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Claude Almansi

Scoop.It! | Education and Training Solutions - 1 views

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    By Claude Almansi and Jan Schwartz October 3rd, 2011 "Scoop.it is a new application that is still in beta, although it's fairly easy to get an invite to join. Claude Almansi found the app, sent an email about it to a list serv, which prompted Jan Schwartz to join. We've only been at it for a month or so, but already both of us have found some good information that we otherwise would have missed, and we are helping to spread the good work about education technology and change. First, some information about Scoop.it that Claude dug up. The web service was conceived in France, launched in December 2010 and its web site is in English. It's a social site for sharing news events and articles via subscription. Even if you don't subscribe, Scoop.it can be used to look for information items selected by others on a given theme via its public search engine. You do need to subscribe if you want to create and curate your own topic on a given theme or subject. For example, Jan was particularly excited to find a blog written as a result of a live chat sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which talked about the topic of Cathy Davidson's recent book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn. There were four panelists and 1500 participants on the chat and one of them, David Palumbo-Liu, wrote a blog about his experience, which was very different than Jan's and so an interesting read for perspective. She would not have found that blog if not for Scoop.it. Claude curates a site for Multimedia Accessibility. Currently Jan is 'scooping' under the title Technology for Teaching and Learning . You can curate as many different topics as you like."
Claude Almansi

Neil Gaiman's Journal: Quick argument summary [w. agent about Kindle's tts] Feb 11 09 - 0 views

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    Just found myself having a long argument/discussion with my agent over the Amazon Kindle text-to-speech capability. I'm going to summarise it here. Her point of view: The Kindle reading you the book-you-just-bought infringes the copyright (or at least, the rights) to the audiobook. We've sold audiobook rights and print book rights as separate things. We must stop this. My point of view: When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.
Claude Almansi

Dana Blankenhorn: Google Books sued by a pig, cat and dog | Open Source | ZDNet.com - S... - 0 views

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    When it comes to digitizing books and offering readers and writers a business model, Google has planted the wheat, harvested it, threshed it, ground it, and baked it. Now Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo think they each deserve a big slice of bread. They are taking the hen to court in order to get it. The effort, led by attorney Gary Reback, to challenge Google's deals with writers and publishers for digitizing "orphaned works" that are copyrighted but no longer published is less lawsuit than business by another name.
Claude Almansi

Groklaw - The i4i v. Microsoft Orders and Permanent Injunction - Updated - Aug 12 09 - 0 views

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    I have the court documents for you in the i4i v. Microsoft case, the judgment, the permanent injunction, and the memorandum and order, which explains the legal reasoning in support of the order. I also got for you the original complaint by i4i, Microsoft's answer with counterclaim, and i4i's reply to the counterclaim, so you can understand what it was all about. The law firm that won has put out a press release. Microsoft, of course, will appeal. It has 60 days to do so. You probably think I am delighted. I am not. I hate software patents. And this is precisely why. It is karmic that this happened to Microsoft, who bullies Linux with patent threats and just got an XML patent of its own on August 4th that could, presumably, be used against the entire market. How stupid do we have to be to grant patents on software? On software *standards*? This is what happens. Now do you see it?
Claude Almansi

Authors´ Guild vs. reality: Kindles and read-aloud - Boing Boing - Cory Docto... - 0 views

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    Time and again, the Author's Guild has shown itself to be the epitome of a venal special interest group, the kind of grasping, foolish posturers that make the public cynically assume that the profession it represents is a racket, not a trade. This is, after all, the same gang of weirdos who opposed the used book trade going online. I think there's plenty not to like about the Kindle -- the DRM, the proprietary file format, both imposed on authors and publishers even if they don't want it -- and about Amazon's real audiobook section, Audible (the DRM -- again, imposed on authors and publishers even if they'd prefer not to use it). But if there's one thing Amazon has demonstrated, it's that it plans on selling several bazillion metric tons of audiobooks. They control something like 90 percent of the market. To accuse them of setting out to destroy it just doesn't pass the giggle-test.
Marc Lijour

Open-source challenge to Microsoft Exchange gains steam - 1 views

  • An open-source, cloud-based e-mail alternative to Microsoft Exchange called Open-Xchange has signed up two new service providers and predicts it will have 40 million users by the end of 2011.
  • Open-Xchange has tripled its user base from 8 million to 24 million paid seats since 2008
  • Open-Xchange has 7 million users in North America today, but says most of its 2011 growth will occur on this continent, in part due to new agreements with service providers Lunarpages of California and Cirrus Tech in Toronto.
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  • Open-Xchange's strategy is to make e-mail cheaper for both partners and customers. Open-Xchange mailbox prices vary by service provider, but will typically cost $5 per user per month, about the same as Microsoft's own Exchange Online.
  • Gartner profiled Open-Xchange last August in a MarketScope report on e-mail systems, giving it a rating of "caution," one of its lowest ratings, behind "promising," "positive" and "strong positive."
  • Open-Xchange has tripled its user base from 8 million to 24 million paid seats since 2008
  • An open-source, cloud-based e-mail alternative to Microsoft Exchange called Open-Xchange has signed up two new service providers and predicts it will have 40 million users by the end of 2011.
  • An open-source, cloud-based e-mail alternative to Microsoft Exchange called Open-Xchange has signed up two new service providers and predicts it will have 40 million users by the end of 2011.
  • An open-source, cloud-based e-mail alternative to Microsoft Exchange called Open-Xchange has signed up two new service providers and predicts it will have 40 million users by the end of 2011.
  • An open-source, cloud-based e-mail alternative to Microsoft Exchange called Open-Xchange has signed up two new service providers and predicts it will have 40 million users by the end of 2011.
Claude Almansi

Main Page - Google Books Settlement Open Workshop - An Open Workshop at Harvard Law School - 0 views

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    The proposed Google Book Search settlement creates the opportunity for unprecedented access by the public, scholars, libraries and others to a digital library containing millions of books assembled by major research libraries. But the settlement is controversial, in large part because this access is limited in major ways: instead of being truly open, this new digital library will be controlled by a single company, Google, and a newly created Book Rights Registry consisting of representatives of authors and publishers; it will include millions of so-called "orphan works" that cannot legally be included in any competing digitization and access effort, and it will be available to readers only in the United States. It need not have been this way.
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    The proposed Google Book Search settlement creates the opportunity for unprecedented access by the public, scholars, libraries and others to a digital library containing millions of books assembled by major research libraries. But the settlement is controversial, in large part because this access is limited in major ways: instead of being truly open, this new digital library will be controlled by a single company, Google, and a newly created Book Rights Registry consisting of representatives of authors and publishers; it will include millions of so-called "orphan works" that cannot legally be included in any competing digitization and access effort, and it will be available to readers only in the United States. It need not have been this way.
Claude Almansi

Cory Doctorow: You shouldn't have to sell your soul just to download some music | Techn... - 0 views

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    Here's the world's shortest, fairest, and simplest licence agreement: "Don't violate copyright law." If I had my way, every digital download from the music in the iTunes and Amazon MP3 store, to the ebooks for the Kindle and Sony Reader, to the games for your Xbox, would bear this - and only this - as its licence agreement. "Don't violate copyright law" has a lot going for it, but the best thing about it is what it signals to the purchaser, namely: "You are not about to get screwed."
Claude Almansi

Chicago Tribune | Blog | A (long, but still edited) talk with Boing Boing's Cory Doctor... - 0 views

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    when you actually look at what happens when you add a lot of surveillance, it doesn't make it any easier to find the needles; it just makes the haystack bigger. On September 11 American intelligence agencies knew everything they needed to know to prevent the attack, they just didn't know they knew it.
Claude Almansi

National Federation of the Blind Responds to Authors Guild Statement on the Amazon Kind... - 0 views

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    "Amazon has taken a step in the right direction by including text-to-speech technology for reading e-books aloud on its new Kindle 2," Dr. Maurer [President of the National Federation of the Blind] continued. "We note, however, that the device itself cannot be used independently by a blind reader because the controls to download a book and begin reading it aloud are visual and therefore inaccessible to the blind. We urge Amazon to rectify this situation as soon as possible in order to make the Kindle 2 a device that truly can be used both by blind and sighted readers. By doing so, Amazon will make it possible for blind people to purchase a new book and begin reading it immediately, just as sighted people do."
Roland Gesthuizen

Why "open education" matters : JISC - 0 views

  • open education goes across the boundaries of formal and informal, children and adults, across academic disciplines, into professional development and into making and crafting. Universities don’t own the “open education” space any more than any organisation could be said to own “learning”
  • We need to be digitally literate, but more than that, we need to find ways of doing our work online, to become open practitioners and digital scholars
  • For educational institutions to thrive, we need to explore models for how we can work in this space, with all its opportunities and risks, all its noise and vibrancy. It is here that we see possibilities for new models of collaboration, peer learning and accreditation.
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    "Open education" matters because it's already happening all around us. .. although it may not be mainstream yet, it is very real. The models continue to grow and combine with the ethos of open access and the methods of open source.The choice for us, as individuals and educational organisations, is in how we respond.
Claude Almansi

Ning's New Deadline for Pay-Only: Aug. 30 « Educational Technology and Change... - 0 views

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    "Ning announced repeatedly that it would delete free networks whose creators had not paid for one of its new pricing plans by midnight Aug. 20. On Aug. 21, however, Ning extended this deadline to August 30. Here's the announcement of this extension on its Help page: Deadline for Selecting a Ning Plan Extended to August 30, 2010 A number of Network Creators, particularly those based outside the United States, have requested more time to arrange for payment and make the right decision on a plan for their network. As a result, we have extended the deadline for selecting one of the three new plans (Ning Mini, Plus and Pro) to August 30, 2010. Beginning on this date, we will block access to any free Ning Network that isn't subscribed to one of the three plans. Please let us know if we can help, or if you have questions or comments. Thank you!"
James Sigler

iTWire - Teaching tech to tots: The use of Linux and open source in pre-schools - 0 views

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    This article highlights a suite of education games called GCompris for K-6 students. It gives a good definition of what Edubuntu is and how it is different than just Ubuntu. It is one more reason to use Linux instead of MS Windows in schools.
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    Great article on Edubuntu Linux
Jeff Johnson

4.2.2.2: The Story Behind a DNS Legend - 0 views

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    Chances are that if you're a network operator you know the IP address 4.2.2.2. It's an easy to type and easy to remember address, which since 1998 has been a "beefy" DNS service responding to the public Internet. Since you need DNS before you can use anything other than IP addresses on the Internet, it can come in handy for testing or initial configuration. Before Google started doing public DNS service on 8.8.8.8, and because 4.2.2.2 is typically pretty fast, many people have used it as their standard DNS server. Since the most basic test of Internet connectivity you can do is to ping an IP address (with DNS disabled), a "ping -n 4.2.2.2" can tell you if your networking problem is at a higher level or a lower level right away. Is this just an accident, or was this a deliberate choice? Was it intentionally set up as a public DNS service, or an accident. I've wondered this for years. But just recently I was investigating a networking oddness reported by Kyle who uses this, and I decided to try to dig deep and find out the story behind whatI imagine is one of the most famous IP addresses on the public Internet.
Claude Almansi

Protesters confront Author's Guild over Kindle text-to-speech | Tech Policy & Law News ... - 0 views

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    The Coalition's mission statement says, "Sadly, the Authors Guild does not support equal access for us. The Guild has told us that to read their books with text-to-speech we must either submit to a special registration system (that not all may qualify for and that would expose disability information to all future eBook reader manufacturers) and prove our disabilities -- or pay extra." (...) The Guild issued a statement following the protests, explaining its position: "The Authors Guild will gladly be a forceful advocate for amending contracts to provide access to voice-output technology to everyone. We will not, however, surrender our members' economic rights to Amazon or anyone else. The leap to digital has been brutal for print media generally, and the economics of the transition from print to e-books do not look as promising as many assume. Authors can't afford to start this transition to digital by abandoning rights." If the guild is trying to gain sympathy, it will have a very difficult time when it pits "economic rights" against civil rights.
Gary Bertoia

Handy Tweaks To Make GIMP Replace Photoshop | How-To | Smashing Magazine - 0 views

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    GIMP is the favorite graphics editing program of many designers and graphic artists. It is free and compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux (the two big reasons for its popularity). It has a wide array of features, as well as plug-ins, filters and brushes. Documentation is primarily available in online communities, as well as through extensive add-ons
David Corking

Raspberry Pi on Newsnight tonight | Raspberry Pi - 0 views

  • a computer so cheap my brother need not worry about breaking it. If I had something like that I would have been much freer trying out linux.
    • David Corking
       
      A great endorsement of the concept from a teenager.
  • computer in the hands of everyone will likely flood the market with mediocre programmers and make it more difficult for companies to discover the good ones. I have seen the destruction that weaker coders can bring to code bases, and while modern coding techniques largely mitigate the issues, I think that this move will have a positive impact on ‘better’ software houses and a detrimental impact on the rest of the industry.
  • The school buys a bunch of Raspberry Pis. Kids can bring their own SD card or buy 1 pre-configured and use the schools Raspberry Pi’s. Or pay a deposit (equaling the cost of a Raspberry Pi) and they can take it home and work on it in their own time. If they want to keep it they just let the school know and a replacement is bought with the deposit.
    • David Corking
       
      Great idea.
Claude Almansi

The alt and title attributes | 456 Berea Street - Roger Johansson - 0 views

  • Use the alt attribute to provide text for visitors who, for whatever reason, can’t see the images in your document. This includes visitors using browsers that cannot display images or have image display disabled, visually impaired visitors, and screen reader users. Alt text is to be used instead of an image, not as additional information.
  • And don’t use the alt attribute for text that you want to appear as a tool tip. It’s not the way it was meant to be used, and as far as I know, it only works like that in Internet Explorer for Windows and in Windows versions of the ancient Netscape 4.*. No Mac browsers display alt text as a tool tip.
  • The title attribute can be used with all elements except for base, basefont, head, html, meta, param, script, and title, but it isn’t required for any. Maybe that’s why it’s less clear when to use it. Use this to provide additional information that is not essential. Most visual browsers display title text as a tool tip when the element is hovered over, however it is up to the browser manufacturer to decide how the title text is rendered. Some will display the text in the status bar instead. Early versions of Safari did this, for instance.
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    Alternate text is not meant to be used as a tool tip, or more specifically, to provide additional information about an image. The title attribute, on the other hand, is meant to provide additional information about an element. That information is displayed as a tooltip by most graphical browsers, though manufacturers are free to render title text in other ways. Thanks to Alexis Antonelli http://uxconsultant.com/ for the reference
Claude Almansi

Why Unjoin Ning Networks that Won't Pay « Educational Technology and Change J... - 1 views

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    "It therefore seems advisable to protect your data by unjoining Ning networks whose creators do not intend to pay for a Ning plan. This includes talketc.ning.com, the Ning network for ETC Journal. Moreover, when you unjoin a Ning network, you have the option to delete everything you contributed to it - you might wish to do that too. "
Claude Almansi

How Microsoft wants to tackle software piracy in Pakistan - M. Khalid Rahman - DAWN Sci... - 0 views

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    "We do not want to be belligerent about it. It is just that we do not want to project the impression that we want everybody to stop using the technology, or that this technology is too expensive."
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