Hi folks I have learned since joining Wikieducator that there really is no typical content or approach to OER. The projects are as strange and idiosyncratic as the individuals dreaming them up. And yet they find homes here and based on page visit data, they are at least seen by others. The page on maintaining chainsaws has not been modified since 2009...and has received more than 20k visits. My old Biology in Elementary Schools page was visited nearly 80k times....once the course ended I considered whether I should scrap it; I should not!
A bit more obscure, my streams project wiki is the foundation for an iPhone/Android app and changes made on Wikieducator are (mystically) reflected in the phone in my pocket. I presented this at an international conference last week and it was rather cool to see all the hands go into pockets to download as soon as I provided the search terms. Wikieducator content instantly transmitted into the hands of the entomologist specialists who will use it. I don't believe that the phone activity is captured in the 4 or 5 K visit count. Falling under the category of "truly strange" perhaps, is a collection of skulls my students have built called 'digital coyote' which we started to provide calibrated coyote skull images from diverse geographical locations for educational usage. The idea was to share a fairly scarce resource (seriously, how many teachers have 100+ coyote skulls for their students to measure). We did that and we published a teaching article about it; teachers and students can measure and compare skulls from…Alaska and Texas for example. But….we realized that the resource we had built was of sufficient quality to also serve as a model for the research community. Three undergraduate student researchers and I have just published that paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325214710_Use_of_Point-and-Shoot_Photography_to_Compare_Regional_Differences_in_Canis_latrans_Coyote_Skull_Size This research is in large part based on OER content hosted by Wikieducator in turn based on images we placed in Wikimedia Commons , but this particular paper is non-educational and not a candidate for the Eric platform….so we shared it instead on Researchgate. Sooo....I don't yet know where my next OER adventure will take me but in the meantime, I'd like to express a heartfelt thanks to the OER community for the logistical and technical support in encouraging this sort of strange and wonderful collaboration. Sincerely Declan -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to wikieducator+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
