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Informing Science Institute (ISI) is an organization of colleagues helping colleagues. We draw together people who teach, research, and use information technologies to inform clients (regardless of academic discipline) to share their knowledge with others. The Informing Science Institute Learning Object Repository (ISI LOR) is the newest Open Source LOR created by a team of 5 individuals. We are currently Beta testing the ISI OSLOR on this site. Please feel free to browse the site. We strongly encourage you to contribute your LOs to this repository.

"At a time when we have the technologies to enable global access to and distributed processing of scientific research and data, legal and technical restrictions are making it difficult to connect the dots. Even when research and data is made public, it's often locked up by regimes or contracts that prohibit changing file formats or languages, integrating data, semantic enrichment, text mining and more. These restrictions sharply limit the impact of published research, and prevent us from exploiting the potential of the Web for accelerating scientific discovery. In the Scholar's Copyright Project, Science Commons develops tools and resources for expanding and enhancing open access (OA) to published research and data. We believe that knowledge-sharing systems and formats based on the paper metaphor block innovation, and that open access is prerequisite for finding new ways to reap the value of the vast amounts of public research now being produced. For details on the resources we offer, continue reading below."

"Crossing the Boundaries of Ning * Posted by Badan Barman on August 22, 2010 at 2:28am in Best Practices and Lessons Learned * View Discussions I am a Library and Information Science Professional from India. I developed a Network "LIS Links : A Virtual Community of Indian LIS Professionals" (http://lislinks.com/) over Ning. I dont know whether I will be able to survive with all of you or not. But here, I would like to share something about my site. There nothing special to its design, since I am dealing with information, I gave much emphasis to content rather than the look. But I think I have included some thing special in my network. I request you all to have a look. Here are my specific points ..."

"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."

"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."

Stated more succinctly as a "general theory of learning in the web era," to borrow a phrase from Jim Shimabukuro, computer technology (e.g., $10 computers) + access to the digital storehouse of human knowledge + social computing + cognitive tools + teaching and learning practices consistent with the learning sciences + leadership to catalyze change = transformation of education.

Software Foundation (FSF) announced the winners of the annual free software awards during the GNU/Linux conference LibrePlanet, held on March 21-22 at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, MA. Creative Commons was honored with the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, and Wietse Venema was honored with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Presenting the awards was FSF founder and president Richard Stallman.

Cory Doctorow's column on DRM Cory Doctorow is a digital activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing. Each fortnight he writes about copy protection, digital rights management (DRM) and the entertainment industry.

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."

Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction writer, was perusing the Web site Scribd last month when she came across digital copies of some books that seemed quite familiar to her. No wonder. She wrote them, including a free-for-the-taking copy of one of her most enduring novels, "The Left Hand of Darkness."

Amazon's Kindle, the first eBook reader that has really started to catch on with the public, deals almost exclusively with eBooks that have DRM. According to Ian Fried, the vice president of Amazon Kindle, customers don't seem to mind: "We've had very few if any customer responses that the choice we made with DRM was a problem." But DRM could become a problem if the Kindle goes bust - then all those people who bought Kindle eBooks with DRM will have no way to read them because no other device can open the files. Beyond that, not everyone agrees that DRM is a good business strategy. Publishing consultant Michael Shatzkin says it's tough to make the case that file-sharing reduces sales. He cites science fiction writer Cory Doctorow who, he says, "does the best he can to give away as much of his content as possible." And by giving it away, Shatzkin says, Doctorow's sales have skyrocketed.

"The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity (Registration Number 1129409) which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing. We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world."

Downloadable images of historical medical illustration- some pretty funky stuff. Great resource for science or art projects.

Opening Doors to Education Worldwide

Tracker is a free video analysis and modeling tool built on the Open Source Physics (OSP) Java framework. It is designed to be used in physics education.

This course provides an overview of the historical and modern context and operation of free and open source software (FOSS) communities and associated software projects. The practical objective of the course is to teach students how they can begin to participate in a FOSS project in order to contribute to and improve aspects of the software that they feel are wrong. Students will learn some important FOSS tools and techniques for contributing to projects and how to set up their own FOSS projects.

Good series of tertiary lectures.