• FINDABILITY: This website is about how superior open educational resources become findable online.

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    More about Findability

    As 21st century education adapts to its online future, the edu sector is learning to work under the network laws that make the best study knowledge findable. Findability emerges naturally from educational resources embedded in a network when these 7 elements are present.

    Digital - Educational materials that are printed are outside of the digital online commons where findability arises.

    Unbundled - Findability works bests with the smallest pieces of content, so bundles like curricula, courses, and PDFs stifle findabiity.

    Open - To be findable, content must be open in the one Web global commons, with no barriers of cost, subscription, or copyright.

    SEOed - Search Engine Optimization with keywords and linking attracts search engine spiders and boosts rankings on search engine results pages.

    Juiced - Webpages getting higher search engine page ranks from links by educators judging their content as superior.

    Networked - Nodes of learning content are syndicated (RSS), virally spread, and connected into social networks.

    Mobilized - Nodes of learning content are becoming findable to millions, and potentially billions, of new learners by being optimized for mobile phones.

    The learn nodes posted on this blog are models that show how you can increase findabiity for open educational resources.

  • The LEARN NODE is a tool for creating findability

    The illustration below shows a learn node, which you can use as an educator to make webpages more findable. The top little circles illustrate links out to content nodes related to the subject of the large circle. Bottom left, experts connect to the node affirming its quality - giving it juice. Bottom right, a student connects to the node to learn the subject of its content.

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    Blog posts are used to make learn nodes on this website. Click here for a primer on using a blog post to make a learn node. Any webpage with its own url can be used as a learn node.

    Visit GoldenSwamp.com for discussions of the way learning is emerging in the 21st century.

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    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Opening Educational Resources (OER)

Excerpt from an article by Judy Breck: “When Educational Resources Are Open,” Educational Technology magazine Nov-Dec 2007, p. 50.

Everything Is Miscellaneous describes how resources can now be organized in new ways because the digital world frees them from physical limitations and the paucity of identifying data that can be offered about them in catalogs. In the digital world, because everything is broken into the smallest parts and scattered randomly, the power of open is unleashed. It is being open in the Internet that allows any piece to connect to any other piece. . . .

Knowing that everything is miscellaneous is a bottom-line concept for understanding education’s intertwingled future. The new digital world is, as I call my blog, a golden swamp. All sorts of treasures can be found in the open digital swamp because the possibilities for organisms of information and ideas to develop and surface are nearly infinite. Everything in this new digital world can be miscellaneous because the venue is open. Anything can connect to anything else: pieces are not isolated in racks of bottles like a shelf of school curricula, texts, and standards where ideas in one bottle cannot connect freely to ideas in another.

*David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous. Times Books, 2007, p. 120.