Group items tagged

Kay, R., Lauriclla, S. (2011). Exploring the Benefits and Challenges of Using Laptop Computers in Higher Education Classrooms: A Formative Analysis. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology. 37:1

a. Laptops and mobile devices are ubiquitous in todays classrooms as students are digital natives. Because of decreasing prices of technology over the past few decades, an overwhelming majority of the university students surveyed own a laptop (87%). Because of this quick onset of technological adoption, culture has lagged, in terms of re-defining the social institutions that such mobile and computer technologies affect. According to this analysis, students feel that the use of a laptop helps in aiding studies, is useful for gathering course and supplementary materials and engaging in peer collaboration. Several challenges have been noted: communication based challenges, relating to social media, email and messaging services; and entertainment based challenges, relating to media consumption. These challenges serve as potential sources of distraction for the student using the technology and others. In their findings, 16% of students reported being distracted by pornography during class, on their own or others' computer screens, which ranked higher than computer games, at 1%. The authors conclude that the benefits of laptop use in class outweigh the challenges 2:1. Possibly, if the functionality of student laptops are integrated into course curriculum further, students can benefit from further peer collaboration, increased academic benefit and decreased distractions.

"Every day we face challenges - from the personal, such as the quickest way to get to work, or what we should eat, to global ones like climate change and how to sustainably feed and educate seven billion people on this planet. At Open Knowledge we believe that opening up data - and turning that data into insight - can be crucial to addressing these challenges, and building a society in which is everyone - not just the few - are empowered with the knowledge they need to understand and effect change."

really good! I think this is a very good summary about what we are learning in this course: "We need to create a culture of "open data makers", people able and ready to make apps and insights with open data. We need to connect open data with those who have the best questions and the biggest needs - a healthcare worker in Zambia, the London commuter travelling home - and go beyond the data geeks and the tech savvy to make data be useful to all."

Mark Thorley (Conventry University): Participatory music culture: the challenges for identity, creativity and recognition The advent of recording technology served to break down the link between musician and audience (Eisenberg 2005), and the music participant became the music consumer. Emerging digital technologies are now reversing this trend and music participation is all the more possible.

The Digital Humanities field is addressing this at the academic level. There is so much resistance to collaboration when sharing means someone else may publish your idea first, while at the same time, multiple operating/networked computers can leveraged to do a lot more work and discover a lot more when people work together. HASTAC is a good resource for learning about digital collaboration in the Humanities. In fact they have just launched a competition about building trust in collaborative environments focusing on education, youth and privacy issues.

"Increased access to information and knowledge, underpinned by universal literacy, is an essential pillar of sustainable development. Greater availability of quality information and data and the involvement of communities in its creation will provide a fuller, more transparent allocation of resources."

"In this context, a right to information would be transformational. Access to information supports development by empowering people, especially marginalised people and those living in poverty, to: - Exercise their civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. - Be economically active, productive and innovative. - Learn and apply new skills. - Enrich cultural identity and expression. - Take part in decision-making and participate in an active and engaged civil society. - Create community-based solutions to development challenges. - Ensure accountability, transparency, good governance, participation and empowerment. - Measure progress on public and private commitments on sustainable development. "

"The focus of this paper is on describing how, after countless millennia of gentle evolutionary change, the Internet is challenging us to discover new forms of sociality and, with it, new forms of social literacy to help us become more effective learners and citizens."

The competencies discussed by Dr. Jenkins in the Module 3 video, for those who are interested, are: "Play - the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving Performance - the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery Simulation - the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes Appropriation - the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content Multitasking - the ability to scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details. Distributed Cognition - the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities Collective Intelligence - the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal Judgment - the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources Transmedia Navigation - the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities Networking - the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information Negotiation - the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms."

An occasional paper on digital media and learning. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the. 21 st. Century. Henry Jenkins

New Visions in Citizen Science by Anne Bowser and Lea Shanley: * different models that support public contribution, potential challenges, and positive impacts that projects can have on scientific literacy, research, management, and public policy. * Illustrate how citizen science functions at its best demonstrating how open innovation can address agency-specific challenges in new and compelling ways.

Local Contexts is a new forum for applying Traditional Knowledge licenses or labels to materials from Indigenous communities. They work a lot like Creative Commons licenses. There are often different categories of Indigenous knowledge meant only for the community, or only for women, or only for leaders, and these licenses offer a way to label materials accordingly. These labels and licenses are added onto existing copyright, which is often held by the person who made a tangible material rather than the community where the idea comes from (an anthropologist who filmed a traditional ceremony owns the copyright on the film, and the community has no copyright). These TK labels are asking people who come across materials like this to think about how they are using the materials, and to think about whose intellectual property they are. This is a very new initiative, but a really valuable tool. This is part of a different conversation that challenges how we normally talk about copyright and intellectual property.

This article employs queer theory and challenges the notion of fitting emergent open access practices within current frameworks of academic success. While I was partially surprised by some of the assertions made early on in the article regarding open access journals being perceived as not as valuable as more traditional journal models, I think in part I may just hang out in academic circles that gravitate towards open access (hence... this course). But, I am very compelled by the conclusions made by Gurfinkel. That is, rather than trying to figure out how to systematize open access models to be respected within current academic standards, open access (as informed by queer theory, in this article) challenges us to investigate and question our standards in a more radical way. For example, in open access peer review models or post-publication review, the notion of a "peer" and thus who are considered credible and worthy sources of knowledge--and consequentially, what "knowledge" is-- are put into question. So, more than trying to figure out how to systematize and make more "legitimate" open access models, Gurfinkel wants us to ask what about the academy currently excludes open access models from being meaningful and legitimate practices in the first place.

Mike McConnell has attended many of the IWMW events which have been held since its launch in 1997. This year's event made a particular impression, particularly with its focus on 'digital' rather than 'web'. In this guest post Mike reflects on the event and describes the moves towards digital taking place at his host institution,...

Practical Action is an international development charity. We use sustainable technology to challenge poverty, working with poor women and men around the world. Open Knowledge if it can not be transformed into some development then, we don't need to advocate for it or our advocacy is fruitless

On my navigation searching for initiatives to see how Open Knowledge are making the difference on the Latin America society I found this... nowadays unfortunately on South America (and in other places as well) open knowledge initiative are not divulgated. Universities seem to be not interested about promoting these initiatives and few people know about them. I was amazed reading the text from Francisco J. García-Peñalvo (Open Knowledge. Challenges and Facts) and seeing that a lot of Universities on Europe and North America are promoting and working with open and free access to texts and online courses. It's incredible how people have the possibility of learning in a world that each day is more competitive. I really hope that this great news about Brazil helps more and more people to understand the impact and the changings on the educational process.

Open Access also opens up a much wider ability to adopt other forms of information transmission than print. The embedding of the videos into this MOOC is a case in point. As librarians, we are then challenged to ensure that our intermediation, whether through Information Literacy training or direct reference assistance, takes into account the growing need of users to be able to make sense of all forms of communication. This fairly short article addresses this issue and states the challenge we face succintly and to the point!

"This raises the interesting and important question of whether publication in an OA journal represents the end of a process or the beginning of a different one. The difference is marketing, a term that is often misunderstood in scholarly circles. Marketing means creating demand for something. Traditional publishers do this with their brands and (for books) their authors. For OA publishers the challenge is to continue to keep pushing a particular paper after it has appeared online. There are many ways to do this, of which simply making the content openly available is one (allowing an article to get indexed by search engines and pointed to by bloggers and others). But to continue to keep the article in the eyes of its prospective readers, new means of attracting attention have to be developed. "

Thanks for sharing! This is very helpful for a project (short vid) I will be making!

"This report offers practical design advice to public managers and political leaders who are facing complex, dynamic public challenges involving multiple stakeholders on issues or problems where there is no clearly defined solution. In these situations, open project approaches have the potential to spark large-scale activity that could fundamentally change society."