Resource: Global Dimension Website

This site offers free access to a number of educational resources on global issues. 

The Global Dimension Website is managed by DEA, a UK education charity that promotes global learning. As well as the site editor, there are a number of editorial and curriculum advisors, bringing a wide range of experience in teaching and supporting the global dimension in schools(…..)

This website is a guide to books, films, posters and web resources which support global, intercultural and environmental understanding for all age groups and subjects.

From climate change to poverty, water to fair trade, you can find a huge range of teaching resources and background material(…..)

You can browse through the teaching resources database from any page of the site by choosing the curriculum subject, type of background material or topic .

(From Global Dimension )

Link: Global Dimension Website

 

Resource: Harvey Project - nteractive, dynamic human physiology course materials on the Web

Harvey Project is an international collaboration of educators, researchers, physicians, students, programmers, instructional designers and graphic artists working together to build interactive, dynamic human physiology course materials on the Web.

Founded in 1998, the Harvey Project has over a hundred participants in nearly twenty countries. It has received funding from the US National Science Foundation . The Harvey Project has developed over forty learning objects, mostly Java simulations and Flash(tm) animations . Check out some of our learning materials (RLAs) and please join us if you’re interested in helping out.

Link:Harvey Project

 

Resource: The UNESCO Portal on Higher Education Institutions

From UNESCO:

This portal offers access to on-line information on higher education institutions recognized or otherwise sanctioned by competent authorities in participating countries.

It provides students, employers and other interested parties with access to authoritative and up-to-date information on the status of higher education institutions and quality assurance in these countries.

Currently, information can be accessed on the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Norway, United Kingdom, and the United States of America. In the next stage of the project, the number of countries covered will be expanded.

The country information on this portal is managed and updated by relevant authorities in participating countries. More information on the national processes for recognizing or otherwise sanctioning institutions is available on the country pages.

Users are encouraged to consult several sources of information before making important decisions regarding matters such as the choice of an institution, course of study or the status of qualifications. Individuals wishing to have their qualifications recognized for work or further study are advised to consult the competent authorities of the country in which they are seeking to have their qualifications recognised. It is also important to note that some institutions not on the national lists may offer quality programmes. Users are encouraged to contact the national contact point(s) for each country, if necessary, for further information.

Link here

 

Resourcer:Worldmapper

Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest. There are now nearly 600 maps. Maps 1-366 are also available as PDF posters. Use the menu above to find a map of interest.

An example is the following map on Tertiary Education Spending Growth (1990-2001).

The territory size shows the proportion in spending in tertiary education between 1990 -2001.

The site informs that:

There have been spending increases in tertiary education in 135 of the 200 territories in the world, between 1990 and 2001. North America and Southern Asia are the only regions where there has been a spending increase in every territory. In Eastern Asia there has been a spending increase in every territory except for Mongolia. In Central Africa there has been a spending increase in every territory except for Burundi.

The size of spending increases varies hugely between places. Increases in spending per person in North America and Western Europe are over 4 times those in the next highest regions of Eastern Europe and Japan.

 

Audio/Video: Bruno Latour

A very complete list of Bruno Latour Audio/Video lectures available online.

From ANTHEM:

• Listen to audio: “The Tarde/Durkheim Debate” with Bruno Karsenti as Emile Durkheim, Bruno Latour as Gabriel Tarde, and Simon Schaffer as the Dean, at the Tarde/Durkheim: Trajectories of the Social Conference at Cambridge University, 14 March 2008
• Listen to audio: “The Harman Review: Bruno Latour’s Empirical Metaphysics,” a symposium with Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Lucas Introna and Noortje Marres, chaired by Edgar Whitley, at ISIG, London School of Economics and Political Science, 5 February 2008
• Listen to MP3: “Another European Tradition: traceability of the social and the vindication of Gabriel Tarde,” lecture by Bruno Latour, European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, 4 February 2008
• Listen to RealPlayer Audio: “Episode 5 - Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour,” How to Think About Science, CBC Radio, 12 December 2007
• Listen to audio: “Is there a cosmopolitically correct design?” Manchester Architecture Research Centre, University of Manchester, 5 October 2007
• Watch the video or listen to MP3: “From Object to Things: How to Represent the Parliament of Nature?” A lecture by Bruno Latour, The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, UC Berkeley’s Center for New Media, 17 October 2005
• Watch the video: “Nature Space Society” by Bruno Latour, with Olafur Eliasson, Doreen Massey and Dominic Willsdon at the Tate, London, 19 April 2005
• Watch the video: Bruno Latour on the Issue Ticker, at “Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy.” Exhibition. ZKM_Museum for Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany, March 2005

• Watch the video: “Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy.” Exhibition. Opening speech by Bruno Latour, ZKM_Museum for Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany, 19 March 2005
• Watch the video: “Assembly or Assemblage? Politics and Polytechnics.” A lecture by Bruno Latour, Politecnico di Milano, 17 November 2003
• Listen to RealPlayer Audio: “Why has the Critical Spirit Run Out of Steam?” A lecture by Bruno Latour, Stanford Humanities Centre, 7 April 2003
• Watch the video: “What is Iconoclash?” A lecture by Bruno Latour given at the symposium “Image Wars and Image Floods,”12 July 2002
• Watch Flash presentation: “Iconoclash” by Bruno Latour given at CCA Kitakyushu, 1 July 2002

 

Resource: The Free Software Directory

The Free Software Directory is a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The website catalogs useful free software that runs under free operating systems — particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants. Licenses are verified for each and every program listed in this directory. Link: http://directory.fsf.org/

 

Resources: Collection of Free Learning Tools

Zaid Ali Alsagoff offers a very complete list of free learning tools for professional development:

A Free Learning Tool for Every Learning Problem?

Let’s explore the idea that there is at least one excellent free learning tool for every learning problem (or issue)!

I want a FREE:

1. Easy-to-use and secure Internet browser? Firefox
2. e-Mail system? Gmail
3. Social bookmarking tool? del.icio.us
4. Online RSS reader? Google Reader
5. Online Calendar? Google Calendar
6. Learning Management System (LMS)? Easy, Moodle
7. Hosted LMS? Here are SEVEN!
8. Learning Activity Management System? LAMS
9. Collaboration tool? Connect with Ning
10. Social Networking tool? Tricky one! Facebook
11. Content authoring tool? How about two? eXe & CourseLab
12. Screencasting (recording) tool? Wink
13. Hosted screencasting tool? Jing
14. Audio recording tool? Audacity
15. Tool to host my audio recordings? Odeo
16. Virtual Classroom? DimDim
17. Hosted Virtual Classroom? WiZiQ
18. Videoconferencing chat service? Vawkr
19. Tool to make calls from my computer? Skype
20. Online Quiz tool? ClassMarker
21. Online polling tool with a bit of fizzle? Polldaddy
22. Online survey tool? Click here to choose!
23. Tool to broadcast myself to the world? USTREAM
24. Online suite of office tools? Google Docs
25. Wiki tool? PBwiki
26. Blogging tool? WordPress! Why aren’t you using WordPress? Good Question!
27. Microblogging tool? Twitter
28. Tool to share my slides? Too easy man! SlideShare
29. Tool to share my videos? Come on! YouTube
30. Tool to download videos from any video sharing site (YouTube, Metacafe, etc.)? ClipNabber
31. Tool to share my pictures? Are you joking! Flickr
32. Tool to create flowcharts, diagrams, technical drawings? Gliffy
33. Tool to create cool personalized images? Custom Sign Generator Widgets
34. Tool to create comics and cartoons? ToonDoo
35. Image Resizer? Dosize
36. Metasearch engine with visual display interfaces? What! Here is KartOO!
37. Watermarking tool? uMark
38. Screen Color Picker? ColorSchemer
39. Tool to make screenshots from different browsers with one click? Browsershots
40. File hosting solution that allows me to share files up to 250MB each? FileCrunch
41. Online visual dictionary and thesaurus? Visuwords
42. Mindmapping tool?FreeMind
43. Interactive 3D business simulator? INNOV8
44. Tool to create Flash games (templates)? ClassTools.net
45. Self-publishing tool (books, papers, articles, etc)? Scribd
46. Tool to improve my typing skills? Peter’s Online Typing Course
47. Gaming tool to help me learn ICT? ReviseICT.co.uk
48. Tool to highlight text in a webpage? The Awesome Highlighter
49. Tool to aggregate all my resources, mail, RSS feeds, etc, in one place? iGoogle
50. Site to make you shut up? About time! Here we go:

25 (must-have free) Tools: Professional Development Programme (Jane Knight)

In short, for every learning problem (or issue) we have today, there is probably a free tool out there that enables us to solve it. If not, I am pretty sure some genius out there is constructing it right now. If no one is doing it, perhaps we can do it.

Another challenge is to integrate all our learning tools efficiently and effectively into our learning spaces. On the positive note, more and more tools are creating integration modules to widely used systems like Moodle and Facebook, so it might not be so difficult after all. Also, with OpenID we can increasingly login to all our favorite websites without much hassle. Single-login to all our learning tools! Now that is something we all can appreciate! Remember one password! Tough one!

 

Resource:FreeTechBooks.com

FreeTechBooks.com lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet.

Link: http://www.freetechbooks.com/

 

Resources: Recolecta_ portal to Spanish OA

From Open Access News by Gavin Baker, April 10, 2008:

Recolecta is a new national portal to OA publications from Spain. From the DRIVER announcement, dated March 2008:

Recolecta is the national portal to Spanish open access scientific publications. The project is a joint collaboration between REBIUN (Network of academic and research libraries of Spain) and FECYT (Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology) to create a national search service of open access scientific publications, to stimulate open access initiatives in Spain, to stimulate and coordinate the creation of a national infrastructure of institutional repositories and to serve as a central point of information about all questions related with Open Access and new Scholarly communication issues.

As a scientific national search service RECOLECTA will only harvest scientific documents wherever they are (open access journals, institutional repositories, disciplinary repositories) as long as they are OAI compliant. “Cultural heritage” type of documents will not be included and neither will learning objects. For the moment, most of the documents are textual and all are open access.

RECOLECTA is currently in beta phase (pending further work on the graphical design). As soon as possible an English translation will be made available similar to the Sherpa/Romeo translation which has already been completed. Other services such as statistics and a national Thesis portal are also planned.

In April the first national meeting of Spanish OAI data providers will be held. It is planned to use this meeting to create a national repository managers group to coordinate the development of the Spanish national infrastructure in a standarized way following the DRIVER guidelines. For further information please contact info@driver-support.eu.

 

The World Food Crisis

The rise of food prices is now a global crisis, think about the consequences for hundred of millions of people around the world, and the link that this have with the ethanol production policies in the US.

“The demand for agricultural products has grown, though not as a result of population growth; instead as a result of increased demand for ethanol and other biofuels, and for food that requires more agricultural acreage to produce. Today, besides people and pigs eating corn, our motor vehicles “eat” corn that has been converted into ethanol.” ( Food Prices and Malthusian Economics–Richard Posner)

Read the entire piece here.

From PSD Blog - World Bank Group by Alan Pereira , April 10 2008:

Food prices haveincreased by an estimated 40 percentglobally since 2007. This increase has had a disproportionate effect on many developing nations, where families often spend more than half their income on food. The situation is particularly troublesome in countries such as Nigeria, Vietnam and Indonesia, where the percentage of income spent on food is respectively 73, 65 and 50 percent,as reported recently by the New York Times. As a resultriots have taken placein several countries as people protest the rising food prices.

TheIMF published a brief analysislast month predicting that the social implications in Sub-Saharan Africa may be severe. It also points to long term and temporary factors ??? including rising biofuels production and droughts ??? contributing to the current increase in food prices as well as guiding policy responses.

Oh, the Bob Marley tune that inspired the title of this blog post goes on to say that a “hungry mob is an angry mob.” How is that for a policy-guiding principle?