For those interested in non-formal learning, you may want to take a look at BigMarker, a web ‘hub’ for those wanting to teach or learn in an informal way – or for those who want to add a live conferencing session to a formal course. The company is reaching out to career coaches and experts. They are looking for more professionals willing to donate their time and knowledge to help people find employment.

Its web site states:
BigMarker is a free web conferencing community. Through our platform, you can reconnect with your family in Rio; manage your employees in Madagascar; organize your non-profit’s resources to Ottawa; teach a virtual class from Tulsa to students all over Thailand; foster a support group for cancer survivors from France to the Falkland Islands. With unlimited access to live events, there are endless opportunities for you, your community, organization, business, classroom, and social network to grow.
Technically, the functions are similar to Adobe Connect or Blackboard Collaborate, although it does allow group video conferencing for up to 10 people at a time.

However, the main advantage (apart from being free, like Skype) is that you can make the conference either private or public, and can use the site to promote or find learning modules.

As the site is new and, like all cloud computing these days, still being developed and expanded, it has a limited but reasonable number of modules (about 300) available at the moment, although the ones I looked at seem to have well qualified instructors… Read more.

Source: Tonybates.ca

Previous knowledge is required: please make sure that you understand the basic concepts of Free Software. You will find some introductory documents and videos in the classroom where the Guest Lecture will take place.

Learn about the basic concepts and join the Guest Lecture provided by Richard M. Stallman from April 1st onwards:
http://campus.ftacademy.org/course/view.php?id=36

Source: Press Release

As such, we thought we’d alert you to some of the following resources for getting free Kindle books on your new device (as well as your smartphone and desktop). For all but the Kindle Store, you’ll need to transfer the books manually using a computer and USB cable.

1. Project Gutenberg: 33,000 free e-books, including all of the classics, available in Kindle, HTML and simple text formats.

2. Google E-Bookstore: The free section is filled with thousands of free, scanned copies of books, available in Kindle-friendly PDF formats.

3. Internet Archive: Millions of primarily rare, out-of-print works in multiple languages and formats (including Kindle), especially useful for academic work.

4. Open Library: 20 million user-contributed items in multiple editions and formats (including Kindle).

5. ManyBooks.net: Nearly 30,000 titles, many of which have been pulled from Project Gutenberg. Has a good collection of little-known Creative Commons works.

6. LibriVox: Thousands of free audiobooks.

Source: Mashable.com

Remember that you can register for any course of the programme until one week before the term starts. This means that you have time until January 3rd to register for these courses:

• The concepts of Free Software and Open Standards.
• Basic GNU/Linux.
• Free Software Utilities.
• Network Technologies.
• Web applications development.
• Software development.
• Deployment of Free Software and Case Studies

Don’t leave it for the last minute! Register now at https://ftacademy.org/registration-form

Having trouble choosing only a couple of courses? Keep in mind that many of them are also offered later in the year:

http://ftacademy.org/courses/programme

If you’re still in doubt, contact us at registrations@ftacademy.org and we’ll help you create your own programme!

Source: Press Release

The site aims to explain the various scientific subjects of mathematics, physics, chemistry and others in a simplified and easy to understand manner, all in the form of short video clips that do not exceed 15 minutes, that should be enough to simply deliver the information and get it across to the learners.

The goal of the site is to build and provide an extensive library of tutorial videos that cover hundreds of explanations and lessons in various fields of science; this is to facilitate access to information and clearly explain all these topics to a large number of people from around the Arab world, whatever their financial situation is or how advanced the educational system is in their countries.

The site also gives subscribed users the ability to comment on the lessons and post their questions on the topics covered in the lesson.

The user interface is very easy, providing a highlighted video and beneath it all the newly added lessons; that is followed by the different sections available on the site with links to go in and view the classes beneath them.

As mentioned above, Areeb School is a non-profit project, so the site and the provided lessons are free of charge. Subscriptions to the site are also free for anyone.

The service relies on Khan Academy for the preparation of educational material in the form of videos and explanations on the site.

The site is available in Arabic only and is built and managed by the Saudi based Remal IT, a web services and applications company that was founded in 2005, and owns and operates a network of social networking sites and Internet applications.

Source: Startuparabia.com

P2PU is also excited to announce the launch of the P2PU School of Webcraft, run in conjunction with the Mozilla Foundation. The School of Webcraft is a powerful new way to learn open, standards based web development in a collaborative environment. School of Webcraft courses include Beginning Python Webservices and HTML5.

All classes are globally accessible, free, and powered entirely by learners, mentors and contributors with the goal of creating  a vibrant, peer-led system that helps people around the world easy access to build careers on open web technology.

The P2PU community is growing and excited to have these new courses and their organizers on board.

Since the last round of courses, a few changes have taken place at P2PU, most noticeably on the P2PU site which has seen a major overhaul, and is simpler and easier to use than ever before. However, the nature of the P2PU community remains the same, and all community generated content is open and shareable under CC BY-SA.

The P2PU community consists of a diverse group of people. They are writers, teachers, designers, doctoral and alternative grad students, artists, copyright specialists, scientists, and blues guitar players. Above all, they are learners–peers working together to learn from each other.

Sign-ups for all courses are available at http://p2pu.org/course/list. Deadlines for sign-ups are 8th September 2010. The courses will run until October 27th. Each course application may require additional information.

Source: blogs.p2pu.org

This institution allows people to publish their work and then makes it accessible to a broader, world-wide audience. In fact, its efficiency consists in increasing the visibility and the impact of the published pieces as it serves to permit them to reach more readers than ever before and extends the books chapters with video, audio, PPT and PDFs. As a result, it creates a solid basis for the advancement of the publishers’ academic career by reinforcing the usage and the scientific impact of the works. Furthermore, by publishing through Sciyo, every one can guarantee the creation of a rich central point for his work since it enables the start of a discussion forum with one’s audience so long with connecting with colleagues from all over the world and starting new collaborations. Thus it is worth saying that with Sciyo, you can “share your knowledge with the world”.

Content published in Sciyo journals and books is open access, which is an all-around enhancer of scientific climate. That is to say it provides free access to superior academic literature in Science and Technology. Indeed, any one is free to read, print, download and share the content or part of it as long as the original author(s) and source are correctly credited. This leading organization ignites collaboration between scientists and thus creates a richer and more effective science. For instance, it enables wider dissemination of science and faster communication of research findings. Consequently, it exposes the targets to latest research developments, also it accelerates scientific breakthroughs.

The company is well known of its efficiency through the good service it provides on its web-site. The staff deals with the authors as their partners, noticing that “Everything we do is about supporting them – helping them in their quest for academic goals and professional growth, as well as building bridges towards new audiences where their work won’t go unnoticed”. In addition, it works hard to provide high quality tools and infrastructure facilitating science communication. Indeed, it affords first-class peer reviewed literature compliant with the highest standards of scientific publishing. Therefore, it makes the work effective and appropriate to a profuse extend in every way.

The transparency and openness features of the institute play a crucial role in facilitating advancement in research, contributing to the progress of science and exploiting the totality of human potential, which are the intended goals of this initiative.

In conclusion, Sciyo.com is a fast-growing open access scientific publisher, enabling barrier-free access to the latest research developments, knowledge and ideas within the field of Science and Technology.

The Festival will take place on the 4^th and 5^th of November, 2010 in Barcelona, with an opening keynote and reception on the evening of the 3^rd of November. Its goal is to assemble all the puzzle pieces needed to ideas like educational resources, open content licenses and so on, in order to avoid thorough and effective information to people. Contentment is guaranteed as there will not be a waste of time during the festival to look for the necessary tools. Mozilla declared “we have all these puzzle pieces in our hands already. We just need the right people to get into a room and use them.” For instance, it will display concepts and projects making connections between learning, freedom and the web dealing with topics like:

• A secure ‘data backpack’ where students control their own learning materials and credentials.
• Libraries transformed into digital garages where kids learn to make, do and create with an agile, hacker attitude.
• Massively scaled apprenticeship, we people learn by diving into the world of open source master craftspeople.
• Hackerspaces where people teach each other about everything from robots to lasers to knitting.
• Alternative accreditation models based on web and open source peer review techniques.

An important number of persons and organizations are invited. Absolutely, they are leaders in their domain such as Software developers, Creative Commoners and the list is long.  As follows, performance is assured.

Hereafter, the event in question is the first annual Drumbeat Festival which is a collection of practical projects and local events that gather smart, creative people around big ideas that improve the openness of the Web. It enhances the belief hold by Mozilla that “everyone has a role in keeping the web open and vibrant”. It is being organized in partnership with Creative Commons, MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Participation is accessible by sending e-mail to: drumbeat-events@mozilla.org.

Navigating through the Net to get educational information is becoming more and more popular, especially that the amount of high quality instructional content is rising enormously online and is available for free. Forward, achieving a world class education appears to be possible with the condition that no barriers stand confronts it. That is the idea behind the attempt of this institution to identify these obstructions and dismiss them. Thereafter, it looks forward to find innovative ways to use technology in order to increase the ease of learning.

With the intention to find new ways to make learning more accessible for every one, the company approaches a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will allow internet users around the world to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world leading scholars. Notably, it collects the interventions of the experts of the most appropriate American universities. That is the strategy used by the organization to achieve its aim to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing substance increasingly valuable.

Succeeding to help people around the globe to use Internet to extend high-quality tutorial opportunities through providing free access to online course, Academic Earth helps people to have access to courses of the most highly-respected universities such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford.

Beyond; it works to guarantee an up-to-date content of e-learning ensuring, thus, convenience to its targets.  As a matter of fact, it pulls free lectures from Princeton, MIT and so on into one attractive and easy to navigate site with a clear intuitive interface.  Actually, the videos can be downloaded and saved to favorites, so they are enjoyed at any time. Also, they are available through a license authorizing non-commercial exploitation.  Noticeably, their quality is very good and the video driver can be embedded toward another site. Furthermore, it is an open web site considering that any one can watch the videos even if he does not have an Academic Earth Account. Farther, users can subscribe by RSS to the subjects that interest them particularly to be informed of the new conferences and available courses.

Conclusively, Academic Earth is succeeding to bring together the best attainable content across many subjects and distribute it in an engaging and useful way to learners worldwide. By these means, it assists them to attain the level of education acknowledged by all the world institutes.

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