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Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. We engage and invest in research in order to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, encourage innovation, enrich education, and stimulate the economy - to improve the public good.

Digital technologies and online learning environments permitting harvesting, analysis and use of student data is nothing new in higher education. They open up a number of opportunities and equally a number of perils - creating the need for higher education institutions to find ways to protect the harvested data.

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

Interesting paper on utilizing citizen science for digitizing natural history collection data. It is nice to get the perspective of how these programs are constructed.

There is one point in student and publishing en general, it will go on with non stop from now on. Digital publishing is low cost and a great help to student and any person as well.

Tic´s

Tic´s

Information Research, is an open access, international, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal, dedicated to making accessible the results of research across a wide range of information-related disciplines. It is privately published and edited by Professor T.D. Wilson. It is hosted, and given technical support, by Lund University Libraries, Sweden and editorial support by the University of Borås, Sweden.

RE: the multimedia editing activity. Paint.NET is free simple image editing program. It has more advanced features than windows paint, but less than a full editor like GIMP. Thus, you can use it to do some quick high quality editing when you don't want to mess around with a full editor. It is also interesting in terms of Open source, since it started as open source, but is no longer open source, because the author felt there was problems with plagiarism...

Awesome! I've saved this and can't wait to test it out. Thanks for sharing!

The AGORA program, set up by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) together with major publishers, enables developing countries to gain access to an outstanding digital library collection in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental science and related social sciences. AGORA provides a collection of more than 3500 key journals and 3300 books to 2500 institutions in 116 countries. AGORA is designed to enhance the scholarship of the many thousands of students, faculty and researchers in agriculture and life sciences in the developing world.

Thanks, the site is useful.

We encourage library publishers (and friends of library publishing) to submit proposals and/or attend the Forum, including both administrators and technical staff charged with this important scholarly communications function. The Library Publishing Forum will include representatives from a broad, international spectrum of academic library backgrounds, as well as groups that collaborate with libraries to publish scholarly works including the digital humanities.

The year I graduated high school, the media was overrun with speculation about a new technology set to shake the foundation of the world. What was it? We weren't told, exactly. All we knew was that code name "IT" was so revolutionary that we would have to rebuild our cities from scratch.

It is interesting that whenever a new innovation is introduced, the current one is declared dead before its final time arrives. Books in whatever format are appealing to different audiences for various reasons. To think that the introduction of e-books was going to lead to a declaration of war on printed books is laughable. Books will be with us for as long as we are still in this world. Does format matter? only time will tell.

Long back Lancaster wrote about paperless society but still we are heavily depending on paper only. Technology has fast evolved. First we talked about e-libraries then virtual libraries and now contemplating cloud based libraries. Many technologies have come and gone but paper is still ubiquitous.

The book that I share with you is a treasure, is so extraordinary that in it we can find information about universities with high academic prestige just like Stanford University. It covers topics of great interest and dynamism like, augmented reality, game-based learning and global knowledge among others.

This is an interesting post. Thank you for your sharing. As mentioned in this post, new research shows that electronic readers promoted more deep reading and less active learning. However, from my own experience, I feel like electronic reading leads to less deep reading but more active leaning. For me, I will never choose to read electronically if I have the physical version of the book because reading from digital devices, such as e-readers, tablets and smartphones, make me feel it's not like reading, it's more like looking through some online content or some one else blog posts. When read electronic books, it easy for me to skip around, and lose focus, attention or patience. I always need to read a second time for fully understanding a paragraph, when I read electronically. Also, with out the convenient of highlighting and making notes, reading electronic books prevent me from better understanding the content and thinking deeply. However, reading electronically, especially reading online might promote active learning because in some online reading website or softwares, there's interactive section on the side where readers of the book or article post their own opinions or form a discussion. This promote people to read, think and learn actively and collaboratively.

"electronic readers promoted more deep reading and less active learning" Some of my observations. I believe the future is for electronic reading only.

For me, maybe I am old school, it depends on the mood. I am wired towards both the print and electronic books. I cannot wait to have a printed book in my hand this Christmas holiday. The smell of the new selection of books and the paging through is a wonderful experience.