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"Open Access means free access to scientific information and unrestricted use of electronic data for everyone. With Open Access, expensive prices and copyrights will no longer be obstacles to the dissemination of knowledge. Everyone is free to add information, modify contents, translate texts into other languages, and disseminate an entire electronic publication. For UNESCO, adopting an Open Access Policy means to make thousands of its publications freely available to the public. Furthermore, Open Access is also a way to provide the public with an insight into the work of the Organization so that everyone is able to discover and share what UNESCO is doing."

Open content licensing (free stuff!) is changing the world. It's making art, music, information, and education more accessible than it has ever been in the history of humankind. We've put together a collection of articles designed to help you become a part of this amazing movement, either as a creator, or just a more empowered consumer. This is a guide for people new to open content, or people who want to expand what they already know about this incredible movement. Here you'll learn what open content is, how to license your own work for sharing around the world, and how to find the best and most beautiful open content for your websites, slideshows, articles, and whatever other amazing projects you have coming up!

"Reusing existing Open Educational Resources (OER) can save significant time and effort. The OPEN partners recommend TAACCCT grantees invest up-front time finding OER to reuse rather than starting development of new educational resources right away. A significant benefit of OER is that they provide source material to build your development efforts around. No need to invest development effort in creating something that already exists. OER come in a wide variety of types. Many educators are simply looking for individual media elements to use within their courses, such as photos, graphics, videos, and audio, that are openly licensed in a way that freely permits education use. The page below will help you find openly licensed media elements to use within your courses. To jump directly to what you are searching for use these links:"

"While the open content movement in education continues to gain steam, more teachers are starting to learn about free content they can use and adapt to their own needs for their classrooms. But educators are focusing too heavily on acquiring content, rather than contributing and improving to it, according to a company that helps teachers and students access open education resources."

As the availability and awareness of open educational resources grows, educators and open-content publishers are experimenting with hackathon-style content collaborations among subject-matter experts to create high school and college textbooks over the course of a few weekends.

Session 3 will focus on: An introduction to open copyright, Creative Commons licences, and searching for open "safe" content online.

2012 looks as if it might be the year that OER and open access reach the mainstream, globally and in South Africa. In the last few months in South Africa, the national department responsible for schools had announced the take-up of a major OER science and maths resource and the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) has included in a new Green Paper a recommendation for the widespread use of open educational resources.

Universities are traditionally seen as exclusive institutions for the few, not the many. But that is changing, as a new wave of online courses throws open the doors of academia to all.

"Amazon just opened its free library of open-education resources, called Amazon Inspire. Anyone with an Amazon account can now see the collection and download resources, but the Share feature is turned off, with a "coming soon!" label next to it. Letting any teacher share their teaching materials is a key promise of the service, but it is also one that sparked controversy last year, after several people uploaded materials without the permission of the authors. The copyright violations prompted complaints by teachers, and led Amazon to quickly take down the pirated content and promise to put a better review system in place."

"OpenSimulator is an open source multi-platform, multi-user 3D application server. It can be used to create a virtual environment (or world) which can be accessed through a variety of clients, on multiple protocols. It also has an optional facility (the Hypergrid) to allow users to visit other OpenSimulator installations across the web from an account on a 'home' OpenSimulator installation."

The First Steps into Learning and Teaching in Higher Education massive open online course (mooc) will run from 21 May to 22 June 2012. This mooc is developed by the HEA/JISC funded OpenLine Project at Oxford Brookes University. First Steps into Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, is targeted at new lecturers, people entering higher education teaching from other sectors and postgraduate students who teach. We also welcome experienced lecturers to update and share their knowledge and expertise. The First Steps course is an element of the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development's (OCSLD) HEA accredited Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education (PCTHE).

Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.

The whole philosophy of OER rests on a foundation consisting of two fundamental concepts which are (i) free and open access to knowledge; and (ii) the ability to freely adapt and re-use existing pieces of knowledge.

I love the idea of Twitter etiquette. Twitter just like any other social networking site has its own rules and guidelines that any new member has to accept before opening their account. But there are also other rules that are formed by force of actual use and though they are not as binding as the written ones but they are just as much important. As teachers and educators, the purpose behind using Twitter is primarily to connect with other teachers, learn from their teaching experiences and share with them ours.In doing so we build a community of people that we interact with and for this interaction to be effective we need to abide by Twitter code of ethics. Corey Talked about 11 Twitter etiquettes and based on his list I made the graphic below. Enjoy"

CoZa Cares has recently been involved in many discussions around open source content, free textbooks, and how we can collaborate with other great educational initiatives to bypass the ineffective and corrupt textbook distribution process. On this topic, we want to share the work that Breadbin Interactive is doing to provide free content direct to teachers and learners - without all the storage, transport, or distribution cost issues.

The #edchatsa community is full of insightful, committed and innovative thought-leaders in the South African education space. As a member of this community you are invited to submit a blog post on a subject close to your heart as long as it has connection to education. Your post will then be published and will be available on this site for comment by others. You may want to introduce readers to a particular edtech tool, open debate around a particular topic, challenge paradigms or simply add insight to the #edchatsa topic of the week. You will also be able to point readers to your own blog or social media platforms.

What does Google Moderator do? Google Moderator allows you to create a series about anything that you are interested in discussing and open it up for people to submit questions, ideas, or suggestions. These are called submissions.  Anyone can come to the site and submit a question, idea, or vote, and anyone can vote. Google Moderator shows you a question in the box with the blue background. This is called the Featured Question. A topic is a way to break up your series into smaller, more manageable topics of discussion. You can have one topic, or multiple topics. For example, if you create a series of 'Book clubs' for your organization, topics could be 'Fiction,' 'Non-fiction,' or 'Auto-biographies.'