Overview
There’s been a bit of buzz recently on more ed tech blogs than I think I can refer to about using blogs as a delivery host for opencourseware as PLE-inspired learning content. This branches off of that thought by demonstrating a very quick-and-dirty method of targetting chunks of content from various sources in order to remix a customized online “lesson”.
In short, this is a tutorial-in-lieu-of-a-lousy-conference-presentation for those who are unfamiliar with the tools or need orientation to an approach.
Preparation
You’ll need:
- A Google account set up for Google Notebook and Google Docs & Spreadsheets
- Mozilla Firefox Web browser with the Google Notebook add-on
- A collection of topic-related Web pages or documents from which to remix
- A basic outline of the lesson to be composed/remixed (pref. with objectives)
I expect that this process can also be done with Zoho using the Zoho Notebook Helper add-on for Firefox, however I’ve not worked through this process myself.
The importance of having the last element, an outline of the lesson, should not be underestimated. The hardest part of this task is staying focused and organized. I tend to take a kitchen-sink approach, throwing everything together and sorting it out later, but having a clear outline of what you want your lesson to include from the beginning sets up a checklist of sorts from which you can search and order information.
As for information sources themselves, there are an increasing number of Creative Commons-licensed or public domain materials available on the Web that can be remixed into an online lesson. Some of these are materials specifically authored for education (e.g. MIT OpenCourseWare, Open Yale Courses, UK Open University’s OpenLearn), others are collaboratively authored repositories (e.g. Wikipedia), and some are already in the publich domain (e.g. Project Gutenberg. Of course, copyrighted materials can be quoted and cited within reason, and Google Notebook helps you preserve source information for citations.
Quick Tutorial
Disclaimer: the sources and excerpts used in this example are merely for demonstration purposes and should not be reflective of a well-remixed or structurally complete lesson!
First, create a new Google Notebook for the lesson with title.
Using your lesson outline, seek out your information sources on the Web. Select a passage and right-click to activate the Firefox Google Notebook Add-on. Choose Note this (Google Notebook). This passage is now an excerpt copied into your Notebook. You’ll notice that the Google Notebook Add-on opens a preview window in the lower-right-hand corner of your screen. You can type your own commentary or notes here to include with the quoted passage.
Repeat this for all your information sources on the Web, selecting passages you wish to use as an excerpt in the lesson, right-clicking, and choosing Note this (Google Notebook).
Do the same for sources that you may wish to condense, rewrite, summarize, or paraphrase information from. You’ll be able to edit your Notebook in a minute. Because there’s so much information out there, it’s fine to collect more than you need. At the same time, using a lesson outline from the beginning will help you stay focused and not stray from your teaching objectives.
Don’t worry about noting sources out-of-order; Google Notebook will let you re-arrange your sources.
When you’ve completed your grab of sources, simply click Open Full Page from the Google Notebook add-on. This will open up your Google Notebook with all quotations. Each excerpts is preceded by the title of the Web page from which it came, and a hyperlink to the Web site for citation purposes.
You can type directly in the notebook to draft introductions, conclusions, additional information, or segways from one piece of information to another. Again, having a solid lesson outline here is very useful.
By mousing-over the left-side of source excerpts, you’ll find that you can left-click and drag excerpts above or below other excerpts or text sections that you’ve written. This makes it easy to rearrange the excerpts to match your lesson outline.
Once you’ve finished your rough edit of your lesson, you’ll need to send the saved Notebook to Google Docs for finish editing and publishing to your blog. Under Tools on the top-right, choose Export to Google Docs.
While Google Notebook is the best place to perform basic structural edits to your document because of the drag-n-drop feature, Google Docs have slightly more sophisticated formatting features to choose from for your finish edits. After you’ve completed editing and formatting your lesson in Google Docs, click the Publish tab to send this to your blog.
In the Publish tab you’ll need to click change your blog site settings and work through the few form fields to point to your own blog for publishing (e.g. blog hosting server, username, password, blog title). Click Test before finishing by clicking OK.
An alert will ask you to confirm publishing. Note that after you’ve published, you can in fact make edits to your Google Doc and republish to your blog, overwriting the original blog post using nearly the same process we just did.
After publishing, go to your blog and review your re-mixed lesson! Remember, you can edit your Google Doc and republish at any time, however if you want to add to your lesson starting from Google Notebook you are better off deleting the original blog post and Google Doc and re-exporting from step 9. Using the Firefox add in for this process preserves text, images, and hyperlinks from the source all the way to the published blog, however I’ve not had any luck preserving embedded video files.
OK, this creates an admittedly rough looking “lesson”, but it’s a fast method of remixing open content, especially if one has a good outline and is familiar with what’s available.
One idea that I haven’t played with is using Google Desktop with Notebook to grab pieces from files on my local computer. I’ve actually never used Desktop, but it’s been suggested that this would be possible.
