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I think, its really an expensive and unnecessary experiments, if the attendance of Harvard University is low, then they have to come up with different rule to attract the interest of students. Cameras should be there for security, but not for surveillance.

wondering if this would be a different conversation if the cameras were just picking up heat signals so that the identity of the people could not be known but they could still be counted. The technology is pretty basic and it might even be more efficient than the way they're using them now.

Can't believe Harvard can do this thing. I think informations are sharing and revealing on internet or others more and more serious. Harvard shouldn't secretly photograph students, they should ask permission first.

"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).

Please join us for the following webinar, to be presented on Monday, 29 September 2014. The webinar will be presented by Iryna Kuchma, EIFL-OA Coordinator. 1. Please register: http://conferences.sun.ac.za/index.php/liasa/oafl 2. Please test and familiarise yourself with the software beforehand. See http://tex.sun.ac.za. Help available at: http://wiki.lib.sun.ac.za/index.php/Webinar We will start at 14:00 (SA Time).

Here is an invitation to a Webinar today at 14:00 South African Time.

Photo courtesy of Intercontinental Toronto Yorkville. There is not much restriction in this photo. You can copy or save the photo as you wish. I love to take pictures and during my recent trip to Canada, Toronto particularly, I was actually hoping that I could snap the beauty of this city at night looking at the Toronto Island Park, just the way it's supposed to be at this picture. But the chance was just elusive. It suddenly rained when I was at the park until I get back to the Harbor square. I am documenting all my travels abroad and planning blogging them. I might use this photo should I blog all my travels abroad.

Very nice photo Shirley!

By: Matthew LeBar Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are often described as the future of education - or at least a significant part of it. But there may be a significant problem with them: a very small proportion of students who start them actually finish. This poses a serious threat to their legitimacy.

This brings up the question of what it means to complete something? And why is it so important to us? And why 'productivity', a thing somebody defined ages ago, is so important to our humanity? .. or is it anymore?

Because I am taking a MOOC course but also on campus at University, I receive credits and grades where this is definitely one of the motivations for me to contribute. Although I agree that completion of the course is not essential to attain knowledge, what about our motivations to learn? And what about our incentives? Not saying MOOCs are not interesting nor helpful, I like MOOCs, but I think people like recognition too. I think to just receive the "statement of accomplishment" is not enough to prove efforts made within the course. However MOOCs are not as well developed at this stage, there definitely will be adjustments in the near future.

"...we need to recognize you can't kill the instinct the technology produces. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using it. We can only drive it underground. We can't make our kids passive again. We can only make them, quote, "pirates." And is that good?" - Larry Lessig This is a great talk about the free use of materials to make something new. The crux of Mr Lessig's argument is that every time a "kid" remixes a song with a video they are committing a criminal act. By doing this the law is making their free expression criminal. He shows three great examples of this starting at 8:29 in the video. He suggests that by using Creative Commons materials, we can avoid being criminals, and by doing this we can break the cartel of the RIAA and others. He uses the example of BMI causing the downfall of ASCAP. You can see this at 4:55 in the video. Here is the quote: "Finally. Before the Internet, the last great terror to rain down on the content industry was a terror created by this technology [Shows a picture of a broadcast radio antenna]. Broadcasting: a new way to spread content, and therefore a new battle over the control of the businesses that would spread content. Now, at that time, the entity, the legal cartel, that controlled the performance rights for most of the music that would be broadcast using these technologies was ASCAP. They had an exclusive license on the most popular content, and they exercised it in a way that tried to demonstrate to the broadcasters who really was in charge. So, between 1931 and 1939, they raised rates by some 448 percent, until the broadcasters finally got together and said, okay, enough of this. And in 1939, a lawyer, Sydney Kaye, started something called Broadcast Music Inc. We know it as BMI. And BMI was much more democratic in the art that it would include within its repertoire, including African American music for the first time in the repertoire. But most important was that BMI took public domain works a

"Free software is fundamental to providing user privacy. The ability for third parties to continue providing security updates is vital for ensuring user safety. But in the real world, we are failing to make this argument - the freedoms we provide are largely theoretical for most users. The nominal security and privacy benefits we provide frequently don't make it to the real world. If users do wish to take advantage of the four freedoms, they frequently do so at a potential cost of security and privacy. Our focus on the four freedoms may be coming at a cost to the pragmatic freedoms that our users desire - the freedom to be free of surveillance (be that government or corporate), the freedom to receive security updates without having to purchase new hardware on a regular basis, the freedom to choose to run free software without having to give up basic safety features."

Text from 2011, still extremely timely, about privacy. The author, professor of Law, deconstructs the "nothing to hide" argument that says that we should not be scared to disclose private activities or information when we do nothing wrong.

"With regard to individual rights,.... there exists a private domain in man which should not be regulated or violated. This realm constitutes what is deepest, highest, and most valuable in the individual human being." http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Younkins/Social_Cooperation,_Flourishing,_and_Happiness.shtml

Privacy off course matters.It is right that if I have not done anything wrong then why should I hide it. On other hand we can not share our family relationship information with anyone.

From June 2014, lecture at the Open Data Institute, UK. Professor Carr explains how the open web we know is just one of many attempts over the last century to build a planet-wide network of information. Why was this one successful? And will it continue to be so? Professor Leslie Carr is a Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton where he researches the impact of network technologies on our lives and economy, and in particular on the research and knowledge industries. Slides for this talk can be found here - http://www.scribd.com/doc/230569908/Friday-lunchtime-lecture-Open-data-open-web-Just-a-passing-fad-with-Professor-Leslie-Carr (recommended) From the slides, I thought this was interesting: "......The loss of ignorance, by all agreeing to share information The loss of privacy , by all agreeing to share a public space " also: "......The development of society as a whole (nuanced and structured and refined) is inextricably related to the technology of information provision, consumption and dissemination (e.g. writing, reading, printing, education). Different parts of society have different objectives and hence incompatible Web requirements, e.g. openness, security, transparency, privacy."

Looks at the "Linux model" as a successful way of doing business."I think there is a general movement and a general recognition in the technology community that we need to reform the patent process. There's far too much effort and energy put into creating patents that do not end up fostering innovation," said Musk. "I think no reasonable person would say that the current patent system is ideally suited to foster innovation."

A true pioneer, Mr Musk is. I think he has an extra sense for the future. Patents seem to be an institution which increasingly focuses on short term profit instead of the common benefit on the long run.

Patents are the biggest responsible for the technological delays. The laws should change radically.

"At the same time, a fair amount of resistance to OA practices still exists. Publishers object to OA on economic principles, as it undermines the revenue generated by journals. Some researchers feel that it devalues their work as well, lowering it to the level of "a database to be consulted," in Eve's words. He believes the academic community is over-reliant on scholarly publishing's status quo; as he told the crowd at Columbia, "the system reinforces itself through economies of prestige." Even as interest in altmetrics grows, the quality of research continues to be gauged by the number of citations an article gathers and the status of the journal it appears in."

This is a good overview of a project that seeks to demystify and break down resistance to open educational resources.

How can open educational practices empower less used and minority languages? - Webinar series (part of the European project LangOER) that aims at enhancing the teaching and learning of less used languages through open educational resources and practices

How can open educational practices empower less used and minority languages? - Webinar series (part of the European project LangOER) that aims at enhancing the teaching and learning of less used languages through open educational resources and practices

"It turns out that students are poorly trained in college to effectively navigate the Internet's indiscriminate glut of information. Another Project Information Literacy study, involving more than 8,300 undergraduates at 25 American colleges, found that most make do with a very small compass. They rely on tried and true resources such as course readings, library databases, Google, and Wikipedia....The skills that students cultivate through traditional assignments-writing essays based on library research-are far different from those required to perform efficient, high-level, accurate research in the digital world. All of those types of research skills take practice under the eye of experts."

This commentary emphasises the need for students to be taught within the curricula on how to be discerning when navigating the surfeit of information on the internet.

This is a great resource if you are interested in how things like publication strategy, data management, dissimenation, Open Access, DOAJ list, etc. discussed and applied in the Netherlands at one of the top research universities. This is a blog. It has been written and maintained voluntarily by a bibliometrician, who has been working at Wageningen University Library over 7 years. Posts and themes are in English They are very well written and structured. At the bottom part of the Home page you can find Categories, Recent Comments, Keywords, and Archive - they are very well linked and make search and navigation easy. Another bonus is that every post/article supplied with international and local references, which gives this source depth.

"The results show that at present, the responsibility for funding article processing charges (APCs) is more likely to fall on the author or granting organization than the library or institution. However, 23% of r"

This article responds to reality. Librarians are at the crossroad.

I love this lecture by David Levy at GoogleTechTalks from 2008. I found the required video by Levy to be a bit too short for my taste, so for anyone who is interested in hearing more, I would recommend this lecture.

I'm reading "Men Like Gods" by H.G. Wells, and there are quite a few things that seem prophetic. The book was published in 1923 and the setting includes things like connecting by voice and visuallly when talking to others at different locations. (Skype, Facetime) A screen where the words move instead of your eyes. (SPREED.com)

I too worry about the world of work, that I am only the efficiency at which I function.

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.

An alternative perspective on "openness".

The argument will be with us for a very long time. I think this is based on the side of the fence that one is sitting on. It is just like a case of what came first a chicken or an egg. The fact is Open has place to occupy in our learning space. The jury is still out there.

Thanks for sharing this well presented write up. Big question put forth is are we really getting the outcomes expected from the open society. Open vs. quality is a big issue. At times restricting access helps a great deal.

Background Back on 19th June 2014 I gave an invited plenary talk on "Open Practices for Researchers" at the Research and Innovation Conference 2014 at the University of Bolton. I was pleased to have an opportunity to share my experiences with researchers at the University of Bolton, an institution which has a clear focus on...

This is an excellent article which explains how Sugata Mitra's teaching models helped to transform a failing school in Mexico. It's a story which completely changed my attitude to learning and education and inspired me to discover as much as possible about cloud-based and student-centred learning.

Thanks for posting. I have heard of similar ideas from my girlfriend who works with learning disabled people, helping them make goals and follow through with them. The way the criticized traditional 'top down' eduction system is set-up, learning disabled people end up with the impression that they are failures and burdens. This goes beyond learning disabled people though, anyone who finds no inspiration for math, English and the sciences is bound to under perform at school, fail at the competitive aspect of it and get told their failures as a result, implicitly or explicitly. I also found that at design school when I realized that math and English were important for the projects I was working on I started to learn effectively and enjoy doing so. This is after failing my secondary education (pre university in New Zealand). You say this changed your attitude towards cloud learning, have you done much else as a result?