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OA possibilities in my country - Estonia

It is well known that the rules that allow for certain educational uses of copyrighted works under certain conditions without permission of the rights' owners vary greatly between countries. But how different are those rules? And how difficult is to access those differences? Can a teacher with no legal background determine alone whether a certain...

Use your Twitter feed (or hashtags) to publish a daily, weekly, or monthly paper. View mine (example) at: http://paper.li/JesseLearning/1415080617

Thank you for sharing. Will have to look at it closer.

Muy interesante tu página!!

A map displaying the locations of institutional repositories, which can be filtered by country, platform and date of registration. Each entry links to the url of the repository.

I have found all information needed about IP at this website.

This site is very helpful in terms of resources, such as definitions of terms and seminars for learning how to apply IP

Thanks for sharing this information, it increases the understanding about Intellectual Property.

Not specifically open Data, but look at the innovations possible with data is more open and available.

For those of you interested in taking upon more moocs in Mexico.

Online education

open knowledge online teaching and learning

Thanks for sharing this write up. Though it is written in the context of African continent, it holds true for any developing country. MOOCs have potential to reach out to the masses if rightly implemented. accessibility to technology at the learner end is a a major issue and it needs to be addressed first to make MOOCs relevant and sustainable.

An interesting piece thinking about indigenous learning in a modern context.

Great tie in with the RIck Hill video in Module 1. Indigenous learning teaches us about the connectedness that stands in contrast to this MOOC even as we seek it in different forms through this sort of sharing and commenting and "liking."

I was lucky to be in Berlin with some colleagues earlier this month for the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival and associated fringe events. There's really too much to distill into a short post-from Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, making the case for " Embracing the open opportunity," to Patrick Alley's breathtaking accounts of how Global Witness uses information, to expose crime and corruption in countries around the world.

A useful summary of some of the key take-aways from the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival, courtesy of Tariq Khokhar From the article: 1. There are some great open data initiatives around the world and two common themes are the need for a strong community of technologically literate data re-users, and the sustained effort needed within governments to change how they create, manage and publish data in the long term. 2. Spreadsheets are code and we can adopt some software engineering practices to make much better use of them. There are a number of powerful tools and approaches to data handing being pioneered by the scientific community and those working in other fields can adopt and emulate many of them. 3. Open data fundamentally needs open source software. App reuse often doesn't happen because contexts are too different. Reusable software components can reduce the development overhead for creating locally customized civic software applications and a pool of high quality civic software components is a valuable public good worth contributing to. Reading time: 15mins

I see that Google are the sponsors of the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival but despite having little knowledge about Google's role and interest in the Open Knowledge , I also feel they are the culprit when it comes to data manipulative for their own profit motives.

Most countries are in the process of reaching agreement among multiple participants - apart from the governments themselves - establishing a high level management structure for the implementation of national policies.Major advances have been made in the development of national frameworks for security policies, measures for combating cybercrime have been approved, and response teams for security issues have been established.

The massive expansion of higher education across all continents is one of the defining features of our century. This volume examines two dimensions of this: those of access and equity. Building on the country studies undertaken by this group of Fulbright New Century Scholars, the book offers a unique focus in its commitment to bring together an analysis of the theoretical literature on equity; a focus on the methodological problems of measuring access and equity from a comparative perspective; a comparative analysis of trends and policy developments set in a global framework; and a comparative analysis of targeted initiatives which are currently in place in different societies. The need to develop a comparative research programme addressing the question of measuring equity is noted

Here's some interesting topline figures year 2012 report about the state of intellectual property around the world. It quickly shows us the countries that take the business of innovation & patents seriously. For 2013 World Property Indicators, here's the link: http://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/intproperty/941/wipo_pub_941_2013.pdf

I like how this article breaks down where the patents are coming from in the world. I also like this because it always reminds me of the story (that is likely untrue) that the US patent office was almost closed at the beginning of the 20th century because all the good ideas had already been thought of. Progress marches on!

"Just as important as learning these helpful tools, however, is unlearning and avoiding the most common pitfalls of common sense. Reminding us of where society is most vulnerable to those, Sagan writes: In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.He admonishes against the twenty most common and perilous ones - many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity - with examples of each in action"

The 20 fallacies: "ad hominem - Latin for "to the man," attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously) argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia - but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out) argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn't, society would be much more lawless and dangerous - perhaps even ungovernable. Or: The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives) appeal to ignorance - the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist - and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don't understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don't understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - each in their own way enjoined to

Wonderful post, Kim! These are great guidelines alongside which to test ideas.

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it .

it would be a good idea for all the African countries to have a similar list for all types of libraries. We have been struggling with a directory for African libraries , school libraries etc

Thanks for the list!

College textbooks cost too much - and something needs to be done about it, according to a report from the advocacy group U.S. PIRG. The College Board estimates that the average student in this country spends around $1,200 a year on books and supplies. A single book can cost as much as $200. This is why we need open textbooks!

Coming soon to MITx on edX is a new kind of MOOC-a MOOC to help high school students better prepare for college. Many students who arrive at college find themselves struggling with the courses they must take, as their high school experience has not provided them with the necessary preparation to do well at college....

Bookmarking this as I have two students at home who enjoy learning via MOOCs.

I took this coursera course in the summer - Learning How to Learn - https://www.coursera.org/course/learning It was really well put together with lots of practical ideas to implement right away. It's being offered regularly and is only 4 weeks long, very worthwhile.

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)?