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Sal Khan maintains his vision for education. SAN FRANCISCO - Good news for parents of school-age kids and fans of free online tutoring lessons from Khan Academy: founder Salman Khan has no intention of turning it into a profit-making enterprise. Khan, who has three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard, started out creating programs to help a cousin learn math in 2006.

The mission of the Arab Open Academy in Denmark (AOA) is to develop scientific research, enrich human knowledge and accelerate the comprehensive, social and economic transformations of our society through the academic studies offered and the training of highly specialized personnel in basic and applied fields, who can implement the comprehensive development plans in the Arab World.

نحن بحاجة ماسة الى هذه الجامعات في كل العالم العربي

What Khan Academy is for Math, The Big History Project is to History. An incredible resource to share and very well-done. I saw this presented in a TED talk. It has impressed me with the quality of presentation and the open, big picture presentation that really inspires people.

I found this an amazing resource. Spent the morning watching the first few videos with my son, and then we have been thinking about what came before spacetime ever since. I like the idea of taking a multi-disciplinary approach to history.Thank you for posting the details.

Roopika Risam puts forth an argument that digital publication is not merely a new platform in which to carry out traditional academic actives. Rather, Risam proposes three ways in which digital scholarship is distinct from print, fundamentally shifting the values potentially underlying the academy: (1) it tends towards more collaboration (2) it is an iterative process, rarely considered "finished", and (3) it is frequently more public. Risam notes that these new principles do not guarantee dramatic shifts in the academy, and there are efforts to systematize these features in order to make digital scholarship more closely reflect the principles in print scholarship. Yet, it is emphasized we are at a point in time where we have the opportunity to be clear enough about the ways digital scholarship differs from print scholarship in order to decent and uplift these qualities rather than try to transform them to better resemble print scholarship.

A plan to convert traditional subscription publication formats, including society-published journals and books or monographs, to OA, based on an annual or multi-year payment made by every institution of higher education, no matter what its size or classification, and by any institution that benefits from the research that is generated by those within the academy.

There are two versions (at least) of this text. One earlier version is a first draft of sorts "A BOOK CROWDSOURCED IN ONE WEEK MAY 21-28, 2010" http://hackingtheacademy.org/ The url supplied above (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=dh;c=dh;idno=12172434.0001.001;rgn=full%20text;view=toc;xc=1;g=dculture) gives you access to the slicker version. Both can be read online. The text professes to a hacker ethos: "1 The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved. 2 No problem should ever have to be solved twice. 3 Boredom and drudgery are evil. 4 Freedom is good. 5 Attitude is no substitute for competence." One of the opening chapters encourages academics to "get out of the business." "Burn the boats/books" focuses on the need to move away from "librocentrism." Something I hadn't thought of: "A PDF document is not a web-based document. It is a print-based document distributed on the web." This is to make the point that online materials should be interactive, which a pdf is not. The focus is hacking scholarship, teaching, and institutions. Seems worth dipping into here and there .

Interesting open text book created by the Free Technology Academy that outlines the history, culture, and use of free software. "Free Software" is ambiguous in English and not the commonly used terminology. However, in Spanish and French it is possible to make a distinction between "Libre software" and "gratis" software. The authors argue that the term "open source" is too technical focused, while "libre software" better focuses on the rights of the users and community. Interesting and worth skimming for reference. Available in English, Spanish, Catalan, and Italian. Authors: Jesús M. González-Barahona, Joaquín Seoane Pascual, Gregorio Robles Coordinators: Jordi Mas Hernández, David Megías Jiménez Licenses: GNU Free Documentation License, Creative Commons Attribute ShareAlike License Information: 291 Pages; 3.2Mb Free software is increasing its presence in mainstream media and in debates among IT professionals, but it is still unknown for many people.

Introducción al software libre, en Español: http://ocw.uoc.edu/informatica-tecnologia-y-multimedia/introduccion-al-software-libre/materiales/view?set_language=es

Muy buenos aportes @koobreader

An investigation into the low levels of published African scholarly research by Emerald. Although this study is from 2008, the findings are still valid even in 2014.

Codecademy is the easiest way to learn how to code. It's interactive, fun, and you can do it with your friends.

Codecademy is the easiest way to learn how to code. It's interactive, fun, and you can do it with your friends.

I began at Code Academy last year, and completed various courses. The problem I had was knowing about the architecture and systems behind the code, so, now I am learning to use Command Line and working through FLOSS manuals. I like Code academy, and I may go back there, but not before I have understood Command Line and more specifically what works with Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora etc The thing is, free software development, open source and education for all, begins with Linux OS and whatever branches from that is free to share, iterate and scalable. The trademark socialist, philosophically opposed to the capitalist.

Una lista de algunas alternativas latinoamericanas a Khan Academy.

Great JavaScript programming initiative.

Some really relevant quotes!

Medievalists are often considered, like their subject matter, a stodgy old-fashioned bunch who are the vanguard of old academia. But there are a few exceptions, like the Digital Medievalist site. Open to scholars and enthusiasts of varying skills and experience, it runs a long-standing open-access journal, a small wiki dealing mostly with aspects of the digital humanities, and a list of important news and upcoming conferences for professional scholars. Overall it's a great place for those interested in what's going on in the medieval academy. It's not perfect, though: the journal only publishes a handful of papers each year, and most of the rest of the content isn't very expansive. It feels like, and probably is, a side-project that a few scholars work on in their free time rather than the comprehensive resource it could be; and that makes it a cautionary tale. If we freely offer only the barest bones of what constitutes a journal (or any other scholarly resource), we run the risk of presenting open access as an inferior model that can only take readers so far. It's important to remember that open access takes real sustained effort to make it a viable alternative to traditional models of scholarly publishing.

Whether you're doing research for a project, need help with homework, or just want to learn something new, YouTube EDU features some of our most popular educ...

I knew Khan academy, but I did not hear the story and how it was created, not the fiplosophy behind the project. Thank you for sharing, as I learnt how these huge project came from a real, human, day by day activity.

Academy free resources in Arabic in various fields and disciplines

A short video explains some important terms about citizen science.

This article employs queer theory and challenges the notion of fitting emergent open access practices within current frameworks of academic success. While I was partially surprised by some of the assertions made early on in the article regarding open access journals being perceived as not as valuable as more traditional journal models, I think in part I may just hang out in academic circles that gravitate towards open access (hence... this course). But, I am very compelled by the conclusions made by Gurfinkel. That is, rather than trying to figure out how to systematize open access models to be respected within current academic standards, open access (as informed by queer theory, in this article) challenges us to investigate and question our standards in a more radical way. For example, in open access peer review models or post-publication review, the notion of a "peer" and thus who are considered credible and worthy sources of knowledge--and consequentially, what "knowledge" is-- are put into question. So, more than trying to figure out how to systematize and make more "legitimate" open access models, Gurfinkel wants us to ask what about the academy currently excludes open access models from being meaningful and legitimate practices in the first place.

Online discussions and post-publication analyses are catching mistakes that sneak past editorial review. This article describes the pitfalls with editorial review and pre-publication peer review, and advocates for post-publication crowd-sourced reviewing through social media platforms.

I think having a comments section is a great way to provide feedback on the information provided. Often when I read articles the comments section allows me to understand different perspectives and interpretations of the information.

This article, while not necessarily explicitly, managed to hint at what I find to be a source of problematic practices/outcomes in the academy, publishing, etc. That is, it is not necessarily that traditional peer review processes are ineffective at finding errors or misconduct, but rather it is when our processes and practices become so systematized that we can mindlessly or effortlessly engage in and reproduce them without our full, critical attention that they can produce problems. While I think there are good reasons to critique the notion of peer and "expert" culture within traditional peer review processes, an additional and separate critique is the problems that arise with systematization. The article implicitly addressed this when the author commented that current post-publication environments "provide a public space that is not under the control of journal editors and conference organizers." Yet, as White indicates, there exists skepticism of the value of post-publication reviews along with a simultaneous effort to build post-publication systems that have standards that put those questioning it at ease. The National Institutes of Health establishing requirements that potential post-publication reviewers must meet demonstrated this. That is, they are trying to figure out how to systematize post-publication. For me, what this article indicates is that we ought to figure out how to keep our academic and publishing processes "fresh," so to speak. This way we don't become so comfortable with our methods and practices that they allow us to simply go through the motions without fostering innovative and critical inquiry.