As the coauthor (with Susan Dean) of a formally for-profit and now open (i.e., free on the web) textbook, "Collaborative Statistics," this author has received many questions about open educational resources (OER), which can be summarized as follows: (1) What are OER?; (2) Why do you support, actively promote, and speak about OER?; (3) If a book is…

This paper presents the open learning initiatives of the Science Education Institute of the Department of Science and Technology to overcome certain barriers, such as enabling access, cost of replication, timely feedback, monitoring and continuous improvement of learning modules. Using an open-education model, like MIT's (Massachusetts Institute…

Exploring the Solar System in the elementary school curriculum has traditionally involved activities, such as building scale models, to help students visualize the vastness of space and the relative size of the planets and their orbits. Today, numerous websites provide a wealth of information about the sun and the planets, combining text, photos,…

In various research areas, the availability of open datasets is considered as key for research and application purposes. These datasets are used as benchmarks to develop new algorithms and to compare them to other algorithms in given settings. Finding such available datasets for experimentation can be a challenging task in technology enhanced…

This article focuses on the potential of free tools, particularly inquiry tools for influencing participation in twenty-first-century learning in science, as well as influencing the development of communities around tools. Two examples are presented: one on the development of an open source tool for structured inquiry learning that can bridge the…

In 2004 "Technology, Pedagogy and Education" published a review of literature which framed current understandings of pedagogy and the implications for the use of ICT in learning and teaching in formal educational settings. This article revisits the topic in the light of more recent developments in understandings of pedagogy. It offers…

This article describes an outreach program to broaden participation in computing to include more students with visual impairments. The precollege workshops target students in grades 7-12 and engage students with robotics programming. The use of robotics at the precollege level has become popular in part due to the availability of Lego Mindstorm…

The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA)--the principal association representing the technology leadership in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs--presents its eighth annual report on select, national, educational technology activities. This…