Lesson 5: Sharing information and digital contents

 March 3rd, 2021

The main objectives of this lesson were:

• Be aware of the amount of content we find on the web and how to act upon it. 
• Know how to filter the content we find on the web. 
• Know mechanisms for sharing web content. 
• To identify what an Open Educative Resource is (OER) and develop develop its own materials from OER. 
• To know the open repositories where they can share the created materials from OER. 
• To share the materials created from OER. 
• To know the available tools to create infographics and mind maps.

In this class, we looked at different concepts such as the use of visual content as social media networks are gaining a great importance as a communication channel to a specific target audience. The visual contents are becoming more important than the textual ones. Thus, educational organisations should focus on generating and sharing visual contents with the intent of making individuals learn and process information in a more adequate way. 

When talking about educational resources or content it is important to:

• Know how to search 
• Know reliable sources 
• Understand the licenses in order to know if the contents can be reused and the degree to which it can be modified, mixed, etc. 
• Know how to share and what tools can be used to do so 
• Know how to protect and share our own content

In order to share content, there are many different ways to do so such as through e-mail, specific content curation tools and social networks. Through social networks, we can create publications and/or send private messages to convey the specific message. In this lesson we also learnt about Open Educational Resources, which are "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions." as said by UNESCO. 

There are 5 main Rs of Open Educational Resources as users should be able to: 

• Reuse – use content from others (ex. in a class, on a website, in a video, in a presentation, in a group work, …) 
• Revise – adapt, adjust, modify, or edit the content (ex. translate the content, use part of the content and add more information) 
• Remix – combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (ex. create a mashup) 
• Redistribute – share copies (ex. Upload a copy in your blog, share in your social networks, send in an e-mail. …) 
• Retain – make, own, and control copies of the content

Using Open Educational Resources has benefits both for the students and the instructors as it increases affordability of education, it affords greater flexibility, frees up time that can be spent on other aspects of the teaching and learning process, it can help raise the instructor’s profile and impact, etc. We can create an Open Educational Resource by: 1. Creating a resource, 2. Give an open license and 3. Publish and/or share online. 

For the individual task for this lesson we had to create an infographic and a mind-map about our didactic unit. An infographic is a graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly. Infographic are quite “viral”, which leads to fast propagation throw social networks. They are also quite attractive to the user, since they easy the memorisation process by the use of photographic memory. They help treating contents, by encapsulating contents and translating into other format and they are quite easy and fast to create. Currently there are several online tools to edit infographics in an easy and fast way such as the one that I used called Piktochart. I decided to create an infographic about condensation which one can observe below: 

We also had to create a mind-map regarding the Water Cycle using Mindomo which I have also attached below:

Overall, this class was really useful as we learnt how to create new information about visual content and how to share it in the most efficient way, whilst we also got to know more about Open Educational Resources and the use of infographics and mind-maps to convey specific information in a different way in order to make sure that students and other individuals understand the topic in-depth.