect videos, lectures and animations suitable for kindergartens, primary and secondary education, much like WAYS partner wlp, the world lecture project does it for university-level education. Materials correctly submitted to WatchKnow until September 26 will be eligible for a prize draw.

It does not matter whether you created the video yourself or just found it on the web, but you should be able to provide the data relevant for copyright, and give an explanation why that video is particularly suited for educating children or teenagers. Watchknow is headed by Larry Sanger who also founded Citizendium, an educational Wikipedia offspring directed at university students, researchers and adult education.

The Open Access movement now enters education. After the well-known Budapest Open Access Initiative ( http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ ) and a number of related initiatives for for Open Access to scientific research, the Cape Town Open Education Declaration now extends this approach to education and calls for endorsement of the following (excerpts):

1. Educators and learners: First, we encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement. Participating includes: creating, using, adapting and improving open educational resources; embracing educational practices built around collaboration, discovery and the creation of knowledge; and inviting peers and colleagues to get involved. Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly.

2. Open educational resources: Second, we call on educators, authors, publishers and institutions to release their resources openly. These open educational resources should be freely shared through open
licences which facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone. Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet.

3. Open education policy: Third, governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources. Accreditation and adoption processes should give preference to open educational resources. Educational resource repositories should actively include and highlight open educational resources within their collections.

Details and the full text is available via
http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration , individuals and organizations may sign.

Berlin, Germany / Accra, Ghana. The MERLOT Africa Network (MAN) Council announces the First Africa Forum on Open Educational Resources (OER), to be held during the eLearning Africa Conference 2008 in Accra, Ghana, May 28th to 30th (cf. conference announcement at http://ways.org/en/events/2008/may/27/elearning_africa_2008 ).

MAN is a network of African higher education institutions affiliated with the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT). The organisation works collaboratively with partner institutions to conduct educational research that leads to best practices in the scholarship of teaching and learning using electronic resources. MAN also strives to enhance the usability and quality of the MERLOT e-learning repository for global access.

The First Africa Forum themes focus on global awareness of OER, universal access for all to high quality teaching and learning resources, equal access through internationalisation of resources with multi-language capabilities and research, as well as OER Global Communities of Practices. The event is organised by MAN in collaboration with eLearning Africa and the African Virtual University.

The forum targets all education professionals from all disciplines, including educational researchers, educational trainers, faculty members and teachers from the secondary and higher education sectors.

Open Educational Resources - educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use - are becoming increasingly important for education in Africa.

Because of the respect the eLearning Africa international conferences have garnered, the various MAN institutions have decided to use the gatherings as the hub for their efforts to initiate international collaboration and networking among African Higher Education Institutions. The annual events will serve as a venue for the organisation’s discussions and a locus for its activities related to dissemination of best practices and promoting the adoption of e-learning repositories to support education in Sub-Saharan Africa.

For more information on the First Africa Forum please go to http://man.merlot.org/research/MAN%20at%20eLA.html .

Branching off from religious traditions, the concept of advent calendars has by some been further developed into multiple ways of daily activities, including mental exercise (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent_calendar ). A highly praised (but discontinued) example that I know was last year's online calendar of the German embassy in London, intended to familiarize the users with traditional German musical tunes (available via
http://www.german-embassy.org.uk/advent_calendar_2006.html ).

There are also some examples featuring math problems (e.g.
http://www.calendar.algebraicsurface.net/ or http://www.mathekalender.de/ ), and this made me wonder whether the concept could be more widely used in educational settings. So if you know of any such calendars (not necessarily related to X-mas, nor to religious feasts) that feature textbook contents or problems in any discipline, please post them here, so that we can provide the whole link collection to the wider scientific community.