Group items tagged

"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. "

"free, off-the-shelf tools that don't require programming knowledge and might be particularly interesting to people who work with a lot of images."

If you are interested/involved in the field of Information and Digital Literacy, this site is for you. It is run by information professionals from key UK organizations actively involved in this field. This is an amazing source that has been created for practitioners, researchers, and anyone with such interest from around the world. It is well structured, maintained, and updated. It provides definitions and models, teaching materials, information about research in the filed of Information Literacy, extra reading (e.g. books, journals, websites, reports, etc.), and much more. You can search about Information Literacy by sector (e.g. schools, health, public, and special libraries, higher and further education, etc.). You can also get in touch with editorial team or leave your comment.

"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.

interesting website that provides free access to several books and educational resources about the public domain, plus an interesting blog. [i can't remember if this was already a course reading, but I thought I should include it anyway...]

A teacher is a life long learner, in fact, everyone should be a lifelong learner, but the difference between us ( teachers and educators ) and others is that we have no choice but to be life long learners. We can not stop learning for fear that we might be outrun by our students.

Interesting way to frame teachers' life long learning: "for fear that we might be outrun by our students". The author also tells teachers that they need to lead students, "not lag behind". These ideas bring up interesting questions around self-directed learning and participatory learning environments, which might actually celebrate times when students outrun their teachers by finding new tools and solutions and leading their teachers in different directions.

Discusses the risks of being tracked through our Internet activity and location tracking devices. Risks include financial fraud, stalking, manipulation by advertisers, tracking our whereabouts, devaluation of privacy as a fundamental right. Read as the opposing viewpoint to Why Online Tracking Isn't Bad - The Great Privacy Debate - WSJ.

In my opinion we should do some extra careful mostly when it comes to financial matter, we should not just type in the confidential information even if it is most respected site, because bad hackers are every when, we do not know if they are just lurking around waiting for us.

Interesting article! I think it´s important to sort out what privacy really means in different Internet contexts. There are many theories and interpretations. Private users, sellers and marketers are examples of groups who have many different agendas and interests. Privacy and how it is used on Internet, must be studied from both local and global perspectives as I see it. What type of information does not the private user know that other actors use for selling and marketing and online services. How can a clearer cooperation be done to not cross the lines for online privacy?

Looks interesting: LibraryBox is an open source, portable digital file distribution tool based on inexpensive hardware that enables delivery of educational, healthcare, and other vital information to individuals off the grid.

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.

A digital journal of learning, teaching and technology. You can read interesting articles on MOOCs, digital writing, peer review and other relevant topics, as well as future of open knowledge.

With the development of technology, more and more people can join the media and become reporters. However, the rise of citizen journalism also has revolutionary effect on different kinds of careers, such as publishers and other aspects of news and sociey.

Dated from 2012 but an interesting read that really puts the importance and significance of citizen journalism into perspective

Citizen journalism is especially powerful when it disagrees with the popular paradigm of the mass media platforms. This article specifically talks about occupy, Syria, and other movements where the media was not necessarily on the side of the protesters. This is particularly powerful because it disinter mediates the mass media and shows a balanced perspective - something that history prior to the internet lacked all too often. Citizen Journalism, although often biased and unfiltered, gives a raw perspective on events which helps people form more informed opinions.

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.

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)?

Sad and interesting situation here, scientist publishes his research, and in the comments, his work is called into question and it costs him a job. Brings into question the integrity of pre-publication peer review, and casts a shadow on the future of comments. Frequently, the comments are made by anonymous users, which itself should be a problem, even if the comment brings to light errors in the research. Now it seems, entire websites have sprung up with the sole purpose of debunking the hard work of others, sometimes needlessly. It's a good read.

Thank you for sharing. The situation with PubPeer actually encounters problems which are common on internet. As long as one comments anonymously, there are many off-topic and offensive comments. As soon as only registered comments are welcome, there are very few of them or not at all. Besides, one can presume that some scientific communities, even world-wide, are quite small and because of different reasons people do not want to comment under their real names... Another interesting resource to explore.

"In truth, publishing is flourishing, creating massive new fortunes for entrepreneurs and more choices for consumers. It's also attracting large investments by established companies and venture capitalists. Though not everyone prospers, there has never been a better time for publishers."

Good overview with fundamental advice for publishers: innovate

Good read, Kevin! :) I agree with this article that said "As long as people want to be informed, entertained, and inspired, there will be profitable opportunities in publishing." The main key to keep the business running is everyone must adapt. Traditional publishers need to moves to digital media in order to survive and meet the modern readers' needs.

An interesting opinion/confessional piece on one academic's experience of publishing in the developing world. The author points out cultural pressures and differences that could possible contribute to the expanding knowledge gap.

It is very fascinating articles, thank you for posting this. I myself, most of the times, focus on the publisher issues rather than the author himself. However, after read this I realise how important it is to pay attention to the authors because their contribution can really affect the quality of researches that they involved in. Regardless how successful the authors are, they are still human beings who are also affected by the national cultures.

This is an interesting piece but raises the question - why is the institution placing the pressure? It says, tacitly, a lot about the culture of the academic institutions in the country as a whole - and this culture is often shaped by funding patterns from central government, or major funders. The institution then responds to these funding patterns by pressuring staff to produce what is funded. In South Africa this is very much the pattern, with central government funding articles published in selected journals (see the readings for the module 11). However, there has been a rethink and there is proposed changes in now supporting book publication to a much greater degree. So whereas the pressure was on to produce articles, now the universities are looking at book production to a greater extent. As has been said as a truism; "Follow the money" - and in this case we see how this affects what should be, in effect, academic freedom.

An interesting article arguing for the creation of open licenses for data. They make the point that the use of creative commons licenses is mistaken as these are designed for creative work not data or data bases. Unfortunately the argument - which is repeated several times - is not very thoroughly presented. The Talis Community License is mentioned as a possible alternative. The paper dates from 2008 and is thus - apart from the forceful argument for open licenses as the more viable alternative to the public domain - primarily of historical interest. Much progress has been made in the field with Open Data Commons Licenses now being an accepted standard as well as well as country specific licenses such as Open Government License UK, Open Government License Canada or Data License Germany (cf. http://opendefinition.org/licenses/).