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"Kaj Sand-Jensen, un professore danese di ecologia, ha scritto un articolo intitolato "How to write consistently boring scientific literature" dove enuncia un decalogo di regole per scrivere articoli scientifici veramente noiosi. In maniera ironica e divertente mostra come una scrittura spersonalizzata possa servire alla fin fine a mascherare un contenuto modesto. Nella conclusione, osserva che ci sono movimenti di scienziati e anche editori che tendono a recuperare il valore di una scrittura più personale e viva. Sostiene inoltre che, sebbene l'articolo scientifico così come lo conosciamo rimarrà il veicolo principale della comunicazione scientifica, è auspicabile che gli scienziati si impegnino maggiormente in una comunicazione più ampia e speculativa, che possa eventualmente anche contemplare humour e poesia. Una comunicazione in grado di far circolare maggiormente le idee fra campi diversi e di attrarre più facilmente i giovani allo studio delle scienze. È un paradosso, ma è vero che la letteratura scientifica predominante, bulimica, ridondante, assolutamente grigia, selezionata con un processo di peer review sempre più affrettato e sommario, costituisce non l'unica ma una notevole causa di scarsa innovazione dando la preferenza ai maggiori e più consolidati filoni di ricerca. Lascio qui sotto l'opportunità di leggere il paper di Kaj Sand-Jensen, ne vale la pena. View this document on Scribd - [1] More about Fisica e filosofia "Ricordo delle discussioni con Bohr che si prolungarono per molte ore fino a notte piena e che ci condussero quasi ad uno stato di disperazione; e quando al termine della discussione me ne andavo solo a fare una passeggiata nel parco vicino continuavo sempre a ripropormi il problema: è possibile che la natura sia così assurda come ci appariva negli esperimenti atomici?" Werner Heisenberg in Fisica e Filosofia, Il Saggiatore, 1961, p. 55) * Share this: * Stampa * Email * Facebook *

"The winners for each category, selected by an international jury of experts, will win thousands of Euros in cash prizes and ICT equipment. Also, following a successful launch in 2009, the 2010 edition will again be open to international competitors, from countries outside of Europe (see full list of eligible countries in the rules below). Another recent feature: the top 50 entries submitted will be included in the Learning Exchange Resource library (http://lreforschools.eun.org), to give increased visibility to teachers' innovative practices and encourage others to follow their lead. To be eligible for the eLearning Awards, entries must be submitted by schools or teacher training institutions in EU member states, EEA countries, EU applicant countries as well as Switzerland, Israel and Georgia. For the category International cooperation entries are accepted worldwide. A gallery on the eLearning Awards website will showcase all contributions, which will be judged by a panel of experts. Entries can be made from now until 28 September 2010 via the website: http://elearningawards.eun.org. Prize Ceremony The prize-giving ceremony, which will be followed by a gala dinner, will take place in Copenhagen early November 2010, during the annual EMINENT conference. The EMINENT conference is a unique chance to meet and discuss with European ministries of education, global companies and key stakeholders in education. Prize-winners will be given a trip to Copenhagen to attend the award ceremony. Full list of categories Rules"

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.

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.

Wojcicki is a journalism and English teacher at Palo Alto High School, where she leads one of the largest high school journalism programs in the nation. She leads a variety of award-winning journalism projects, including a newspaper, a magazine, a website, a television program, and a sports publication. Over the past 20 years, these projects have won Gold and Silver Crowns from Columbia Scholastic Press Association, the PaceMaker Award and Hall of Fame Award from National Scholastic Press, and best in nation from Time Magazine in 2003. In February 2009, she was awarded the Columbia Scholastic Press Association Gold Key Award in a special ceremony at Columbia University for "outstanding devotion to the cause of the school press … and service above and beyond the call of delegated duty." She is the president of the Friends of the Lurdes Mutola Foundation to support girls' education in Mozambique and is a consultant for the Silicon Valley Education Foundation and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

On July 24-25, 2008, the World Blind Union and KEI convened an expert group to consider a possible treaty for blind, visually impaired and other reading disabled persons. The meeting was held in Washington, DC. There is a one page talking points memo in English, and the proposed Treaty text, as a three page memo discussing the proposal. These documents are available in English, French and Spanish, in several document formats. The English version of the proposed Treaty text is available in DAISY format from the DAISY Consortium here .

"The SNSF already jointly signed the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" with other scientific organisations in Switzerland in 2006. In doing so, it underlined its intention to support the efforts towards establishing Open Access - i.e. free access to scientific publications - in Switzerland."

At present, very few of us buy books in any form. If we could have e-books read aloud to us, however, we would happily pay for them. We are an untapped market consisting of some 15 million people to which authors and publishers have never before had direct access. For this reason, the position of the Authors Guild is not only morally repugnant but also bad business. Prohibiting the blind and others from reading commercially available e-books just means that authors and publishers won't get our money. The guild's position hurts both authors and people with print disabilities. In an age when how we get information is constantly and rapidly changing, it's important that people with disabilities have access to it in the same way that it is important for us to have access to physical structures, goods and services. Amazon took an important step in the right direction by including a read-aloud feature on the Kindle 2, but the Authors Guild is now trying to set us back. We are not going to allow them to stand in the doorway of the virtual bookstore to keep us out.

Parafrasando una frase del Colonnello Kilgore (Apocalypse Now) sono estremamente felice di apprendere che la Corte di Cassazione, così come testualmente si legge nel comunicato stampa dello Studio Legale Sirotti Gaudenzi "ha posto la nota sentenza "Schwibbert" (emessa dalla Corte di Giustizia delle Comunità' europee, in data 8 novembre 2007) a fondamento del principio in base al quale sono inapplicabili le norme penali che prevedono l'obbligatorietà' del "bollino" SIAE". In parole povere il famigerato bollino ha esalato gli ultimi respiri ed è passato a migliore vita. Diamogli degna sepoltura senza neppure spargere una lacrima.

Parafrasando una frase del Colonnello Kilgore (Apocalypse Now) sono estremamente felice di apprendere che la Corte di Cassazione, così come testualmente si legge nel comunicato stampa dello Studio Legale Sirotti Gaudenzi "ha posto la nota sentenza "Schwibbert" (emessa dalla Corte di Giustizia delle Comunità' europee, in data 8 novembre 2007) a fondamento del principio in base al quale sono inapplicabili le norme penali che prevedono l'obbligatorietà' del "bollino" SIAE". In parole povere il famigerato bollino ha esalato gli ultimi respiri ed è passato a migliore vita. Diamogli degna sepoltura senza neppure spargere una lacrima.

"DICE aims at providing support to teaching and non-teaching staff of Swiss higher education institutions in copyright management of digital content for eLearning. The goal of DICE is: (a) Increasing awareness of copyright issues related with digital content, in order to provide sound knowledge and eliminate unreasonable fears. (b) Developing fundamental skills in intellectual property and copyright management for higher education staff (e.g. understanding basic rules applicable in Switzerland, using Creative Commons licenses, etc.) (c) Increase the readiness and ability of authors to publishing open access resources (aka Open Educational Resources)"

" * Posted by amilla on September 14, 2010 at 2:26pm in Improvements to Ning Creators * View Discussions About the exclusion of the music player in the package "ning plus" I would like to inform the management of Ning that I demand from Ning administration to send me an e-mail with all the tracks that are blocked in order to protect the copyrighted material that now is blocked by the company Ning which has no right to withhold them. For these reasons I ask from Ning to send me the music files that was loaded up until the day that Ning music player was free for uploading for all networks. There is need for appropriate administration of music files with responsibility for all of the musicians members of my network. So I demand from Ning to send me all that music files. I am giving to Ning a period of two months to send me all the songs as attachments in the e-mail amilla.gr@gmail.com. Otherwise I have to inform the official intellectual property protecting organization of Greece for unauthorized restriction of intellectual property from the Ning. The same reasoning applies if the music files are deleted from Ning. Thank you and wait for response from Ning. Best regards The administration of www.amilla.gr"

I keep waiting for someone to tell the young mayor, and Miss Rhee that to be a teacher in the District of Columbia is a very hard job shaped by all kinds of outside forces. I think about my three years I which I spent all of my savings contributing to the school system. I taught across from a large welfare housing in southwest Washington DC. The school is still there. They called me the pied piper of SW. I took children on field trips, taught them to use the museums on the mall to learn, did NASA Marsville with them and had wonderful reading scores. It was not appreciated. I was making trouble. That's why I left. Children followed me in the SW mall. Children in trouble slept at my doorstep. There was never enough time or money to address all of their needs.

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."

A landmark study by the Institute of European Media Law (EML) found that a levy on internet usage legalising non-commercial online exchanges of creative works conforms with German and European copyright law, even though it requires changes in both. The German and European factions of the Green Party who had commissioned the study will make the "culture flat-rate," as the model is being called in Germany, an issue in their policies. The global debate on a new social contract between creatives and society is getting more pronounced by the day. Two models are emerging: a free-market approach based on private blanket licences and voluntary subscriptions, and a legal licence approach based on exceptions in copyright law and mandatory levies, that now has been proven legally feasible and appropriate by the EML study.

The blind and other readers have the right for books to be presented to us in the format that is most useful to us, and we are not violating copyright law as long as we use readers, either human or machine, for private rather than public listening. The key point is that reading aloud in private is the same whether done by a person or a machine, and reading aloud in private is never an infringement of copyright. 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". More details are available on the Forbes website.

By not supporting medium-sized deployments of, say 30 to 5000 laptops (a typical order from a school or an educational authority) the OLPC Foundation betrays an instinct for paternalism. We have too much paternalism in education already, and the technologies in Sugar were designed to give children democratic access to education.

Alex explains that the goal of Google Books was to make books easier to find. He references an article in the New York Times in which librarians lamented that people were only searching online materials, not printed books. He references a story in which a research assistant was asked by Larry Lessig to come back with "everything Senator X said about topic Y" and returned only with results after 1996… which is to say, only results from the web.

We are starting to see objections to the Google Book Search SettlementL2 this month in advance of the May 5th deadline set up by the court. The firstL3 comes from the consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog (foundL4 by way of the American Libraries news feed). They have submitted a letter to the U.S. Justice Department asking the antitrust division to delay the settlement until the "'most favored nation' clause favoring Google is removed and the deal's 'orphan works' provision is extended to cover all who might digitize books, not only Google." The letter in PDFL5 is available on the Consumer Watchdog website. The objections revolve around the provision that require the Books Rights Registry to give Google the same terms as anyone else who enters into agreements with the Registry (noting that more favorable terms might be required by a new party in order to compete with Google) as well as the fact that the copyright infringement protection for digitizing orphan works only extends to Google.

KEI supports the notion that the WIPO SCCR should begin it's norm setting agenda in small confidence building steps, working with communities that know what they want. The reading disabled community is at the head of the line both because they are ready now, and because they have a very compelling need. According to the World Health Organization, there are 45 million persons who are blind, and 90 percent of them live in developing countries, mostly in appalling poverty and with very limited employment opportunities.

Sakshat is first and foremost an education program, with a resource and interaction portal in http://www.sakshat.ac.in/ . The device is just one tool of this program but might be of crucial importance for students to be able to work at home, without an internet connection, on material either printed or saved in digital form.

On February 3, after a tremendous amount of hype, India's $10 laptop was finally unveiled. In anticipation of the event, Jim Morrison, Innovate editor-in-chief, distributed an eblast to Innovate board members, which was followed up by Jim Shimabukuro's I-Blog post "India: $10 Notebooks for Students" on February 2. As we all know by now, the Sakshat "laptop" turned out to be a computing device, a far cry from a computer. In the aftermath, Shimabukuro put out a call for articles: What are the implications of the Sakshat or a similar cheap computer device for education?