Group items tagged

The principle of the Panopticon still works in today's "big data" society. As we get more and more assesses to information on the Internet, our personal information is also being exposed to others. However, as an user commented, "there is a place for surveillance -- but not when its scope and power has the ability to undermine our networks and connections that are essential for fostering healthy human development and communities -- which is the best protection against harm". The invisibility of the power, to some extent, builds up the self-suiveillance.

In 1990, after seven years of teaching at Harvard, Eric Mazur, now Balkanski professor of physics and applied physics, was delivering clear, polished lectures and demonstrations and getting high student evaluations for his introductory Physics 11 course, populated mainly by premed and engineering students who were successfully solving complicated problems. Then he discovered that his success as a teacher "was a complete illusion, a house of cards."

The thing that I liked most about this article (and I really liked it!) was the mention of numerous research studies that have looked into the effects of active learning. Also how Mazur himself collects data on his students' results. The fact that interactive learning can be backed by empirical research only adds to its strength as an effective pedagogical method.

Ricochet is an open source effort to make it possible for you to chat privately. In this article we get some insight on why this program is important. Ricochet should be introduced in an user friendly version this November.

Ricochet is an open source effort to make it possible for you to chat privately. In this article we get some insight on why this program is important. Ricochet should be introduced in an user friendly version this November.

Surveillance and society

This guide is intended to be a practical tool to help busy researchers, and the librarians who support them, make the transition to OA. The focus herein is on freely available online resources that will assist in making research publications OA; the closely associated, and rapidly growing, area of research data is beyond the scope of this column.

OpenGeoportal.org is a new site that brings together geospatial professionals, developers, metadata specialists, and librarians to coordinate the Open Geoportal (OGP) project. The Open Geoportal is a collaboratively developed, open source, federated web application to rapidly discover, preview, and retrieve geospatial data from multiple repositories.

A number of universities are partnering on developing geospatial metadata and a tool that can scrape datasets from various sources to display (and overlay!) on a single, federated interface.

Have you ever been in a similar situation? It´s important to know your rights on the street as well as on the internet, does anyone know a good resource for reading about what our rights are on the internet? Besides that, does the internet give us more freedom or does it take it away by monitoring us and making our personal profiles into data? I think that was the transcending question and dilemma which the first module presented, so do we accept the internet as an oxymoron, if not what is happening in the world inregards to being able to opt out from being monitored and used as a statistic and still enjoy the benefits of internet.

The issue of digital identity seems to be causing a lot of waves on the online community. people are really indeed concerned about their privacy and its management. Internet privacy tools have an unfortunate but well-deserved reputation for being technically difficult and bothersome. There's a persistent story that says that there is an intrinsic, irreducible complexity to the problem of keeping your communications from being snooped on and keeping your data from leaking that makes it the exclusive domain of spies and the professionally paranoid.

"To what extent is it possible - or desirable - to disengage from the growing cultural database? How do surveillance and "sousveillance" play a role in the policing of individuals by institutions, and vice versa? Can we disentangle the issues surrounding localized record keeping from globalized control over the archives? In this article, we discuss a range of cultural practices, epistemological regimes and intellectual discourses that have emerged to cope with these questions, and we assess the strategic options for communitarian and individual agency in an era we describe as "the end of forgetting."* I included this link as the article has an excellent model to describe the different strategic responses of agency to the openness of data and the resultant privacy issues.

Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators. Today Open Knowledge and the Open Definition Advisory Council announced the release of version 2.0 of the Open Definition. The Definition âsets out principles that define openness in relation to data and content,â and is the baseline from which various public licenses are measured.

Reuters / Eric Thayer Internet giant Twitter is suing the Department of Justice in hopes that the United States government will let the web company publish more details about requests made for user data. The complaint, filed in federal court on Tuesday this week, asks the Justice Dept.

An interesting read. Freedom of speech is allowed as long it does not relate to the US government. One important thing to understand here is that the flow of information can never be stopped or banned (at least only temporarily.) There is no such thing as good or bad information - it all depends on who interprets the information and what point of views these people have.

Regarding Open Source/Access, good article on whether students consider Wikipedia a good source for information. Since its introduction in 2001, Wikipedia has grown to host more than 19 million articles with 82,000 contributors in more than 270 languages. Wikipedia has 400 million unique viewers each month as of March 2011, According to ComScore, an Internet marketing research company that provides marketing data to large Internet businesses.

A necessary ingredient for the discussion about online identities is the subject of privacy. Here the concept of big privacy explained by Ann Cavoukian

This article describes how the Notification Service of SHARE (SHared Access Research Ecosystem) has come about. It clearly specifies the associations and organisations which have collaborated to alert scientists and others to the status of the latest scientific research being conducted to drive their mutual goals of the advancement of science and access to this research for all.

This ground-breaking text offers a fresh perspective on the governance of science from the standpoint of social and political theory. Science has often been seen as the only institution that embodies the elusive democratic ideal of the 'open society'.

Since I'm in South Africa, ... --- "My campaign has been working on the National Key Points Act for over a year, and some of the people in my team have been working on it for more than a decade. In this session, people who'd never even heard of the National Key Points broke new ground within 20 minutes."