Group items tagged

This blog about Open Data Developments in Asia analyses the recent state of Open Data adopted in Asia and highlights some of the 11 Asian countries participants that attended the Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva in 2012. Of the 11 countries that attended the conference, the author of the post focuses on the East Asian and Pacific countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar and discusses their state and role in Openness. The author does a good job at providing statistics of the different countries in terms of the Worldbank Knowledge Economy Index (KEI), which analyzes the economic rankings of countries. The author then compares economic rank to that of openness, stating that countries low on the economic rank contribute little to no open data within their own countries or externally to other countries. Next, the author talks about the overall internet penetration in Asia as being only 27.5 percent and in that statistic, there is still a wide gap between North and South East Asia in terms of internet use and information distribution and acquisition from citizens and others. Moreover, the author continues to compare how many social, economical, political and cultural influence information distribution, contribution and acquisition in Asia countries. Openness is growing in the more developed Asian countries, but openness is limited, or even nonexistent, in developing (authoritative) countries. After reading this article, I've had a greater understanding of the current state of Open Data in Asia an the influences that contribute to enabling Openness. What I expected from the blog post or something that would've made the post even better could be some examples or projects of Openness or Open Data in Asia.

A really interesting course (also from Stanford Online) that has just started and I believe will be of interest to many doing Open Knowledge! "This interdisciplinary course features talks from thought leaders and innovators from medical education, instructional design, cognitive science, online learning, and emerging technology. Over the course of eleven weeks, we'll consider how to build educational experiences that address the unique learning preferences of today's Millennial medical students and residents. As the volume of new medical knowledge outpaces our ability to organize and retain it, how might educators disrupt outdated practices through thoughtful use of technology and learning design? How might MOOCs, social media, simulation and virtual reality change the face of medical education? How might we make learning continuous, engaging, and scalable in the age of increasing clinical demands and limited work hours? Joining the conversation will be experts from all health care and education stakeholder domains, including patients, and students from nursing, medicine and engineering sciences."

You sold me and I signed up, this is exactly what I was looking for when I signed up for this course. Hoping to bring this into clinical research and improve the perceptions, understanding and participation to forward medical innovation.

Who has heard of this festival about Open Knowledge? Who has been there?

An online course by David Wiley covering a wide range of topics within open education and open knowledge in the wider sense.

Opened in a broader sense knowledge and a broad range of topics is something wonderful for those wanting to learn more and more from anywhere in the world!

Una manera diferente de ver la Educación, muy interesante.

Many interesting charts and data of the global internet use, access, and contributions

Atlas, publications, charts and tables of global information and internet geographies and impacts on information access, information production and information distribution, done over a four year period by Oxford Information Institute. Findings, data, and publication will be published in Open Access formats and platforms. The website is simple but contains lots of information relevant to the topics in Stanford. There are links to external related publications about information geography, access, distribution and production. Very good website. Some limitations include: bias from the two developers and producers as well as institution itself, unknown (not identified) contributors and sponsors.

A very valuable collection demonstrating how economic, political, cultural and linguistic ties impact the flow of knowledge is and information. Of course, such charts do little to explain, why this happens and where a more even distribution of knowledge is desirable. Also, the data that lies behind the visualisations is not always open. Especially vauable are the links to the data collections that are accessible.

Slides from Leslie Chan's talk on What is Open Science and What Role Does it Play in Development?

Is true that open access benefits the academic development of students and agree with it, but it would also be important to know whether college students and teachers and researchers know how to use information resources open access or if known. It is important to give more publicity to information resources in order to open the knowledge society makes use of them to create new knowledge for society.

A great news, especially for the "immediately" aspect! "A consortium of six leading UK medical research charities will support the costs of making research articles from their funded research immediately and freely openly available to scientists, patients, and donors alike, through the recently announced joint Charity Open Access Fund."

Shule.Info is a project that puts data about Tanzanian schools online, providing information for the overall country, regions, and individual schools. The website is also in both English and Swahili, the language of the majority of Tanzanians. This is a great attempt at making this open data accessible and understandable to the people to who need it. "We all know that education in Tanzania is in a state of crisis. Massive failure rates. Not enough teachers. Not enough books. Poor teaching. And many more problems. So what do you do if you are a parent, brother or sister and want to find a good school? What if you are a council or national government leader and want to track progress? Right now it is very difficult to do so, because data is not easily available. And when you can access data, it is very difficult to understand and use. Open data is in fact relevant to all of us in making beter decisions. It is not just a concept for technical experts. If we knew which medicines were available in our nearest health centres we would save ourselves wasted trips. If we had live traffic updates we could better plan our travel. And if we had data on school performance we would have the chance to make better decisions about our children's education and potentially shape the course of their future differently."

"Funded by tertiary institutions rather than individual researchers, this new model seeks to provide open access not just to traditional academic publications but to all forms of scholarly output."

"If, as rumoured, google builds a platform for depositing unrefereed research papers for "peer-reviewing" via crowd-sourcing, can this create a substitute for classical peer-review or will it merely supplement classical peer review with crowd-sourcing?"

Two facts that makes me think, peer-reviewing via crowd-sourcing, at best would supplement the traditional peer-review process. Fact one, there are already open access repositories that allow "deposit first; review later", but those repositories have not taken over other journals. Fact two, Wikipedia is an example in that, though theoretically anyone can contribute and edit the articles, there is definite number of people who would do it. Therefore, I don't see crowd sourcing peer review would really substitute the traditional route.

I appreciated that this source was framed outside of dichotomous thinking by not pitting more traditional and open access peer review models directly against one another, carrying the assumption that a particular publishing process must choose one or another. Although, I think I would challenge Harnad to take this thought process further. Rather than supplementing or complementing one another, traditional and open peer review models are distinct enough to also be applicable in different types of contexts, without necessarily needing to rely on one another. That is not to disagree with Harnad that the two do not "substitute" one another, but precisely because they cannot substitute one another indicates that they serve different purposes and could thus be useful in different contexts…. Or, as Harnad suggest, supplement each other in the same context. I think this very well parallels the context of taxonomies and folksonomies.

I presented this paper to a conference in South Africa in 2005, and it was described as "too radical" by the top leaders in libraries in South Africa who attended. :) So am rather happy that my vague perceptions and musings about the emerging trends have been vindicated today. "This paper will focus on another aspect that is integrally linked to the ability to access literature and information - that of cost and economics. Both the broader macroeconomic context and the more focused microeconomic (South African) environment will be referred to. We will examine the assumption that the economic development of a nation is linked to the ability to access information and test whether this is a valid assumption. From there, we will take a brief look at the issue of the cost of books, specifically in South Africa. The advent of the electronic revolution and the many paradigm shifts that the Internet and electronic media have initiated and the effects on the publishing industry, will be outlined. We will explore the "information as commodity" paradigm and briefly look at the related Copyright and Intellectual Property developments before weaving these seemingly disparate threads together to form a picture of innovative solutions that have arisen in response to the information access crisis in South Africa. These solutions have arisen from the popular notion that information should be freely available for societal good, rather than commodified. Finally, we will ponder the effect that these solutions may have on the traditional book publishing industry in South Africa."

Thank you all, very much, it is quite a new experience for me to have the paper well received. :)

Thank you for sharing this. I really appreciated the non-North American context. I grew up in the States, and am working on my Master's degree in Canada, so it's really easy to get caught up in always looking at these issues from the North American point of view. Seeing papers like this really help to confirm how global these issues are, and cement their importance in my mind.

The official home of the Python Programming Language

Open source is the future. Obvs, Microsoft et.al. paved the way, but moving forward, the route to privacy and access is via free software that can be adapted on the fly.

Microsoft también tiene un sitio sobre "open source" llamado Codeplex (https://www.codeplex.com/), aunque no siempre se debe fiar (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/lest-codeplex-perplex.es.html), hablan de open source, pero no de software libre.

Christopher Kelty has written a book on the cultural importance of open source software and made it freely available under a CC license. It looks at free software from both a technical and social perspective, allowing for greater insights into its significance for today and for tomorrow.

This is a very interesting and thought provoking ebook. Not only does it provide a helpful historical view of how free software came to be, but it posits the impact of such a phenomenon on industry and culture. I particularity liked the view that the pervasiveness of free software - thanks to the Internet - is such that free software itself is instigating much change beyond its original perceived sphere of influence, being software applications. A good read if open source software, free software and impacts on culture interests you.

Eliza Laur CORAS and Adrian Tumitru TANTAU elaborate on the principles of open innovation. Students experienced in open learning might be better suited in a business world, where innovation has changed from being done in a closed shop, to being fostered by a free - albeit carefully managed - in- and outflow of information

"Every day we face challenges - from the personal, such as the quickest way to get to work, or what we should eat, to global ones like climate change and how to sustainably feed and educate seven billion people on this planet. At Open Knowledge we believe that opening up data - and turning that data into insight - can be crucial to addressing these challenges, and building a society in which is everyone - not just the few - are empowered with the knowledge they need to understand and effect change."

really good! I think this is a very good summary about what we are learning in this course: "We need to create a culture of "open data makers", people able and ready to make apps and insights with open data. We need to connect open data with those who have the best questions and the biggest needs - a healthcare worker in Zambia, the London commuter travelling home - and go beyond the data geeks and the tech savvy to make data be useful to all."