Skip to main content

Home/ Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0/ Group items tagged connexions

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
1More

Connexions - Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities - 0 views

cnx.org education opensource collaboration learning courseware reference opencourseware community connexions
shared by Rhondda Powling on 28 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Rhondda Powling on 28 Jan 09
     
    "Connexions is:a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute"
9More

Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers - Chronicle.com - 0 views

chronicle.com/...3623n.htm opensource publishing textbook
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 10 Jul 08 - Cached
  • College students are increasingly downloading illegal copies of textbooks online, employing the same file-trading technologies used to download music and movies. Feeling threatened, book publishers are stepping up efforts to stop the online piracy.
  • Textbook Torrents, promises more than 5,000 textbooks for download in PDF format, complete with the original textbook layout and full-color illustrations. Users must simply set up a free account and download a free software program that uses a popular peer-to-peer system called BitTorrent. Other textbook-download sites are even easier to use, offering digital books at the click of a mouse.
  • culture of infringement
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • So far the publishing group has not sought to take legal action against individual student downloaders, as the Recording Industry Association of America has done in its campaign to stamp out the illegal trading of music at colleges. The book-publishing group has not sought to shut down entire Web sites that offer downloads either, said Mr. McCoyd. Instead, officials are doing research on the extent of the problem and asking Web-site owners to remove individual files. "We've just tried to keep sweeping away these infringements as they continue to come online," he said.
  • Individual academic publishers have also taken steps to stop book pirates.
  • "We have been fairly vigorous in monitoring these sites and in requesting that they take down our copyrighted content,"
  • One place their titles keep popping up is Scribd, a document-sharing Web site that opened this year. The site's policies do not allow users to post copyrighted content without permission, but some people break the rules.
  • He said that if the problem worsens, publishers may have to take other steps to prevent piracy, such as releasing a new version of most textbooks every semester. The versions could include slight modifications that could be changed easily—such as altering the numbers in math problems. "They may compelled to," he said, "in order to stay one step ahead of the pirates."
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Jul 08
       
      Wrong response. Instead of trying to force students into a model that doesn't work any longer, why not give them what they want and need? Look at MIT OpenCourseWare, Berkeley course content on iTunes, Flat World Knowledge, the California Open Source Project, Connexions. Heck! Look at OpenSource software such as Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice. THIS is the new model and companies will need to figure out a way to monetize this in a way that works for everyone.
1 - 2 of 2
Showing 20▼ items per page