On Blogging Australia

There are a variety of ways that blogs are used in education - both formally and informally. Then there is a mixture of the two - OpenCourseWare is a project that MIT started to share courseware for open education - and now OpenCourseWare is being presented via blogs.

Wikipedia describes OpenCourseWare as:

MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, free and openly available to anyone, anywhere, by the end of the year 2007. MIT OpenCourseWare can be considered as a large-scale, web-based publication of MIT course materials. The project was announced in October 2002. This project is jointly funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT. The initiative has encouraged a number of other institutions to make their course materials available as open educational resources.

In Republishing OCW, David Wiley from Utah State University talks about WordPress as a delivery platform for OpenCourseWare. David has an OpenCourseWare course on Blogs, Wikis and New Media that he has released on a WordPress.com blog.

I like the idea of training being delivered via blogs - the technology is accessible and it is everywhere, WordPress.com blogs are free and mostly adequate to the task, and people can relate to blogs as an information delivery platform.

One of the ebooks that my father wanted to see online as a course was The Master Key, Charles Haanel’s classic work of personal development. I’ve set the blog up with the About page as the default - Haanel’s instruction that the lesson material be considered in order is important, and I wanted to emphasise this. There is still a sequential blog that talks about the course and personal development issues that I’ve come across, but the main part of The Master Key are the lessons themselves.

I’ve used blog courses myself - Yaro Starak’s excellent Blog Mastermind course taught me a lot about blogging and about the importance of community. While Yaro’s course is currently full, you can join the mailing list to be notified about the next course.

Do you know of anybody that is running a course from their blog that would help people learn about blogging? If so, leave a comment here and I’ll publish a follow-on roundup post of online blogging courses.