EduGlu Sandbox

There have been a couple of notable resources that have crossed my screen lately that merit a shout-out:

• The first drafts of the ongoing OER Handbook have been posted on the ultra-yummy WikiEducator site. If you are wanting to be more active in the open education space there are heaps of useful pieces on the creation, sharing and reuse of open educational resources.

• Via George Siemens, this Wikibook on Web 2.0 and Emerging Learning Technologies, assembled by by Curt Bonk and a global cast of collaborators, looks most useful.

Now, since both of these resources are openly licensed, and authored on the MediaWiki platform, I can’t resist noting that the Wiki Inc. plugin (blogged by Jim Groom here) would allow any WordPress publisher to incorporate these pages with a simple copy-paste of a URL.

And when the source is updated, your reuse of it will be updated as well.

For example, here’s the Adapt page for the OER Handbook, and the Digital Divide chapter of the Emerging Technologies Wikibook over on UMWBlogs, which as previously noted is making fine use of this approach to manage its WordPress user support documentation.

Now, are those your brains on the floor, or did I just blow your mind? In all seriousness, this sort of thing may seem simplistic given some of the flashier technology buzzing across our screens these days, but to me the combo of easy-as-possible open content authoring mixed with simple dynamic reuse (all within a context of free open source tools) is a broad approach with significance well beyond the toolset.