Group items tagged

"New technology and innovative business models offer proven opportunities for enhancing the sharing of scholarly information - research papers, primary data and other evidence, creative activity and other products of research and scholarship - across institutions and audiences. This scholarly communication - understood as the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use - promotes a shared system of research and scholarship. ACRL sees a need to vigorously re-orient all facets of library services and operations to the evolving technologies and models that are affecting the scholarly communication process. There is wide variance in the background understanding of and engagement in scholarly communication as a critical perspective and worldview for academic librarians. This Scholarly Communication toolkit was designed by ACRL's Scholarly Communication Committee as a resource for education and advocacy efforts in transforming the scholarly communication landscape."

"Scholarly communication outreach and education activities are proliferating in academic libraries. Simultaneously, digital humanists-a group that includes librarians and non-librarians based in libraries, as well as scholars and practitioners without library affiliation-have developed forms of scholarship that demand and introduce complementary innovations focused on infrastructure, modes of dissemination and evaluation, openness, and other areas with implications for scholarly communication. Digital humanities experiments in post-publication filtering, open peer review, middle-state publishing, decentering authority, and multimodal and nonlinear publication platforms are discussed in the context of broader library scholarly communication efforts."

"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).

Community Colleges for Open Education Resources I chose this resource since I work at a community college and The mission is expanding access to education by promoting awareness and adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER). Over 250 colleges have joined the consortium and many more participate in our activities and use resources posted here. The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER)is a joint effort by individual community colleges, regional and statewide consortia, the Open Courseware Consortium, the American Association for Community Colleges, the League for Innovation in the Community Colleges, and many other educational partners to develop and use open educational resources, open textbooks, and open courseware to expand access to higher education and improve teaching and learning.

Open education information and group resources

Open education information and group resources

"Progress has been made toward making academic research, knowledge, and resources accessible to the broader public. This is a great cause. It is certainly a matter of justice and equality. Ironically, a number of scholars - particularly those from marginalized communities themselves (women, people of color, LGBT people) - cannot or are hesitant to participate in the move toward open access. However, many scholars, particularly marginalized scholars, participate in a different form of open scholarship: intellectual activism. "

"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. "

"An overlay journal performs all the activities of a scholarly journal and relies on structural links with one or more archives or repositories to perform its activities."

Canadian community activism organization that rallies for open internet, and launched the international organization openmedia.org "OpenMedia.ca works to engage, educate and empower citizens to defend and advance their communication interests, values and rights. Engage: Through online campaigns and participatory events that resonate with everyday people, and civic engagement around media and communications policy in Canada. Educate: Through educational events high school and university presentations and workshops, and online resources.

"The 2014 Best Websites for Teaching & Learning foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration. They are free, Web-based sites that are user friendly and encourage a community of learners to explore and discover. "

This is fantastic! I just shared this on twitter, and will forward the link to teacher colleagues. Teachers are always looking for ways to make learning fun and different, and they also like those resources to be free!

Awesome! This site definitely will help teachers to have different and productive classes.

eLife is a unique collaboration between funders and practitioners of research to communicate influential discoveries in the life and biomedical sciences in the most effective way. eLife began following a workshop at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2010, where attending scientists concluded that there was a need for a model of academic publishing that better suited the needs of their community. In eLife a team of highly regarded, experienced and actively practicing scientists ensures fair, swift and transparent editorial decisions followed by rapid online publication. The editorial team are editorially independent of the funders. They rely on their scientific expertise and active research experience to identify the best papers, make scientifically based judgements and exercise leadership in steering these papers through peer review. The entire content of the journal is freely available for all to read and reproduce for unrestricted use.

Very interesting project. I spent some time exploring some of the papers. They do seem to be opening up the peer review process slightly be publishing a "decision letter" and "author response" with each paper. I also appreciate the seeming attempt to include data publication in the publication of the paper. Though it does seem to me that some of the papers don't have enough data accompanying them, so I wonder what their data publication policy is.

Open Access repositories promote the widespread dissemination of scientific and scholarly production. Researchers and teachers publish free on line digital assets for claiming their activity and for sharing research results with other researchers. In particular universities, research centres, libraries and, for limited subsets of their collections, museums, administrative archives and other cultural institutions are promoting open access. In the future, a considerable section of scholarly, academic and cultural institutions memory will be formed by born-digital assets, stored in open access archives. Their digital collections will have an ever growing relevance in making up the scientific and information heritage of the next generations. In order to ensure that these objects will survive and continue to be cited, scholarly and academic communities should be committed to the long term preservation of their repositories.

"For most societies, the potential financial consequences of a move to Gold OA are the key concern. Income from subscriptions often provides a basis for financing other activities; as such, a loss in income can have far-reaching consequences. Naturally those who are charged with protecting a society´s interests are fearful of making changes that could have a negative impact on their organisation´s ability to fulfil its aims."

Crowd sourcing for social change.

Researching online often means leaving a trail of information about yourself, including your location, what websites you visited and for how long, with whom you chatted or emailed, and what you downloaded and printed. All of these details are all easy to associate with a particular computer user when insufficient privacy protections are in place.

Thanks for sharing this article. The right to electronic privacy is most important to me. It's frightening how 'big brother' can trace everything we do. I intend following up on the links and asking our local professional association to run a workshop on this.

Librarians in Massachusetts are working to give their patrons a chance to opt-out of pervasive surveillance. Partnering with the ACLU of Massachusetts, area librarians have been teaching and taking workshops on how freedom of speech and the right to privacy are compromised by the surveillance of online and digital communications -- and what new privacy-protecting services they can offer patrons to shield them from unwanted spying of their library activity.

The story of Aaron Swartz, incredible programmer and activist for internet rights, open access and open knowledge. Good documentary to learn a little more about the open access movement, see some important figures (Tim Berners-Lee, Lawrence Lessig, etc.) and the fight against the SOPA bill. A big part of the movie is about his personal life and legal battle over copyright infringement. Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

This was a great video! I enjoyed it very much and it was very touching. thank you for posting. @smoens - awesome blog too. thank you for the link.

For the Copyright section I recommend to watch this documentary: The Internet's Own Boy depicts the life of American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. It features interviews with his family and friends as well as the internet luminaries who worked with him.

Dr Jane McGonigal (a professional game developer) talks about the time spent playing video games (which approximates to the span of human evolution), and that this time has to increase to make any major changes to the world. I have selected this resource partially in relation to week 3's Clarke's lecture (and others), which talks about using our idle time to do something meaningful - participate in citizen science games, for example. Dr McGonigal's talk very much illustrates this point - except that it talks about solving global issues through indirect games, e.g. a World Without Oil online game simulates a world in which you have to survive oil shortage. Creator's research shows, that people maintain the skills and habits they have taken up after playing this intense game, which include making better choices for our changing environment. The only difference here from actual citizen science games is that Dr McGonigal's games are fictional (rather than providing direct data / input for actual scientific research), however, they empower people to influence global change, which is the topic of the other lectures this week, especially Morozov's thoughts about the power of internet and connectiveness to create "revolutions". Although Morozov has taken up a rather critical view, suggesting only those who want it, take the best from the Internet, Dr McGonigal's ideas might be what bridges the two - taking games, which are integral part of many people's lives, especially in the younger generation, and turning them into real "life schools" may help more people get the idea and the essential skills to "fix" their environments. In all honesty, this is a video I would watch again and again, and recommend it to anyone who would listen (and that doesn't happen often for me).

Gamification for learning - using game elements - sounds very promising. Prior to the internet, technology, there were board games or hands on projects - all with the intent to engage and interact with each other. So it is no surprise to me given the appropriate design/project that students can learn and solve real world problems. Letting students choose their persona and role also allows them to make their own future and take ownership for how they want to participate. Just like the original promise of multimedia training that was purported to replace the traditional classroom events and enable getting the "best" teacher recorded for all to have the same experience...I believe it was then thought that the learning experience needs o be "blended". Different techniques - online, face to face, etc.. This is not my field of expertise so these are just personal opinions. If the online game approach can be combined with face to face and tactile/outdoor activities, aka a blended approach - I think that might be very useful. I do also believe that design solutions should be encouraging win win situations to reinforce collaboration and the feeling that all can succeed. One question I might have is how do you measure success in learning?

Gaming promoters unfortunately for me have a commercial agenda and its always difficult to make that balance of pure learning and commercialization aspect