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Wits University said yesterday that it was partnering edX, a non-profit provider of such online courses that was founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. edX has more than 200 000 students in Africa who will now be able to access free courses offered by Wits without having to pay a cent.

this is a good innitiative by Wits, Its good to see African University keeping up with the world trends in education. Considering the cost of education in SA this will make life easier. However acess to broadband and internet is still a problem.

Education situation around the world.When we talk about open education,we always focus on high level education such as college or graduate education.But, out of the U.S, such as Asia, Africa, there are many children who don't have chance to get better education, eager to learn more to change their fate.So, I hope open education can also concerning these edge people

Cape Town, 10 December 2013 - This is a presentation to the combined 3rd Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest and Open A.I.R. Conference on Innovation and IP in Africa, www.openair.org.za/capetown2013.

About the book: Information Literacy and Cultural Heritage: Developing a model for lifelong learning Kim Baker, Cape Town, South Africa - covers cultural heritage in the museums, archives and... Kim is our fellow co-student from Cape Town. She already created a digital project, her blog. She also has created an analog project: a book, you know, something printed on paper :) Kim is a GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) expert. Her book covers anything digital and GLAM or cultural heritage, at least that is what the content section promises. So I'm very glad to have such an expert in her field in the class.

Thank you very much. :) And I am so happy to be here and learn from so many experts around the world!

An article by an anonymous author on the Knowledge Commons Brasil. The article attempts to show how the Global North dominates the internet. Internet users as well as content (exemplified by geo-located entities) tend to cluster in the rich industrial countries of the so called "developed" wordl. This critique resembles the lament of the so called Media Imperialism spearheaded by the McBriede Report to Unesco (http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0004/000400/040066eb.pdf) "Many Voices, One World)". It should be noted that here more detailed studies suggested that news agencies reflect the interests of their audiences. So it would be interesting what the distribution of geo-tagged entities in the Igbo version of Wikipedia is like. Does it mirror a bias towards West Africa (Igbo being one of the principal languages of Nigeria)?

An interesting opinion/confessional piece on one academic's experience of publishing in the developing world. The author points out cultural pressures and differences that could possible contribute to the expanding knowledge gap.

It is very fascinating articles, thank you for posting this. I myself, most of the times, focus on the publisher issues rather than the author himself. However, after read this I realise how important it is to pay attention to the authors because their contribution can really affect the quality of researches that they involved in. Regardless how successful the authors are, they are still human beings who are also affected by the national cultures.

This is an interesting piece but raises the question - why is the institution placing the pressure? It says, tacitly, a lot about the culture of the academic institutions in the country as a whole - and this culture is often shaped by funding patterns from central government, or major funders. The institution then responds to these funding patterns by pressuring staff to produce what is funded. In South Africa this is very much the pattern, with central government funding articles published in selected journals (see the readings for the module 11). However, there has been a rethink and there is proposed changes in now supporting book publication to a much greater degree. So whereas the pressure was on to produce articles, now the universities are looking at book production to a greater extent. As has been said as a truism; "Follow the money" - and in this case we see how this affects what should be, in effect, academic freedom.

In this 2009 bulletin, Leslie Chan discusses the growing inequalities in access to publications. A striking example he mentions is that of a doctor in Africa who makes a decision to alter a HIV programme based on an abstract. It's interesting to think about the strides we have taken to bridge inequalities in access in the past five years. It seems that though some gaps in access have been addressed, there are still obstacles to be overcome. Another point to be addressed is not only allowing access to information published by developed nations to reach those who cannot afford it, but also hearing the results of research and findings of institutions in the developing world.

This year, the fifth annual Publishers for Development (PfD) conference explored current developments in scholarly communication including their impact on publishers, researchers and information professionals in the global South. The rapid growth in open access, the potential for social media to increase communication of research and also new measures for the way research is used were all topics viewed from a Southern perspective. The one-day conference was held in London on 15 October and titled 'Forward Thinking: Developing a global research cycle which fully engages South and North'. It brought together publishers from 16 publishing houses, librarians and researchers from universities in Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Also present were representatives of organisations involved in research access, production and use such as the World Bank, African Journals Online, Research4Life, Development Research Uptake in Sub-Saharan Africa (DRUSSA), Talloires Network and Partnerships in Health Information.

This is about the inequitable global power and how it dynamics the confronting global knowledge production in nowadays.

Underlying this notion of global knowledge production inequities is how developed countries "The Global North" dominate modern knowledge systems. This hegemonic control of global knowledge, driven by increased globalization, places pressure on virtually all societies to adopt global values and services. While this development does have positive implications (e.g. better understanding of modern health practices, nutrition, environmental protection, governance systems, etc), on the negative side, the imposition of cultural forms from the developing world could be considered a form of political and economic domination. This leads to the increasing homogenization of cultures and a threat to local knowledge, and the exacerbation of local differences and inequalities through uneven access to such knowledge and the means for it's application. The production of knowledge implicates and is implicated in power relations, as those with superior technology cannot only generate but also store, monopolize and disseminate information to safeguard their interests. Foucault (1972) suggests that the relationship between power and knowledge has its origin in the ownership of the means of material production and technical expertise. According to Said (1978), Western powers in a colonial and post-colonial context, using agents in developing countries, have been able to develop elaborate cultural and political institutions where knowledge production exists with supporting mechanisms that dominate and suppress African communities. In a critical examination of development policies and programs in Africa, Okolie (2003) considers these to be shaped by knowledge and assumptions about knowledge production that are primarily Euro-American centered, and are consequently "exclusionary and often contemptuous of other ways of knowing" (Okolie, 2003). The establishment of the continent's universities and research centers was primarily driven by Western powers, and the African elites who h

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.

Yousef Eldin explores the impact that new developments in mobile phone technology are having on life in some of Uganda's most isolated communities

The wonders of internet- it speeds up research in Africa

Why do peers help peers to share and co-produce knowledge? Research suggests that there is a whole set of motivations that makes people share their knowledge, a mixture between altruistic and self-serving motives

I agree that the 14 reasons what makes people share knowledge. great learning to share and great sharing to learn. reciprocating just like teaching and learning vis a vis learning with teaching.

Learning modes and principles of open, commons-based peer-production therefor have the potential to provide the "gold standard" of enhancing future skills, competencies, connections, capacities of people and their organisations on a global scale. In short: peer-to-peer learning around open, commons-based peer-production is a game changer in international development cooperation.