Add Connexions to your Firefox search bar

Did you know that you can add Connexions to your browser's search bar? Thanks to Connexions' support of the OpenSearch standard, you can use your favorite browser (or any OpenSearch-enabled software) to scour the repository for your favorite modules and collections.

I'll demonstrate how to do this in Firefox 3.

First, browse to http://cnx.org.

Once the page loads, click on the search engine icon located next to the Firefox search bar. For most people this will be Google's "G" icon (but it depends on which search engine you are currently using).

Click on "Add Connexions" in the dropdown menu.

And there you go!

Now you're ready to search to your heart's content, without loading the Connexions home page first. You can revert back to your a different search engine by clicking on the icon next to the search bar and selecting the site you wish to use.

Connexions founder wins the World Technology Award for Education!

Who knew that Connexions' own Dr. Rich Baraniuk was causing such a commotion in the technology world? Congradulations, Rich, on being a World Technology Award winner!

From Rice University's press release:

"It was a great honor to receive the award, especially since it will bring more attention to Connexions and our globe-spanning community of users," said Baraniuk, who also presented an overview of the state-of-the-art of education technology at the World Technology Summit event held in New York City July 15 and 16.

The World Technology Network awards this prestegous prize to individuals and businesses that make a lasting impact in their field of work or study.

One More Thing ...

... I'm just saying ...

Featured Content: Applied Probability

Paul Pfeiffer's Applied Probability is a collection for college students versed in basic calculus and looking to learn about the practical aspects of probability. The course guides readers through important probability concepts such as distributions, random variables and functions, variance, and more, using problem sets and guided MATLAB examples.

This collection is the culmination of many years of hard work by Dr. Pfeiffer. We wish him the best, and congratulate him on being selected as this week's feature!

Remember, you can always suggest new featured content by using the Recommend Featured Content form.

(image courtesy of Thunderchild on flickr)

Finding Open Education Resources

I just got back from a meeting about how to make open education resources easier to find and use in the classroom -- OER_Discovery_2009. In order for us to do the best job helping faculty, teachers, and students find material, we need to hear what is easy and what is hard right now.

Are you teaching? What sorts of barriers to finding good resources do you have?

• How do you find new materials for your class?
  
• Colleague suggestions?
• Google searches?
• YouTube searches?
• Specialized searches at education sites that you frequent?
  
• Are you worried about copyright restrictions and whether or not you can use or modify the resource?
  
• What is most frustrating to you about looking for resources?

If you have information to share, please comment on this blog, or email cnx@cnx.org.

Connexions Consortium Launched

Connexions is pleased to announce the launch of the Connexions Consortium.

The Connexions Consortium is dedicated to the design and development of collaborative, open source code, software efforts and open access educational content that are targeted at supporting education, research and related scholarly activities. The Consortium is a group of organizations and individuals, who work together to advance open source educational technology and open access educational content

Our mission:

1. To deliver an application framework and associated collaboration, research, and teaching and learning environment tools and components that are designed to work together for education content management, research support and various forms of collaboration;


2. To support research, collaboration and community building around the Consortium application framework and associated research and learning environment tools and components that are designed to work together for education content management, research support and various forms of collaboration;


3. To solicit grants and other funding to permit the development and refinement of the Connexions application framework and associated research and learning environment tools and components that are designed to work together for education content management, research support and various forms of collaboration;


4. To promote economic efficiencies for IT in education and research settings through cooperation, leverage of shared investments and innovation;


5. To serve as an effective voice for open and community source software for research, collaboration, and teaching and learning environment efforts in education.

To learn more about the Connexions Consortium or to find out how to become a member, please visit the Consortium website at http://cnxconsortium.org/. Sign up by July 31, 2009 to become a Founding Member of the Consortium.

Pasting content from a workgroup directly into a collection

Let's say you have about a hundred modules sitting in your personal workspace (or maybe a Workgroup) and you're itching to compile them into one crowning achievement. Maybe you're building your personal memoirs to share with friends and print-on-demand. Maybe you're writing a textbook on marine biology. Whatever your motivation, you've already created these modules and you'd like to package them inside a Connexions collection.

This would be a monumentally boring and time-consuming task if you were to add each module individually (Believe me: Both Jonathan and I have taken this soul-crushing route when creating collections in the past). However, someone finally clued us in that you can copy and paste PUBLISHED modules directly from your workgroup into a collection.

From your personal workspace or workgroup, check all of the boxes next to the PUBLISHED modules you would like to add to your collection. Find the blue "Copy" button located at the bottom of the list of modules. Press it. I'm not a developer so I can't expound on the technical details, but I believe that the module "pointers" are copied into a strange cyber-void that only our Systems Architect fully understands. Now, create a new collection or go to the collection composer page for the collection you wish to populate. Click the folder you wish to insert the modules into and press the blue "Paste" button.

Viola! All of those modules are now in your collection, ready to be organized, retitled, or shuffled to your heart's content.

You'll notice I used the word "PUBLISHED" up there in my explanation-- that's because you cannot insert unpublished modules into a collection. Please make sure you publish your modules before trying to add them to a collection.

Good as MEW: Redesigned authoring area, MathML Editor, and more!

Connexions released a slew of new features and updates to the site yesterday. They're all welcome improvements to the authoring area, so you should probably head on over to the site and get busy writing modules after you read this nifty post :-)

First, let me give you a little background. This round of development effort has been known internally by about fifty different names: MyCNX Dasboard, Module Edit Workflow, Authoring Interface Redesign, and for me, Kyle's Big Tutorial-Updating Extravaganza. Most of us just called it MEW (Module Edit Workflow) for short. MEW has grown over the course of the past few months to include side projects like Phil's awesome, web-based MathML editor (but I'll get to that in a moment).

Now let's take a look at some of the most prominent changes MEW has brought to Connexions.

MyCNX Home Page

The first big change you might notice after logging in is the redesigned MyCNX area:

We've retooled this page to be a little more intuitive. The navigation sidebar on the left now features collapsible menus that will point you toward your work areas, modules, and collections. You can also create a new module or collection from the home page without navigating to a workspace or workgroup. Oh, and your most recently edited modules and collections are right there, so you can quickly get back onto writing your epic open-education textbook after you log in.

You can read all about the MyCNX area by visiting the "MyCNX and the Work Areas" module I recently updated for MEW.

Show/Hide Sidebars

Let's face it: There is limited real estate on your computer screen and authoring in Connexions used to be a bit of a pain when working on a tiny monitor. To help you feel a little less claustrophobic while writing modules (or composing collections), we've introduced a new widget called the Show/Hide Sidebars icon.

Click on it and the navigation sidebars will collapse, giving you more room to get into your authoring groove. Click it again and, voilà, the sidebars return! It's just that easy.

The Connexions MathML Editor

We've really saved the best for last here, folks! When you're editing modules using Edit-In-Place, you may notice a new link near the top of the editing box that says "MathML Editor." Click it.

Oh, my! What in the world is this? It's a fully-functional, web-based MathML Editor! Gone are the days of building equations in MathML code or purchasing software that only works on one platform.

Now you can generate semantically-correct Content MathML on-the-fly and paste it into your Connexions module. Phil Schatz was the driving force behind this addition to the suite of Connexions authoring tools, and I think he deserves a special pat on the back.

You can read more about the Connexions MathML Editor by checking out the new "MathML Editor Introduction"module, located in the Documentation Lens.

It's been a long and winding road to get all these changes out the door, and I'd like to give a big shout-out to our hard-working staff for their tireless contributions. Thanks to you guys, authoring in Connexions is now easier than ever.