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Seen on Open Knowledge Foundation "Recently Brazilian government released the Kit de Dados Abertos (open data toolkit): The toolkit is made up of documents describing the process, methods and techniques for implementing an open data policy within an institution. Its goal is to both demystify the logic of opening up data and to share with public employees observed best practices that have emerged from a number of Brazilian government initiatives. The toolkit focuses on the Plano de Dados Abertos - PDA (Open Data Plan) as the guiding instrument where commitments, agenda and policy implementation cycles in the institution are registered. making it a state policy and not just a transitory governmental action. It is organizsd to facilitate the implementation of the main activities cycles that must be observed in an institution and provides links and manuals to assist in these activities. Emphasis is given to the actors/roles involved in each step and their responsibilities. Is also helps to define a central person to monitor and maintain the PDA. The following diagram summarises the macro steps of implementing an open data policy in an institution - See more at: http://blog.okfn.org/2014/10/07/branzilian-government-develops-toolkit-to-guide-institutions-in-both-planning-and-carrying-out-open-data-initatives/#sthash.kNvTB6nC.dpuf and http://kit.dados.gov.br/

The article provides brief history of information overload and its effects. The author provides 10 activities that help to cope with information overload, each of them is consists of several activities. The article includes also a paragraph on the role of librarians and other information professionals in dealing with information overload. The article pays special attention to filtering the received information, RSS overload techniques, phone overload, e-mail overload, multimedia overload etc.

The New Yorker covered the issue of copyright in a recent issue: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/crooner-rights-spat The cover many of the points raised in this course, as well as some of the issues relating to copyright in the digital age. An interesting read!

Nice find! It has some great examples of American copyright laws and is historically grounded. It's always easier to understand when fun/relevant examples are used (like Rod Stewart's head, in this article!).

Learning and teaching will be severely damaged, many publishing companies will close and thousands of jobs will be lost if the government implements its proposal to remove any choice in which textbooks schools use. Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga published the policy proposal in the September 4 Government Gazette and invited public comment on it.

Check out the 10 new breakthrough technologies 2014 on MIT technology review

"The five-chapter essay (5000+ words) is titled, "From Papyrus to Pixels: The Digital Transformation Has Only Just Begun" and is available in web or book-like formats. It can also be listened to. It includes several charts and a bibliography is also included."

Very good essay about the future of books. I particularly liked chapter two where you get a kind of mixed image of the current state of the book; on the one hand, it is stated that e-book sales are declining to the benefit of the physical book, but on the other hand it discusses how giants like Amazon has a very negative effect on the book business. Interesting for sure!

You are here: Home / Uncat / Publishing: The Economist Publishes an Online Essay About the Future of the Book Filed by on The five-chapter essay (5000+ words) is titled, "From Papyrus to Pixels: The Digital Transformation Has Only Just Begun" and is available in web or book-like formats.

BC Open Textbooks is an initiative started by the province of British Columbia in Canada. It is open textbooks adapted and created by BC faculty. It's difficult to tell which texts are complete and ready for use as Tony Bates incomplete text that I created another post about appears on the same page with complete texts (eg Chemistry, Biology Geography.) All the texts can be modified through Creative Commons licensing. This project has been creating concern for publishers who stand to loose business in BC and other provinces if the texts get adopted outside of BC. Initially, the project was focused on creating "a collection of open textbooks aligned with the top 40 highest-enrolled subject areas in the province. A second phase was announced in the spring of 2014 to add 20 textbooks targeting trades and skills training." Initially they looked for existing Creative Commons books they could adapt and they adapted 8 textbooks. From inception to fall 2014, 2244 students have used their open texts for a savings of $353,000 or $157 per student. The aim is to reach 200,000 students annually so they are at .6% and save each $900-$1500/year, still quite a way to go. Wondering how much this project is costing taxpayers, I googled and found this article http://www.ousa.ca/2013/04/24/textbooks/ which claims $600k-$1m/year. So the government has spent $1.2 - $2 million to save students $350k over the past two years. Still a long way to go to break even. In summary, 65 texts published, 45 adoptions, 2244 student users, for a savings of $353k to date. If this was a traditional textbook publishing company, they'd soon be out of business if they weren't already.

Thank for sharing, I believe that the conclusions that this article leaves us are not surprising, although yes very interesting. "Recently, the Babson Survey Research Group and Pearson conducted a survey of nearly 8,000 faculty members in higher education to find out more about how faculty are using social media. While we often post infographics showing trends or results from specific studies here at Edudemic, I found the results of this survey particularly interesting - perhaps because they were so different from what I expected." Julia Echeverria

You are so, so lucky. Here in South Africa, we are regressing, not even looking at online textbooks, but trying to reduce textbooks to only one per subject. The textbook crisis: http://mg.co.za/article/2013-08-23-00-south-africas-hidden-textbook-crisis and the regressive "solution" http://mg.co.za/article/2014-10-10-single-textbook-option-slammed. It is very frustrating for me, knowing all the possibilities, but not having any agency to get through to the authorities here.Llibraries are also failing horribly in advocating for the solutions that ARE available.

Wikipedia provides Internet users with millions of articles on a broad range of topics, and commonly ranks first in search engines. But its reliability and credibility fall well short of the standards for a school paper.

Me parece que wikipedia sigue siendo un recurso de importancia, y los diez puntos por los que no habria que utilizar o citar Wikipedia, pueden transformarse ne los diez puntos a considerar al consultar y citar Wikipedia. Escritores de la talla de Gabriel Zaid la usan extensivamente y aparece citada en sus artículos y ensayes, sobre todo en Letras Libres; de modo que la vigilancia heurística debería permitirnos usar este recurso.

However, it offers a valuable starting point from which students can go from understanding the topic, to thoroughly researching it in primary sources.

Interesting article on Twitters use outside of social interactions Twitter has been increasingly share-y with its enormous data set. Given the recent $10 million grant to MIT to analyze and put social media data to use, how grand are Twitter's research aspirations? Twitter reports about 500 million tweets are sent every day, from 271 million users (the population of the United States is 317 million) in more than 35 different languages.

A few years ago I was taking a tour of a dome shaped house, and the architect explained to me that domes are an optical illusion. Whenever someone enters a room, their eyes inadvertently glance up at the corners of the room to give them the contextual dimensions of the space they're in.

Why do peers help peers to share and co-produce knowledge? Research suggests that there is a whole set of motivations that makes people share their knowledge, a mixture between altruistic and self-serving motives

I agree that the 14 reasons what makes people share knowledge. great learning to share and great sharing to learn. reciprocating just like teaching and learning vis a vis learning with teaching.

Learning modes and principles of open, commons-based peer-production therefor have the potential to provide the "gold standard" of enhancing future skills, competencies, connections, capacities of people and their organisations on a global scale. In short: peer-to-peer learning around open, commons-based peer-production is a game changer in international development cooperation.

Fair Use as Market F...

An interesting overview of the challenges that the open education faced in the last 10 years. The "Last mile" part emphasizes the role of a teacher in guiding students to the right resources available online.