Group items tagged

"To what extent is it possible - or desirable - to disengage from the growing cultural database? How do surveillance and "sousveillance" play a role in the policing of individuals by institutions, and vice versa? Can we disentangle the issues surrounding localized record keeping from globalized control over the archives? In this article, we discuss a range of cultural practices, epistemological regimes and intellectual discourses that have emerged to cope with these questions, and we assess the strategic options for communitarian and individual agency in an era we describe as "the end of forgetting."* I included this link as the article has an excellent model to describe the different strategic responses of agency to the openness of data and the resultant privacy issues.

Schlitz M, Vieten C, Miller E. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2010 July-Aug;17(7-8):18-36. "In this paper, we examine how increasing understanding and explicit awareness of social consciousness can develop through transformations in worldview." In order to develop a participatory culture which allows for participation by people from different cultural, educational and political backgrounds to the dominant Western culture in the digital domain, it is argued that Worldview Literacy needs to be cultivated, and tolerance learned for different worldviews. This would facilitate participation by all, and prevent the silencing and exclusion from agency of those from different backgrounds.

Part of NAVA's professional development session on social media for artists, Zoë Rodriguez from the Copyright Agency Limited discusses digital copyright, contracts and moral rights. (New Zealand) We live in a global world - if you use someone's work from another country, take note of their copyright laws.

useful thank you

Great post. It's always nice to get insight into the "bigger picture" when talking about complicated laws like copyright instead of just isolated incidents.

This is a great follow-up reading to the core reading for module5 from J. Willinksky (2006). I thought it was timely now though written 12 years ago, due to the surge in citizen video journalism and ease of access to government websites now for public policy information, voting and campaigning.

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.

New Visions in Citizen Science by Anne Bowser and Lea Shanley: * different models that support public contribution, potential challenges, and positive impacts that projects can have on scientific literacy, research, management, and public policy. * Illustrate how citizen science functions at its best demonstrating how open innovation can address agency-specific challenges in new and compelling ways.

A keynote presentation from Tim Berners-Lee, advocating openness of the Web. He notes that some people argue the only way to protect the web is to make a walled garden of safe content, but Berners-Lee disagreed. "The world I see is predicated on an open neutral network," he said. 

Excellent article! " When questioned on the ethics of the web, he said it reflected humanity." and "I think surveillance is inevitable but not acceptable. We need a system built where there is an agency that watches the watchers." No one is watching the watchers. That's a big problem.

Here's a free webinar on Thursday, Nov. 6 at 11am PST. You can register here or go to this site on that day and see it live! Open Access and Libraries: What open access is (and isn't) "Scholarly journals are increasingly becoming digital, experimenting with new publishing models such as Open Access (OA) and incorporating multimedia into their formats. In addition, the process of research continues to evolve because of mandates from funding agencies to publicly share research findings and data. For a candid discussion of what OA is (and isn't), tune in Thursday, November 6 at 2:00 p.m. (Eastern) for the next free, streaming video broadcast of American Libraries Live. Our panel of experts will give their unique perspective on what OA means now and how it will shape the future and will answer your questions."

San Francisco - Computer security firm Symantec on Monday said it uncovered stealthy software wielded as part of a years-long spying campaign, most likely by a nation state. The malicious software, dubbed Regin, has a rare level of sophistication and has been targeting government agencies, telecoms, utilities, airlines, research facilities, private individuals and others since at least 2008, according to Symantec Corporation.

By: Thomson Reuters Foundation Nairobi - Mobile phones and other technological innovations can be "game changers" in securing children's rights, the United Nations children's agency Unicef said at the launch of its first crowd-sourced report on Thursday.

BC Open Textbooks is an initiative started by the province of British Columbia in Canada. It is open textbooks adapted and created by BC faculty. It's difficult to tell which texts are complete and ready for use as Tony Bates incomplete text that I created another post about appears on the same page with complete texts (eg Chemistry, Biology Geography.) All the texts can be modified through Creative Commons licensing. This project has been creating concern for publishers who stand to loose business in BC and other provinces if the texts get adopted outside of BC. Initially, the project was focused on creating "a collection of open textbooks aligned with the top 40 highest-enrolled subject areas in the province. A second phase was announced in the spring of 2014 to add 20 textbooks targeting trades and skills training." Initially they looked for existing Creative Commons books they could adapt and they adapted 8 textbooks. From inception to fall 2014, 2244 students have used their open texts for a savings of $353,000 or $157 per student. The aim is to reach 200,000 students annually so they are at .6% and save each $900-$1500/year, still quite a way to go. Wondering how much this project is costing taxpayers, I googled and found this article http://www.ousa.ca/2013/04/24/textbooks/ which claims $600k-$1m/year. So the government has spent $1.2 - $2 million to save students $350k over the past two years. Still a long way to go to break even. In summary, 65 texts published, 45 adoptions, 2244 student users, for a savings of $353k to date. If this was a traditional textbook publishing company, they'd soon be out of business if they weren't already.

Thank for sharing, I believe that the conclusions that this article leaves us are not surprising, although yes very interesting. "Recently, the Babson Survey Research Group and Pearson conducted a survey of nearly 8,000 faculty members in higher education to find out more about how faculty are using social media. While we often post infographics showing trends or results from specific studies here at Edudemic, I found the results of this survey particularly interesting - perhaps because they were so different from what I expected." Julia Echeverria

You are so, so lucky. Here in South Africa, we are regressing, not even looking at online textbooks, but trying to reduce textbooks to only one per subject. The textbook crisis: http://mg.co.za/article/2013-08-23-00-south-africas-hidden-textbook-crisis and the regressive "solution" http://mg.co.za/article/2014-10-10-single-textbook-option-slammed. It is very frustrating for me, knowing all the possibilities, but not having any agency to get through to the authorities here.Llibraries are also failing horribly in advocating for the solutions that ARE available.

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)?

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

Open culture in a different sense. Help in Pakistan offered to anyone, independent of culture, religion, gender or age. Crown funded. Even the poorest of the poor give. However, they tend not to accept donations from foreign agencies...

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has worked with the National Security Agency (NSA) on the release of Niagarafiles (or Nifi, to the initiated) technology designed to "automate data flows" among multiple computer networks. The software is free and open source (so is available to the public) through the Apache Software Foundation.