Group items tagged

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.

"Responding to rapid and steep increases in the cost of scientific journals, a growing number of scholars and librarians have advocated "open access" (OA) to the scientific literature. OA publishing models are having a significant impact on the dissemination of scientific information. Despite the success of these initiatives, their impact on researchers in the developing world is uncertain. This article analyses major OA approaches adopted in the industrialized world (so-called Green OA, Gold OA, and OA mandates, as well as non-OA information philanthropy) as they relate to the consumption and production of research in the developing world. The article concludes that while the consumption of scientific literature by developing world researchers is likely to be significantly enhanced through such programs, promoting the production of research in the developing world requires additional measures. These could include the introduction of better South-focused journal indexing systems that identify high-quality journals published in the developing world, coupled with the adjustment of academic norms to reward publication in such journals. Financial models must also be developed to decrease the reliance by institutions in the developing world on information philanthropy and to level the playing field between OA journals in industrialized and developing countries."

Initiative that defines the term 'open source' and a number of licences that operate under that name.

With these resources, you can create or participate in collaborative efforts to develop tools and methods for online education.

Many Open Education Resources (OER) have been introduced by governments, universities, and individuals within the past few years. OERs provide teaching and learning materials that are freely available and offered online for anyone to use. Whether you're an instructor, student, or self-learner, you have access to full courses, modules, syllabi, lectures, assignments, quizzes, activities, games, simulations, and tools to create these components.

Thanks. An extensive list of resources. It may have been easier to use the list if it wasn't categorised only alphabetically but also further grouped into categories. It's still a valuable collection.

Some preliminary findings from the MOOC Research Initiative.

Interesting that most people who do well in MOOCs are generally people who have a "growth mindset" and are not necessarily the people in most need of learning. I think any research on MOOCs is interesting since it is such a new phenomenon and it's going to be interesting to see how they evolve.

Very interesting indeed that it is not necessarily those people who are most in need of learning who do well in MOOCs. The question is how MOOC's can, indeed, become more beneficial and attractive to those who need them the most. Access to internet in rural areas around the globe, and availability of cheap computers are both key.

"The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was a three-year research and implementation initiative that took place between March 2010 and August 2013. Hosted by the University of Cape Town, the programme engaged the Universities of Botswana, Namibia and Mauritius in a process aimed at better understanding the dynamics around scholarly communication in the Southern African higher education environment and advancing the open access agenda for the purpose of increasing the visibility of African research. This work was made possible by a grant from the Canadian International Development Research Center (IDRC). This report synthesizes research and findings from the four institutional case studies conducted at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia. It provides an overview the scholarly communication activity systems at work in these four Southern African universities."

Thanks for this article. I think it gives a great overview of the current landscape of scholarly publishing in Africa, and concisely states the problems of visibilities (or the lack thereof).

This post is part of our Open Access Week blog series to highlight great work in Open Access communities around the world. To coincide with Open Access Week, Open Knowledge is launching a new initiative focusing on the future of open access in the humanities and social sciences.

I've been employing Mr Google to try to help me determine how much OER might be used in post-secondary institutions in Canada and came across this document, which I think might be a slide deck turned into a PDF and without the accompanying script it's a little cryptic. The title is misleading, as it's the view from Western Canada, BC in particular. Most of the main OER initiatives I've been hearing about are in the west, I posted links to the BC Open Textbook initiative and to a particular text previously. This particular document

This is really a good initiative. One can only wish that African states finally realize that internet access is no longer a privilege but a right because without it such brilliant initiatives do not spread to all corners of the developing world.

I like the "equalization" word, even if it seems to make it too simple, but it is also making it sound possible

73 OER repositories including their name, the URL and the country of the initiative. Feel free to suggest more

Thank you for sharing a very valuable resource!

"MELIBEA is a Spanish database that uses a composite formula with eight weighted conditions to estimate the effectiveness of Open Access mandates (registered in ROARMAP). We analyzed 68 mandated institutions for publication years 2011-2013 to determine how well the MELIBEA score and its individual conditions predict what percentage of published articles indexed by Web of Knowledge is deposited in each institution's OA repository, and when. We found a small but significant positive correlation (0.18) between MELIBEA score and deposit percentage. We also found that for three of the eight MELIBEA conditions (deposit timing, internal use, and opt-outs), one value of each was strongly associated with deposit percentage or deposit latency (immediate deposit required, deposit required for performance evaluation, unconditional opt-out allowed for the OA requirement but no opt-out for deposit requirement). When we updated the initial values and weights of the MELIBEA formula for mandate effectiveness to reflect the empirical association we had found, the score's predictive power doubled (.36). There are not yet enough OA mandates to test further mandate conditions that might contribute to mandate effectiveness, but these findings already suggest that it would be useful for future mandates to adopt these three conditions so as to maximize their effectiveness, and thereby the growth of OA. "

Strings attached: I needed an id!

OER-Brazil project The Brazilian Project on Open Educational Resources: Challenges and Prospects (Project REA.br) began in 2008 with the visit of an international delegation to the Ministry of Education and conducting a series of awareness raising events in Sao Paulo and Brasilia. REA.br The project was founded by Carolina Rossini in 2008 and is one of the first projects in Brazil that tries to appropriate the reality and the prospects Brazilian international discussion of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Education. Has the support of a passionate community: the Community REA-Brazil. This community is made ​​up of educators, scientists, engineers, ICT professionals, journalists, lawyers and all those who believe in open education and open educational resources. In Brazil, the project has partnerships or receives institutional support from Educadigital Institute, the School of Law of the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, UNESCO, among others. Internationally, the project is funded by the Open Society Foundationse has partnered with several projects and focused on Open Educational Resources initiatives. Meet the REA initiatives in Brazil.

Citizen science, volunteer monitoring, participatory action research... this site supports organizers of all initiatives where public participants are involved in scientific research. More about this...

"This paper provides a brief overview of the ideas and principles underlying the connected learning movement, highlighting examples of how libraries are boosting 21st century learning and promoting community development by partnering with a range of organisations and individuals to incorporate connected opportunities into their programmes"

Thanks Kevin for sharing this.

El lado oscuro de las bibliotecas: "¿Quieren leer? Pues a pagar" Es un delirio: cuando tomemos prestado un libro de una biblioteca será preciso pagar un canon http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2014/08/27/babelia/1409137321_870906.html

Global internet censorship and surveillance

"The development of the ISP as a conceptual framework is the result of more than two decades of empirical research that began with a qualitative study of secondary school students and the emergence of an initial model, that was verified and refined through quantitative and longitudinal methods of diverse library users and further developed in case studies of people in the workplace." Very interesting to compare this model developed by Kuhlthau with Siemen's model of Connectivism.