Group items tagged

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.

"People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning "modules" rather than lock into 12-week university courses?"

@Kevin - thanks for sharing. I really share many of the sentiments of this article - but the modularisation of the curriculum also raise some interesting and possibly disturbing points. For example, our current diploma/degree structures are based on the premise that the final outcomes of a diploma or a degree is the result, inter alia, of the unique combination of a number of different courses/modules which, together, allow students to provide evidence of competency in all of the outcomes. While I sincerely think there is a place for just-in-time learning and short courses, and secondly, that the notion of a four-year degree may be outdated - I am wondering about the notion of the curriculum as journey.

Thank you sharing this! I think this is new and innovative idea. I wouldn't mind trying this kind of system at my school.

This recently published book, by a University of British Columbia journalism professor named Alfred Hermida, questions how the new culture of sharing and collaboration-and the pace of change that sharing enables-changes our lives. It's particularly interesting for us because it doesn't back away from the challenges that open access poses for us: how does being both creator and consumer change us? How does blurring the lines between these two change the way we think about the balance between copyright and the public good? Hermida doesn't tackle these last questions directly, but he provides a useful lens for thinking about our changing roles and how open knowledge and sharing need to reflect that. Considering the book's focus on sharing, it's somewhat ironic that it's not open access, but I highly recommend checking it out. It's received significant attention in the Canadian press and is exactly the kind of mainstream attention that can get conversations about open access started.

Not everything can be shared. Aside from the 14 reasons what makes people share knowledge is because they are trust each one with the knowledge that they will share will be beneficial to the receiver of the knowledge or learning. Knowledge is power when shared.

Student publishing can include high schoolers, too.

Open access success or failure as a policy problem. It is!

Very interesting! No-one said it would be easy! One could always suggest a few other complications as well...but we are here for the solutions.

"The current crisis, the deepest and longest in the history of capitalism, has opened a debate around the world about what appears, more clearly with each passing day, to be the simultaneous destruction of the two principal institutions of social and economic life: the State and the market. Never in living memory has the economic system been so universally questioned. On the other hand, never before have technical capacities been so powerful, and, more importantly, so accessible to people and small organizations. In fact, never before have so many small businesses taken part in the world market. Nearly free [gratis] P2P communication technologies let them create the largest commercial networks in history. The emergence of free software (which, by itself, represents the largest-ever transfer of value to the economic periphery) empowered them with unexpected independence. Millions of small businesses around the world, especially in Asia, were able to coordinate among themselves this way and hone their products just as new markets were opening up to them. It's "globalization of the small." It's not a marginal phenomenon: never before have so many people around the world gotten out of poverty."

"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. "

A short guide for using Twitter for academic purposes, aimed at beginners.

thanks Kevin. Very useful. I'm new to twitter but i strongly believe in it as a "right" tool in research and teaching context

Thanks for sharing it! I'll tweet the post

The right to privacy, as guaranteed in Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many other provisions - including Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Article 16 of the Convention in the Rights of the Child, and Article 14 of the Convention on the Protection of Migrants - is a core tenet of democratic societies.

From the site: "Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that happens at various times throughout the year at the University of Mary Washington... but you can join in whenever you like and leave whenever you need." I took part in the open ds106 course for a while. I am impressed that it keeps going and morphing over time. The dedication to openness - both the the tools used and the content being produced by the participants - is also impressive. Concepts taught in this course included remix, reuse and re-share are core to the concepts of OER and open knowledge.

Open access is an alternative publishing and distribution model that makes scholarly research literature-most of which is already funded by taxpayers around the world-freely available to the public online, without restrictions. Harnessing the power of the internet, open access brings the results of academic research to unprecedented numbers of scientists, university professors, medical researchers, patients, inventors, students, and others.

© 2010 Carolina Rossini. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 45, no. 4 (July/August 2010): 60-68 Carolina Rossini ( carolina.rossini@gmail.com), a Brazilian lawyer and law professor, is currently a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, and Coordinator of OER-Brazil ( http://www.rea.net.br).

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.

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.

"Heather Joseph, Executive Directory, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, talks to the University of Maryland community about the evolution of open access and how trendlines are pointing up. Change is accelerating in the push to make information openly and freely available."