Group items tagged

Worldwide learning network of shared teaching and learning materials made freely available online. Grouped by subject area and grade level

OER Commons is a dynamic digital content hub, offering a suite of OER implementation supports.

A well developed website for Open educational resources

Connected learning is when you're pursuing expertise around something you care deeply about, and you're supported by friends & institutions who share this common passion that is tuned to the demands and opportunities of the digital age. This is the first in a series of three short animated films that explores why today's learners need a learning approach designed for our times, what connected learning looks like, and what is at stake if we do not make learning relevant. To learn more, visit connectedlearning.tv/what-is-connected-l­earning

ThinkLink Resource

A personal view of Open Access Science. It's part of a weekly series on Open Access from Open Access Button, so I will be posting them as they become available ... "We caught up with Graham Steel, a tireless advocate for Open Access who believes in sharing information as widely and as easily as possible. A native of Glasgow, Scotland, Graham works as a property claims adjuster/recovery specialist. After losing his sibling to a rare condition known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), Graham became involved in patient advocacy work, and more recently, in lobbying for open access to published scientific research. He acts in advisory capacities to the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Public Library of Science (PLOS) and Digital Science".

Researchers and academics spend a lot of time documenting the sources of the ideas, methods and evidence they have drawn on in their own writings. But Patrick Dunleavy writes that our existing citation and referencing practices are now woefully out of date and no longer fit for purpose.

I think that LSE is doing a lot of useful work for change the way scholars work and communicate. But the structure of the whole system is solid rock (still).

I was lucky to be in Berlin with some colleagues earlier this month for the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival and associated fringe events. There's really too much to distill into a short post-from Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, making the case for " Embracing the open opportunity," to Patrick Alley's breathtaking accounts of how Global Witness uses information, to expose crime and corruption in countries around the world.

A useful summary of some of the key take-aways from the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival, courtesy of Tariq Khokhar From the article: 1. There are some great open data initiatives around the world and two common themes are the need for a strong community of technologically literate data re-users, and the sustained effort needed within governments to change how they create, manage and publish data in the long term. 2. Spreadsheets are code and we can adopt some software engineering practices to make much better use of them. There are a number of powerful tools and approaches to data handing being pioneered by the scientific community and those working in other fields can adopt and emulate many of them. 3. Open data fundamentally needs open source software. App reuse often doesn't happen because contexts are too different. Reusable software components can reduce the development overhead for creating locally customized civic software applications and a pool of high quality civic software components is a valuable public good worth contributing to. Reading time: 15mins

I see that Google are the sponsors of the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival but despite having little knowledge about Google's role and interest in the Open Knowledge , I also feel they are the culprit when it comes to data manipulative for their own profit motives.

Who owns the Data or the question should be, who is manipulating the Data? The article by Alistair Croll on who owns the Data asks big questions but fails short to highlight the fact that there is someone out there manipulating the well intended, innocent data into their own profit motive agendas. Many times, I have received emails, phone calls and SMS from sales people trying to sell me something. How they got my contact details is definitely my guess that someone is busy manipulating the data, I gave away for profit motives. At the end of the article the writer makes an opinion that, we are using the internet for free? Which I disagree, because our data makes and runs the internet. Without our data, the internet will not be the internet. Without our data on Facebook, facebooks or twitter will be blank, no value and worthless. If companies are paying people to participate in surveys and opinions, then it means our free data we upload on the internet, facebook and twitter is a payment for us to use the internet. After all we have to pay to the internet service providers for us to access to use the internet, and face book. Or someone is even suppose to pay for our data, in fact we have made things easy for the marketing people who now just sit behind their laptops and manipulate our free given data for their own consumptions. Or maybe I should console myself that, since the article is old, maybe someone has answered my question?

A mi me pareció que el artículo señala dos puntos centrales, aunque resolver el tema es una empresa peliaguda. El asunto de lo gratuito en un sistema basado en la ganancia y la capacidad de aprovechar los resquicios que abren las situaciones nuevas y una buena dosis de desorientación generalizada: 1. As we use the Internet for "free," we have to remember that if we're not paying for something, we're not the customer. We are in fact the product being sold - or, more specifically, our data is. 2. The important question isn't who owns the data. Ultimately, we all do. A better question is, who owns the means of analysis? Because that's how, as Brand suggests, you get the right information in the right place. The digital divide isn't about who owns data - it's about who can put that data to work. Tal vez, como menciona natashasana, el problema sea más complejo, y reducir la manipulación al negocio deje temas relavantes fuera. Y la información que usan/manipulan es la que todos aportamos. Cierto, pero no todos la usamos o aprovechamos de la misma forma.

Considering digital identities, here's an interesting article over a new form of data privacy: our health. As health devices (i.e. smart watches) become more available and mainstream we should consider what type of data we want 'floating' around the internet such as our weights/BMIs or whatever other personal information the health device may obtain. This is one issue that the increase in technology and social communication has brought to us (not entirely a bad thing)…more personal data becoming easily accessible for advertisers. "This week, Apple has updated its privacy policy to try and ensure that developers don't market personal healthcare data to advertisers and brokers. The company is betting big on its new HealthKit platform, part of iOS 8. It gives developers a set of APIs to share their apps' data with Apple's […]"

Digital media is changing how scholars interact, collaborate, write and publish. Here, Jessie Daniels describes how to be a scholar now, when peer-reviewed articles can begin as Tweets and blog posts. In this new environment, scholars are able to create knowledge in ways that are more open, more fluid, and more easily read by wider audiences.

Las personas comparten más información por las redes sociales que por cualquier otro canal. Sin embargo, cada vez existen más amenazas que aprovechan las vulnerabilidades de las cuentas personales y corporativas (exploits), por lo que es necesario encontrar nuevas formas de proteger la identidad digital de los consumidores.

A look at how fitness tracking might be expanded to wider use/tracking in the workplace. Here theoretical and positive, but could be sinister. I thought this was interesting, especially after reading the 2011 article "Why Privacy Matters" https://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/ shared in our OKMOOC group.

The BCN Open Data Portal makes public the data generated by the Barcelona City Council, excluding those subject to privacy, property or security restrictions. Data are available to everyone in standard, open, digital formats, that are clearly structured and comprehensible. In my opinion, this is a valuable example of how governments at different levels (in this case the municipality, which is the level of government closest to the citizen), can make efforts to facilitate access to the great amount of data they collect and to encourage citizens to reuse them.

Ms Kasian-Lew's article have a balanced view on the general fear about online privacy. We have no real choice but sharing in our digital world. I think we should learn to be aware of sharing and learn to live with a level publicity. I see it as a process of growing more conscious about our activities and the consequences. On the other hand we need to defend ourselves against the ill use of our shared information. We should inspire and support laws against it. And we might share good and bad examples and use the power of sharing. She is right awareness is fine, fear does not help.

PhD Theses are normally locked away digitally. They cost 20 billion dollars to create and we waste much of this value. By making them open we can use software …

Thank you very much for sharing this presentation. I completely agree that today science is done in C20th way and communicated in C19th way. The risk is lose the power and possibilities opened in the C21th, mainly because of the power of science publishing moguls & others.

This is an interesting presentation given at 'EUNIS 2014 Conference: Higher Education in the Digital Era' by professors from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Although the presentation concentrates on UAB experience and the COURSERA platform, it gives also a European perspective on use of MOOCs. According to the presentation, there were 510 MOOCs in April 2014 in Europe. Some findings are especially thought provoking. The UAB course on Egyptology had 25350 initially enrolled students. Only 1/3 of them watched the first video, and a completion certificate was issued to only 2950 students (11.7%). Another course (Pre-Calculus) had only 0.01% completion ratio. Something to really think about!