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Yousef Eldin explores the impact that new developments in mobile phone technology are having on life in some of Uganda's most isolated communities

A lot of kids use smartphones or tablet everyday, and they even do not need their parents to tell them how to use these devices, it is like kids have the innate ability to use the technological devices. There are debates on whether touchscreen technology is good or bad for kids. For my personal opinion, touchscreen technology would make them lack communication skill and social skill. However, by providing sound effects, colours and moving objects on the screen, it could get kids' attention and interest to learn something they feel really boring such as math, by this way they could learn faster and understand better. Therefore, touchscreen technology is not totally bad or good for kids, it depends on how parents help kids to balance how much time they could spend on touchscreen technology. It seems the only way for kids, because they are too young to have self control.

In everyday life we are learning continually from each other. Whatever the situation, most of us draw on the knowledge, skills and experience of our friends and colleagues. Within any educational setting learners naturally engage in informal peer learning to make sense of their course, test their ideas and share their concerns.

Peer learning is engaging, and researches say that people learns most effectively when they are interacting with each other. It creates this network of knowledge when you share and connect with people, it not only benefits the individual, but benefits everyone as a whole. It also relieves the pressure of University funding with teachers having to teach such a large class, which affects the quality of learning as well. With peer learning, students engage with one another, and will eventually find the correct answer. It is not independent learning, this is interdependent learning.

Thank you for your share. I think this is a great article that introduces the potential of peer learning in higher education from the teacher's perspective. I agree that connected learning does a great job in promoting student's interactivity, creativity, motivation and interest in learning a particular topic with peers. In addition, peer learning provides learners with opportunities to collaborate and learn a subject together, which might maximize the productivity if used in a correct way. Peers and collaborative learners can do their own research separately, and meet together to discuss and express different opinions on the issue, which can inspire student's deep thinking. However, peer learning and collaborative learning is not always superior to individual work, or contributing to the learning result of every individual. Sometimes it might decrease the learning productivity if the group members or peer partners over reply on others in the group without doing much themselves, or if they didn't communicate well. Thus it's important to practice students learning ability and teacher's facilitating ability in peer learning or collaborative learning.

Join this excellent community. Check the free webinars with certification at the end.

Open Education Week is a global, community event that seeks to raise awareness about the benefits of free and open sharing in education, especially Open Educational Resources (OER).

Three things guide everything we do: openness, community and peer learning. Interesting website.

SciStarter connects citizen scientists with citizen science projects. Professional and amateur scientists, teachers, students and people of all ages share, find and join exciting citizen science projects and communities.

"Unnoticed by most of its readers, Wikipedia continues to undergo dramatic changes, as its sister project Wikidata introduces a new multilingual "Wikipedia for data" (http://www.wikidata.org) to manage the factual information of the popular online encyclopedia. With Wikipedia's data becoming cleaned and integrated in a single location, opportunities arise for many new applications."

The ECOPSI team published information regarding the project through various print and online mediums in 2012 and 2013. The reference list below itemizes each of the documents into the following categories: Journal Article Books Magazine Articles Conferences and Presentations Online Dissemination Journal Article Tench, R., Vercic , D., Tkalac, A., Juma, H.

Scientific journals are surely important. They provide the most effective means for disseminating and archiving scientific results, and so are a key part of an enterprise on which our health, security, and prosperity ultimately depend. Publications are used by universities, funding agencies, and others as a primary measure of research productivity and impact. They play a decisive role in hiring, promotion, and salary decisions, and in the ranking of departments, institutions, even nations. With big rewards tied to publication, it is not surprising that some people engage in unethical behavior, abuse, and downright fraud.

It's absolutely shameful that so few library and information science journals are open access: if any professional associations have a professional imperative towards improving the scholarly and cultural communication processes, it is librarians and other information professionals. This substantial (but still woefully short) list of open access journals that publish on library and information science will be a great resource for those of us in this course who are aspiring or practicing librarians. As we've heard over and over again throughout this course, advocacy is absolutely essential if open access principles are ever to receive wider acceptance and implementation; that's why it's important that, as practicing information professionals, we use open access publications for our research whenever we can. Lists like this one allow us to streamline our research in ways that align most closely with our professional values, though of course currently there just isn't enough published to allow us to rely exclusively on open access material for our own work. But having lists like this also allows us to determine where our research should be submitted; otherwise, by publishing in paid journals, we are only making things worse. This all being said, most lists like this that I could find online were either outdated and incomplete, part of a larger database that made hyperlinking difficult, or-like this one-they lacked any explanation of what sorts of articles could be found within; even this one hasn't been updated in eighteen months. But as is so often the case with open access, we must take what we can get.

Hi, thank you for sharing the link! I agree with your comments. However, I am very pleased that I found my professional journal on the list :)

The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to working with community members and visitors to make cultural institutions more dynamic, relevant, essential places. It was written by me, Nina Simon. I'm an exhibit designer, museum consultant, and the author of the Museum 2.0 blog. The book is available for purchase, perusal, and discussion.

Open Access Week is less than a month away! Now in its eighth year, Open Access Week is an international event that celebrates the wide-ranging benefits of enabling open access to information and research-as well as the dangerous costs of keeping knowledge locked behind publisher paywalls.

Hi Kim, Thanks for sharing! Until now, I'd never heard of Open Access Week. I'd love to hear how both you and Federico have been involved in the past and what your communities (both online and off, local and nonlocal) have done to highlight open access during this week. I did a bit of searching, and it turns out that my school has a whole series of events planned for OEW, including some super interesting sounding lecture and a few documentary screenings. I'm very excited! http://oaweek.open.ubc.ca/ Amanda

Knowledge should be able to share with people, knowledge should not be trapped behind a paywall. For those who needs the information but couldn't get the information because they need to pay for it, this doesn't make any sense to me. So many paper and research by scientists are funding by government which the tax payers have contributed a lot on funding. Thus people should have access to those information.

"This paper interrogates and situates theoretically from a Marxist perspective various aspects and tensions that inhere in the contemporary academic publishing environment. The focus of the article is on journal publishing. The paper examines both the expanding capitalist control of the academic publishing industry and some of the efforts being made by those seeking to resist and subvert the capitalist model of academic publishing. The paper employs the concepts of primitive accumulation and alienation as a theoretical register for apprehending contemporary erosions of the knowledge commons through the enclosure effects that follow in the wake of capitalist control of academic publishing. Part of my purpose with this discussion will be to advance the case that despite a relatively privileged position vis-à-vis other workers, academic cognitive labourers are caught up within and subject to the constraining and exploitative practices of capitalist production processes."

From this article: Many organizations wanting to create educational materials find out during negotiations with authors that most of them are ultimately willing to openly license their materials. However this often requires overcoming their personal fears about OERs. Many authors are unfamiliar with the concept of an open license and open educational resources. Even if they hear about them, Saylor.org found that "chief concerns included the loss of control of materials, commercial reproduction, and loss of traffic/ad revenue" (6). And a chart : Fig. 1. What are most typical arguments you hear against Open Educational Resources? OER community experts survey.

Criteria that can be used to distinguish between popular magazine articles, articles from trade publications, and scholarly journal articles