Glad Syttende Mai alle sammen!

I'm back, with new resolve to log the resources I come across. I'd love to get a rating system going, but one thing at a time, right? I've become enamoured of Open Course Ware (OCW) and Open Course Resources (OCRs) in the past few months. I'm still not sure how to make practical use of them just yet, but they have a lot of potential.

Open Course Ware Consortium is one group working on getting the ball rolling.

Open Learning Initiative seems like they have actually set up a platform for delivering open courses and advertises their courses to be based on research which excites me a little further. I can actually see how I might sign up and use their materials if I were teaching, say, Biology. The big problem thus far is they don't have any ESL courses yet. They are also utilizing lots of other OCRs such as Merlot and The Realia Project that I didn't know were related to language learning.

What got me all excited about this is an announcement I came across on the Creative Commons webstie about the new TAACCCT Federal Grant Program. I'm proud that Washington State Community and Technical Colleges are the fore-runners in developing best practices and professional development around the use of OCW and OCRs. I went to Creative Commons originally to generate a license for some handouts I want to share around amongst some colleagues. I'm trying to get better at smaking a license on each thing I create with the hope that others will be encouraged not only to share my materials/adapt them to their needs, but to put licenses on their work as well. I'm headed to the CC Choose a License page next!