Open Education: Imagining Sleep

If I were to design a web-based course, I’d want it to make intelligent use of multimedia (movie clips, podcasts, music, images, etc.), adopt a Creative Commons license so that people could freely use it, be interactive, take an interdisciplinary approach, and, of course, demonstrate a deep knowledge of the course topic. For an excellent example of such a course, check out Imagining Sleep: An Interdisciplinary Course on Sleep and Dream by my pal Carolyn Fay. Carolyn’s certainly qualified to teach about sleep: she wrote a dissertation in French literature on sleep and dreams, and she taught several interdisciplinary courses on sleep while a faculty member at Franklin and Marshall College and Penn State Altoona (plus she has a young daughter, and therefore much experience with interrupted sleep). Imagining Sleep offers a series of lessons on the scientific, cultural, and psychological contexts surrounding sleep, complete with activities, readings, and informative, charmingly-narrated podcast lectures. I think an important aspect of digital scholarship is making knowledge available to the wider community, and Imagining Sleep does a great job of organizing that knowledge coherently and using the Web wisely to deliver information.

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