Group items tagged

"The motivation for my own authorial decision to turn my back on traditional publishers was both psychological and entrepreneurial. The psychological was purely personal. I am a Depression baby. My father was hard hit during the Depression and it was difficult for him to get and hold a job. He was always at the mercy of others, and I vowed early on never to be beholden to others to make my living. Controlling my own destiny has always been one of my principal obsessions."

An online review and ratings of the Terms of Service from different social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, and more. "Terms of service are often too long to read, but it's important to understand what's in them. Your rights online depend on them. We hope that our ratings can help you get informed about your rights. "

I think people really need this online review because most of people do not have patience to read the long list of Terms of service but it does not mean they do not care about their rights online. This tool is great, I would like to use it and share to all of my friends. Hope more people could know that such a great tool exists.

This snapshot of terms of service for the various social media sites is excellent. Bookmarked!

"The Web Literacy Map is a map of competencies and skills that Mozilla and our community of stakeholders believe are important to pay attention to when getting better at reading, writing and participating on the web."

This is terrific. As someone who works in, on and around the web, a list like this makes it easier for me to describe to clients, colleagues and vendors just what it is I can do.

Thanks for pointing to this useful resource, could use it both for teaching and evaluation, and for finding gaps in my own web literacy skills

How an open course can work. "We don't want the students to remember the formulas. We want to change the way they look at the world."

I liked how Ted explains the way students access to Open Courses and how right he is when he says that if there are no due dates, even if the topic is very interesting, there are always other things to do first, therefore, you end up not doing it. I am also with him in not doing moocs to long that can get you bored and end up losing all your attention.

very informative!

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

A Video Community for Why Open Education Matters

This video was created in 2012, where the OER was already promoted, and I just learned about it in 2014. I guess there are still a lot of people who does not know about it. Now I wonder, what is going to change in the teacher's role? If there are more MOOC courses, does that mean the need of teachers will decline? When he mentioned that they use public funds to develop these Open Educational courses, does that mean the rise of taxes? Although I do support the OER, it is still developing, adjustments need to be made for the balance of these courses and the public sector.

I like this article. I think students are limited to get access to knowledge, resulting from distance, poverty, politics. Open education resources can reduce the distance, making people all around world join a same class. Free makes poverty students get chance to take courses which he couldn't afford before.

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.

Knowledge sharing is not giving but getting sth. from the others

Getting connected with others in Australia around Open Knowledge - what it is, communities to join, and a great list of resources and websites to visit under their Communities tab.

"Now, following criticism of its quality-control checks, the website is asking all of the journals in its directory to reapply on the basis of stricter criteria. It hopes the move will weed out 'predatory journals': those that profess to publish research openly, often charging fees, but that are either outright scams or do not provide the services a scientist would expect, such as a minimal standard of peer review or permanent archiving. "

A look at how fitness tracking might be expanded to wider use/tracking in the workplace. Here theoretical and positive, but could be sinister. I thought this was interesting, especially after reading the 2011 article "Why Privacy Matters" https://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/ shared in our OKMOOC group.

"CAN 3D printing be subversive?" asks a voice in the creepiest Internet video you'll be likely to watch this month. It's a trailer for Defcad.com, a search engine for 3D-printable designs for things "institutions and industries have an interest in keeping from us," including "medical devices, drugs, goods, guns."

I've read in Japanese paper that Ricoh and Canon started producing and announced 3D printers. The market has been expanding. It used such as a design of dental work etc. I don't think it's matter of that "open source" is winning or not. It's been and will continue to utilize, but how to use it could be changing. Maybe more creative way, people may need to be smarter about how to analyze to SELECT right source before analyze the source of data, etc..

Interesting article but he couldn't really develop a cogent argument in a op-ed. However, "open is the new green" could be true. That's why I want to learn about 'open' now so I can be ahead and stay ahead of what happens to 'open' when it gets reduced, like 'the environment' did to 'green'.

"This raises the interesting and important question of whether publication in an OA journal represents the end of a process or the beginning of a different one. The difference is marketing, a term that is often misunderstood in scholarly circles. Marketing means creating demand for something. Traditional publishers do this with their brands and (for books) their authors. For OA publishers the challenge is to continue to keep pushing a particular paper after it has appeared online. There are many ways to do this, of which simply making the content openly available is one (allowing an article to get indexed by search engines and pointed to by bloggers and others). But to continue to keep the article in the eyes of its prospective readers, new means of attracting attention have to be developed. "

Librarian site from New Zealand. It's still far from comprehensive but it can provide a good start if you're looking for stuff to try. FOSS4LIB is a much larger directory of library-specific open-source projects you might also look at.

I've used Greenstone, Koha, and Wordpress, and while Wordpress is the easiest to use, I find it the least "library-esque" of the three. Koha is excellent once you get started, and has barcode-scanning built in, which can be very useful. Greenstone I've only just started to look at, but is fairly user-friendly once you get started and has a huge community of users that can help with any number of add-ons and tutorials. Great article!

Thanks, great stuff. I created a blog using WordPress.

The best free cultural and educational media on the web

erikitaymarijo, thank you for the attached list it is very helpful.

Some of us get our education at film school. More of us get it from The Criterion Collection, that formidably cinephilic restorer, curator, and packager of classic motion pictures from every era.

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.

Compares the cost of articles from society and non-profit publishers to those of the major commercial publishers.

Its crazy. The numbers (of profit and control) for the publishing companies is astronomical!

Universities have received a poor deal from the system of private, subscription-based access to knowledge production since the port WW2 commercialization of the scientific publishing industry. It is absurd that the university or research funder supplies the content (the research), pays for the authoring (the time of the researcher writing the article), and provides and pays for the time of peer reviewers and academic editors. In addition, it often pays page charges or formatting charges to publishers. It then cedes copyright and finally buys back its own research at prices that have escalated at four times the rate of inflation in the past decade and a half! Considering most of this research is conducted using public funds, it becomes a moral argument when public resources are used once again to purchase access to the outputs of this research. The commercial model of disseminating research does not obey the rules of supply and demand. A relatively small number of 'core' journals occupy monopoly positions, in that university libraries have to subscribe to access their content, whatever the cost, because these journals have been established as 'must-have' resources. While the practice of 'bundling' offers the advantage of bulk pricing, it reduces room for choice, as bundles consume large chunks of library budgets, making it difficult to subscribe to smaller, individual titles. In addition, the inflexibility of indexing systems makes it difficult for new journals to establish themselves; thus compromising the potential for smaller niche subjects and newer interdisciplinary areas. Thankfully the global inequalities engendered by the commercialization of scholarly publishing are being challenged by open access.

Good article on how to look for the best information the internet has to offer and be a discerning consumer. Also good for availability of academic publishing as an important public good.

It's a good reminder to all of us to pay close attention to where we are getting our information. The main points are take advantage of academic publishing via Google Scholar, get 2nd opinions, check multiple sources, be aware of the potential motives of the writer and their affiliated organization, and follow links/sources and fact check. Additional suggestions that I would add to the author's blog post include taking a close look at the writer's credentials, asking yourself who the intended audience might be, looking out for emotion-rousing words, and doing a link search to find out if other people have sited the article. It's also good to ask whether the web is the best place to look for that particular type of information in the first place.