With the increasing demand for safe food and the growing globalization of food production and manufacturing, there is a great need for no-cost, accessible training and educational resources for food safety professionals, especially those working in developing countries where such access is not readily available. Michigan State University and the Global Food Safety Initiative have partnered together to create the Food Safety Knowledge Network (FSKN), a directory of open educational resources in the area of food safety, which will make quality content easily and efficiently findable.
FSKN will use ccLearn’s DiscoverEd search tool to draw resources from reliable sources. These materials will be curated by experts in the field as well as aligned to a set of core competencies for food safety managers so that the users can identify the specific area the resource covers as well as trust the quality of the content. This fall, the Food Safety Knowledge Network will be pilot tested to support implementation of supplier training at the pre-certification level in developing countries including India and China.
If you have or know of food safety resources to share, please contact Sunnie Kim at kiml@msu.edu.
right now i’m in a session led by dave cormier. in this room are david wiley, george siemens, jim groom, alec couros, stephen downes, and more!
these are people whose ideas i have been following in the edtech/oer blogosphere for months. i love hearing them dialogue with one another, especially the disagreements that lead to enlightenment.
I just got into Vancouver B.C. for the Open Education conference. This conference is always lots of fun with a great group of people and great exchanges of ideas. I missed last year’s OpenEd so I’m glad I got the chance to come to this year’s conference which is being held in beautiful Vancouver for the first time.
I have a couple different goals for the next few days here. One is to really start thinking about my dissertation topic since I’m pretty sure I want it to be something that will add value to the OER community. I want to learn what other people are studying and how they are going about it.
My other goal is to look for people who are doing things related to what we are doing over at MSU. Specifically, I’m looking for folks working on K12 OER so that I can make some connections for collaboration with our school gardening project. I also want to talk with people who work on OER repositories and directories and pick their brain on things they’ve learned that may enlighten our process for our food safety OER projects.
I’ll also be presenting on the last day of the conference. The title of my session is called “Piggy-backing your way to OER growth in higher education.” I’ll be talking about how we (MSUglobal) have been using back door methods to increase awareness, use, and production of OER on our campus.
I am super stoked for this week and can’t wait to hear all the speakers and meet new people and old friends!
i had the wonderful opportunity to chat with david wiley about the projects he is working on.
david is associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at brigham young university, chief openness officer of flat world knowledge, and founder of the open high school of utah. he was formerly associate professor of instructional technology and director of the center for open and sustainable learning (COSL) at utah state university.
so the conference wasn’t too spectacular, but what was absolutely breath-taking was visiting high tech high school with my pepperdine classmates. what an amazing realization of all of the learning theories we have been learning about. the high tech high design is all about problem-based learning (PBL), collaboration, personalization, student engagement, real-life application, and innovation.
from the moment we walked into the doors of the original high tech high, there was a different feel than all other schools i’ve been in. the students were happy, they were engaged, they were self-monitoring, they were confident and proud, they were LEARNING! their artwork and projects were everywhere and it was beautiful.
high tech high is a charter program in san diego, california that is currently comprised of 5 high schools, 2 middle schools, and an elementary school. 100% of their graduates are admitted to college. whoa. the thing i LOVE is that these are not privileged, affluent, uppity kids. the enrollment is by lottery and the only prereq for entering the drawing is being a resident of california and having a method of getting to the school since there is no bus system. the schools do not track and so there is no such thing as isolating or mainstreaming… they’re all in it together. the classes are small… 25-27 at most and every student is known by an adult through an advisory program that goes throughout the whole 4 years. the teachers teach interdisciplinary subjects and collaborate together for all kinds of cool real-world projects. the students have published books and are exhibiting their artwork on blood at a real art gallery next month. i could literally go on and on about the exciting things they are doing there.
we were given a tour of high tech high international by a student in her junior year and she was amazing. so poised, confident, and intelligent. you can hear her talk in this awesome video made by my classmate terry who could possibly be the coolest teacher i have ever met:
we also had a chance to visit explorer elementary and these are some pictures i took there. the knowledge tree is especially inspiring. click on it to see a larger view.
tree of knowledge
peace
dogs by elementary kids
aren’t these wonderful? as you can tell, i had a lovely time just seeing how school can be done and was so inspired to see it working and working well. yay for people who think outside the box and challenge the status quo.
