edna.edu.au

Finding Free Stuff

This is a list of favourite starter resources for the Finding Free Stuff hands-on workshop

National Library Australia Prototype
Explore Australian library collections and worldwide online sources through prototype service. Bookmark a url for bibliographic records and include library location in comment

edna curriculum resources
Use the edna curriculum search to find learning resources across the national key learning areas. Not all resources have open licences

Scootle (The Le@rning Federation)
Digital content for Australian schools K-10 including curriculum related learning objects and images. TLF licensed resources are free for Australian schools but may only be republished within the school. Login required. Check

flickrCC
Search easily for photos on flickr that are released under the Creative Commons license. Built in editing options and attribution

Wikimedia Commons
Freely licensed photographs, diagrams, animations, music, spoken text, video clips, and media

Open Education Resources (OER)
OER are digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research.
Check the Smartcopying website for further details

Handout for this workshop [313K Word doc]

Tags: information literacy oer resources ipshaa tl search
Posted at 11:45PM Jun 18, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

Open licensing

As I started work on documenting the users who would use the proposed edna open licence search I received an invitation to an interesting looking presentation description from IGI Global's presentation at ALA Midwinter.

Walking the Usage Tightrope in a Digital World: Publishers and Librarians Explore the Delicate Balancing Act of E-Content Usability

In recent years librarians have grown increasingly concerned with digital rights management tools used by vendors of licensed scholarly resources such as e-journals and e-books. Although some restrictions are necessary to protect the academic material, how will protection measures affect student and faculty use? This showcase will explore the balancing act concerning use restrictions through discussion between librarians and publishers on soft restrictions, hard restrictions, user views, and database analysis.

 The focus on usability is a very good idea. The complexity of copyright laws combined with the problems of authentication and single sign on make this too hard, even for those academics who want to try and do the right thing.

Tags: resources copyright e-content digital rights
Posted at 12:00PM Jan 17, 2009 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]

Statistical literacy

"Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write."
Samuel S. Wilks (1906-64) paraphrasing H. G. Wells (1866-1946)

A SLASA professional development event this evening presented by Pam from the Australian Bureau of Statistics was a great idea. Sure we could have stayed at home and spent a couple of hours exploring the ABS website ourselves, but participants agreed that hearing it from someone who lives and breathes the service can enthuse and inform.

Things I learned:

• Statistical literacy is a key driver. ABS is consulting on defining this concept and describing statistical competencies.
• The ABS is moving from model of data dissemination to data communication.
  
• Looking for an overview of statistics available about education?
  Education and Training Statistics National Centre
• It's all OPEN and FREE - unless you need a complex dataset that takes the  helpdesk longer than 5 minutes to produce
• Data visualisation features like the animated population pyramid require downloadable SVG viewer
• The 2009 Australian Year Book will not be published in hard copy due to budget cuts. You can email the ABS to register an opinion about this.
• Census@School 2008 data collection finishes on 4 July. Check out the sample questionnaire
  
• CPI is the single most requested figure
• At the time of typing this, the Australian Population clock stood at
  21,329,123

The ABS site produces ridiculously long urls - thank goodness for the edna url shortening service: http://url.edna.edu.au 

Look for interface changes from 4 July 2008, and a labs area called Beta works.

Tags: statistics resources digital literacies multiliteracies
Posted at 11:43PM Jun 16, 2008 by Pru Mitchell  |  Comments[0]