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"As a result, it's not so simple to say that we shouldn't trust the cloud anymore, and that whatever happens to us is our fault if we do. It's an argument ignorant of the online-only reality consumer technology is hurtling toward more and more every day. Already, the cloud is the primary data store for a lot of people, for better or worse. Is it really so unreasonable to expect that the privacy, security and protection of our data should keep pace?"

Local Contexts is a new forum for applying Traditional Knowledge licenses or labels to materials from Indigenous communities. They work a lot like Creative Commons licenses. There are often different categories of Indigenous knowledge meant only for the community, or only for women, or only for leaders, and these licenses offer a way to label materials accordingly. These labels and licenses are added onto existing copyright, which is often held by the person who made a tangible material rather than the community where the idea comes from (an anthropologist who filmed a traditional ceremony owns the copyright on the film, and the community has no copyright). These TK labels are asking people who come across materials like this to think about how they are using the materials, and to think about whose intellectual property they are. This is a very new initiative, but a really valuable tool. This is part of a different conversation that challenges how we normally talk about copyright and intellectual property.

A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources. By ―open‖ it is generally meant that the resource is available at no cost to others for adaptation and reuse in different contexts. However ―open‖ is not a simple dichotomy; rather, there is a continuum of openness. We discuss four separate aspects of reuse and demonstrate how these describe different levels of openness. We discuss how the licensing and technical aspects of open educational resources affect the relative openness of an OER.

It's unquestionable that Research4Life has had a significant impact in improving access to research information for communities in developing countries. I do have a number of criticisms about how the program is organized and delivered, however. 1. Publisher participation in the program is 'entirely voluntary', without 'a single contract (being) signed between any of the partners' (Aaronson, 2004), meaning that publishers can opt out at any point. This issue was highlighted in 2011 when Elsevier, Lipincott Williams & Wilkins, Springer and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, publisher of Science Magazine) withdrew access to over 2500 journals through the HINARI system. Following international attention, and widespread condemnation, publishers restored access, with Elsevier announcing that they were in discussions with the government in Bangladesh to transition towards a paid licensing scheme (Wise, 2011). 2. Countries that meet the eligibility criteria of the program (which are based on the World Bank's listing of Lower and Lower Middle Income Countries) are sometimes excluded. Take for example India or Pakistan- although these countries are in the lists of eligible countries, the publishers deliberately exclude participation to protect whatever business they may have in these countries. So although hundreds of institutions could benefit, they exclude access to protect the business they receive from a handful of institutions. 3. Access to content is delivered through a single username and password for each institution. This is problematic for librarians, as they are unable to ensure the security of the password (a well-meaning researcher may share the password with a colleague in another institution, violating the license agreement). Abuse of institutional accounts has severe consequences, and librarians are sent messages from Research4Life threatening to not only cut off the institution, but all institutions in their country if they

Research4life is a great program by committed government and non-government organizations dedicated to produce valuable researches that will improve the life of people. Librarians play an important role in assisting researchers find valid, current, relevant information in order to produce a reliable output or results that will help humankind's betterment of living.

Researchers found out that " Wikipedia is significantly more biased than Britannica by their measurement, and a bit more left-leaning." But isn't the biggest and the most important thing of Wikipedia is their neutral point of view policy? This is introduced by the Wikipedia founder as the core principle of the community in our lecture video. However, researchers also found out that, the research result is influenced by their measurement, "Wikipedia articles are longer, on average, than Britannica articles, and on a per word basis Wikipedia is actually slightly less biased. Wikipedia articles which have received more revisions tend to be more neutral. The more the crowd works on an article, the less biased it is."

Does that mean it has created a platform for all the political foes to meet, under one roof and voice out their views.

"The trouble is that impact factor of journals where researchers publish their work is a poor surrogate to measure an individual researcher's accomplishments. "

Una mirada crítica al acceso abierto: Nature 495, 426-429 (28 March 2013) doi:10.1038/495426a http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 As that lack of enthusiasm demonstrates, the fundamental force driving the speed of the move towards full open access is what researchers - and research funders - want. Eisen says that although PLoS has become a success story - publishing 26,000 papers last year - it didn't catalyse the industry to change in the way that he had hoped. "I didn't expect publishers to give up their profits, but my frustration lies primarily with leaders of the science community for not recognizing that open access is a perfectly viable way to do publishing," he says.

La cuestión es que no hay quien ofrezca una opción sólida que pueda remplazar al Factor de Impacto. La comunidad científica lo ha adoptado cómo "LA" manera en que se puede medir el desempeño de los investigadores en el mundo. Y ese supuesto es hegemónico en el mundo. Tan es así que Scielo, a pesar de ser un repositorio en acceso abierto que sigue la filosofía de dar a conocer la producción científica latinoamericana, se decanto por generar indicadores bibliométricos de la mano de Thomson-Reuters y entrar al Web of Science. Esto no es asunto menor, es un indicador definitivo de que el dominio del FI no decaerá. Esto repercute directamente con la política científica nacional de cada país. En México CONACYT evalúa a los miembros del SNI mediante sus publicaciones en SCOPUS -pidiendo como evidencia las citaciones en este sistema de información. En Colombia, PUBLINDEX colocá revistas en A1 por el hecho de ser JCR-WoS u SJR-SCOPUS. Esto es innegable y seguirá pasando. Es por ello que iniciativas regionales de Acceso Abierto en América Latina (ya sean repositorios, leyes, etc:) ofrecen una posibilidad diferente que debe ser explotada por los investigadores de la región para mejorar la visibilidad de su producción. Del mismo modo, es ahí donde espacios como este MOOC deben ser valorados por su capacidad para diseminar la cultura del conocimiento abierto.

This is a weekly series highlighting Open Access Button users from around the world, discussing their work, and sharing their stories. If you would like to participate, please email oabutton@gmail.com Professor Ernesto Priego, part of the team at City University London's Library and Information Science Course, was thankfully able to chat with us after a...

This title is SO meaningful. People always ask what librarians do in this digital-Google-era. Librarians enable access, that is what they do! And in many ways. In educating people on open access, how to search databases, by searching databases for patrons, by searching the full-text, by contacting other libraries to get interlibrary loans, etc. etc. etc. The role of the librarian today is still very important and relevant. Technologies did not diminish the role of the librarians, technologies pushed it to very advanced, specialized and precise roles.

"Logan Laplante is a 13 year-old boy who was taken out of the education system to be home schooled instead. Not only was he home schooled, but Logan had the ability to tailor his education to his interests and also his style of learning, something traditional education does not offer." I realise this article (and the video on which the article is based) does not fall neatly into any category we've studied yet, though I hope many of you may find it as interesting and inspiring as I have. At core, this is about "hacking" the educational system. As Logan explains, his methods can be applied in mainstream schooling (or indeed for anyone interested in lifelong/lifewide education). There's also the element of "participatory culture" embedded in the production of this video: Logan is sharing his experiences, allowing others to comment and contribute so that he might learn as others are learning from him.

This is a truly amazing talk, I was especially pleased to discover your post since I was just about to share a talk that speaks to many of the same issues! My shared video talks about how schools simply aren't made for boys - for many reasons - and what should be done to reengage them in education. (You can check it out here, if you're interested - https://groups.diigo.com/group/okmooc/content/gaming-could-the-ultimate-tools-to-re-engage-boys-in-education-12782090) The part about "writing about butterflies and rainbows" quite literally made me chuckle, here's why: (from my video) "Boy comes home from school, and he says, "I hate writing." "Why do you hate writing, son? What's wrong with writing?" "Now I have to write what she tells me to write." "Okay, what is she telling you to write?" "Poems. I have to write poems. And little moments in my life. I don't want to write that stuff." :) The boy then goes on to saying "I want to write about video games. I want to write about leveling-up. I want to write about this really interesting world. I want to write about a tornado that comes into our house and blows all the windows out and ruins all the furniture and kills everybody." ...which is one of the main points of "hackschooling" -writing through experiences & interests. Also, speaking from personal experience as someone who also left a diploma behind, I can confirm that leaving a rigid non-functional study environment for an open world of possibility can be the best thing you can ever do. All in all - thumbs up for sharing the talk!

Thanks for sharing - what an inspiring talk. Many of his lessons are just as valuable for adults, who often seem to lose any sense of creativity after settling in to their lives, careers, and relationships. FYI - my wife and I have done some limited homeschooling with one of our kids who really doesn't thrive in traditional school settings. I wish we could have done more, but at the very least I encourage each of our kids to explore other ways to learn to either supplement (or question) what they are learning in school. Traditional education just isn't supportive of creative thinking and creative thinkers.

"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. "

Young, K. (2004). Internet Addiction: A new Clinical Phenomenon and Its Consequences. American Behavioral Scientist. 48:402

a. Although this is a psychology article, it poses an important concern over the rise of internet addiction in connected populations. This article is relevant to this course, as it relates to the notion of critical consumption; some users are unable to filter information effectively, which should be recognized as a concern. Young states many statistics from educators and researchers discounting internet use in the classroom as it is far too distracting and the loss of productivity (in both students and the workforce) is immense.

Some might argue that this article shows the downside of connected learning and e-resources, however this is not the case. Certain web activities mentioned in the paper such as chat rooms, social media, and video games are not the focus of this course. Open Knowledge deals with the light side of the internet, which is the interconnectivity, the accelerated learning, and the ability to publish ones own content. The internet can definitely be misused, but not every web activity is "junk food". If someone obsessively became a mathematician and ultimately ended up being the best mathematician in the world due to "addiction" people would call him or her a genius. The trick is to filter which content and activities one engages in.

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.

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. LaTeX is available as free software.

LaTex is a document preparation system programmed in free software. It is also a document markup language. It is a very useful tool to create scientific documents in many fields, but especially appropriate to write mathematical expresions. Among its advantages, it has different dictionaries for many languages, it can be adapted to any style class and gives a professional look to any document you write. In addition, manage of bibliography references is quite simple and flexible. Latex comprises a collection of TeX macros and program to process TeX documents and convert them in PDF documents, but also in HTML, PS, EPS, DVI, etc. The other main advantage is that LaTex document scan be opened with any text editor since they consist of plain text and do not contain hidden formatting codes or binary instructions.

Difícil para personas no versadas en informática, pero seguro muy útil cuando te haces con él :) Gracias por compartirlo. Saludos.

8 elements of digital literacy This video has merit despite the some of the distractions which divert the viewers' attention from the valuable content. Belshaw's introduction of his topic and objectives are clearly identified when he's in the street, he then walks into a building (at an accelerated time speed), sits down to describes the difference between the traditional mode of literacy found in print and books to that of digital media e.g. smart phones. This works well until he's suddenly in a railway station and later back in the street with all the commotion linked to these settings. This makes it very difficult to hear what is being said. However, his re-cap of at the end is helpful. Although reading and writing is necessary in both traditional and digital milieus, this is in figurative sense with the digital setting. There are numerous definitions for digital literacy (DL), but he describes digital literacy as being "a social linguist construct" rather than an intellectual concept. He describes an intersection between information and digital literacy. DL is divided into 8 elements: Cultural, Cognitive, Constructive, Communicative, Confident, Creative, Critical and Civic. The order of importance of the elements is dependent on the context in which the DL is found. There is no one correct choice as geography and networks have an impact.

In the whole article, there's one quote from Clive Thompson got my attention, "Twitter is the place where you could be like 'here's my one thought' and then link somewhere. I no longer needed to write a one-paragraph blog post about it, and Twitter scratched that itch and gave it a larger audience than it might have had." While people addict to twitter for fun, the fact is Twitter is actually a very good platform to share and learn knowledge.

"Data connectivity is intrinsic to most of our daily lives. The place which exists in almost every community large or small, rural or urban, is the public library. Ben Lee argues that not only do libraries provide free access to data, but they do so in an environment which is trustworthy and neutral, geared to learning. Access to digital technology increasingly overlaps with access to opportunity and it is important to recognise the role public libraries already play (and have always played) in keeping the gate to knowledge open. "

"Having explored a "learning theory" that George Siemens (2005; 2006a) and Stephen Downes (2005; 2007) developed for a networked and digital world called connectivism. Fascinating and extensive conversations in the blogosphere and in educational journals debate whether connectivism is a new learning theory or whether it is merely a digital extension of constructivism."

I agree, is a wonderful delineation.

The article is great. I only have one observation, we always assume learning is all about connecting special nodes and sources of information but we forget that the opposite is also learning. When we disconnect our wrong nodes and sources of information in terms of beliefs and wrong information, I believe we are also learning.

"...we need to recognize you can't kill the instinct the technology produces. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using it. We can only drive it underground. We can't make our kids passive again. We can only make them, quote, "pirates." And is that good?" - Larry Lessig This is a great talk about the free use of materials to make something new. The crux of Mr Lessig's argument is that every time a "kid" remixes a song with a video they are committing a criminal act. By doing this the law is making their free expression criminal. He shows three great examples of this starting at 8:29 in the video. He suggests that by using Creative Commons materials, we can avoid being criminals, and by doing this we can break the cartel of the RIAA and others. He uses the example of BMI causing the downfall of ASCAP. You can see this at 4:55 in the video. Here is the quote: "Finally. Before the Internet, the last great terror to rain down on the content industry was a terror created by this technology [Shows a picture of a broadcast radio antenna]. Broadcasting: a new way to spread content, and therefore a new battle over the control of the businesses that would spread content. Now, at that time, the entity, the legal cartel, that controlled the performance rights for most of the music that would be broadcast using these technologies was ASCAP. They had an exclusive license on the most popular content, and they exercised it in a way that tried to demonstrate to the broadcasters who really was in charge. So, between 1931 and 1939, they raised rates by some 448 percent, until the broadcasters finally got together and said, okay, enough of this. And in 1939, a lawyer, Sydney Kaye, started something called Broadcast Music Inc. We know it as BMI. And BMI was much more democratic in the art that it would include within its repertoire, including African American music for the first time in the repertoire. But most important was that BMI took public domain works a