Tom Caswell

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  • Better Job Alerts: an AI assistant for job hunting

    Better Job Alerts is a personal AI job hunting assistant that can learn your preferences and send you personalized job alerts. I named it BJ for short. Start by sending BJ an email (email address is in the video below) describing what kind of job you want and where, or upload your resume or LinkedIn profile. It replies within minutes with matching postings. You can also send BJ email in plain English with questions, feedback, or to modify or cancel your alerts.

  • A better conference app for nurse practitioners

    My wife attended the AANP conference in Las Vegas this year, and their conference app wasn’t very easy to use so I built her a better one with Claude Code while we were there. My version allowed her to plan sessions (including Watch Later), follow a live map to find session rooms, food, and shops, as well as track continuing education credits toward license renewal. Open the planner or see the code on GitHub.

  • Open Content: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

    The positive, often serendipitous news about the Open Course Library continues to appear. Shortly after our launch, the Saylor Foundation adapted 11 Open Course Library courses for use by self-learners. In the process they made the courses easier to access. You see, our first batch of courses were released as Common Cartridge .zip files which ended up being a barrier for those who don’t have access to a LMS. Saylor put our courses directly online and made them look pretty. They even caught a couple typos for us! (Note: We have since shifted to developing our course materials in Google Docs. All OCL course materials are available here: http://opencourselibrary.org).

    Recently the Saylor Foundation began uploading some of their open courses to iTunes U, including several from the Open Course Library. Everyone benefits all over again, simply because a group of educators was willing to share their less-than-perfect course materials freely with the world. Open Course Library materials are now being used in 8 states through Project Kaleidoscope, an NGLC grant whose research is now informing our open sharing efforts in Washington State. (more…)

  • Herding Cats

    At the WCET Digital Content Summit last week I was asked to describe how I work with faculty in Washington State to develop and curate materials for 81 of our system’s highest enrolling courses into the Open Course Library. I jokingly said two words: “herding cats,” and then I went on to describe the process and the great faculty, instructional designer, and librarian teams that have been involved. Of course, I only got quoted on the herding cats part. That’s the power of a sound byte. 🙂

  • From Cable to Me to You

    Flagrant reuse warning: I copied the following post from Cable’s blog because he said what I wanted to say 🙂

    1. If you use Creative Commons licenses for your OER (or any other openly licensed creative work), you might want to check out: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/32157
    2. Please contribute to the new OER Policy Registry: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/32072
    3. New video hot off the press from CC Qatar:
    Now to copy someone else. This past weekend the first 42 Open Course Library courses made their way to Haiti on a DVD — a little over 1GB of course content. Here’s the presentation given by Brandon Muramatsu. It’s worth watching. So maybe you don’t get to travel as much as I want to these days, but at least your openly shared content can.
    From OpenCourseWare to Open Education