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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.

Mahara is an open source ePortfolio and social networking web application. It provides users with tools to create and maintain a digital portfolio of their learning and social networking features to allow users to interact with each other. Hola a todos. Hoy me gustaría haceros llegar una aplicación que utilizamos en la Universidad de Málaga para que los alumnos hagan los Portfolios relacionados con la asignatura que estén tratando, incluso permitiendo la relación entre contenidos de distintas asignaturas. Podéis ver la aplicación en la página web: https://mahara.org/ Mahara permite crear, controlar y desarrollar tu propio portfolio electrónico. Permite, asimismo, organizar las páginas que el alumno va creando, organizando su propio portafolio en páginas, permitiéndole crear las páginas que estime necesarias y adaptándolas al público que el alumno decida tener en cada página. En este sentido, le permite elegir qué elementos mostrar, cómo y cuando. Finalmente, y como algo muy positivo y dinámico, permite compartir con la red el contenido que hace el alumno, hacer amistades, participar en los grupos y, finalmente exportar todo el contenido en una página web que, posteriormente, puede ser compartida en Internet. Desde la Universidad de Málaga hacemos uso de esta herramienta y nos sirve como herramienta de evaluación de nuestros alumnos, donde vemos su capacidad de síntesis, comprensión y reflexión sobre las distintas materias que vamos tratando.

Veru useful indeed! I didnt know this. Thanks for sharing!

I think this will be a great add-on on my personal website. I just added it on.

The recent proliferation of social networks has led to a societal shift - from a tribal mentality to that of Facebook - and has served to connect people from around the world with common cultural, religious, political and economic characteristics in an unprecedented manner and with astonishing speed.

Article about how a resource such as twitter can drive classroom learning going forward.

This is an area I'd like to tune up for myself and learning communities that I work with. Twitter's potential seems huge and not yet well utilized (in my networks) for closing the gap between sharing information and building relational solutions that move insight into action.

The reason I really like using Twitter for education is that it fits so well with constructivism. Like other social media, Twitter blurs the line between content creators and consumers, making interactions inherently collaborative; and more than that, the short character limit ensures that these interactions remain a dialogue rather than long-form conversations that frustrate sharing. I think suggestions like this article makes are also important beyond Twitter, because-let's be honest-it won't remain the dominant form of social media forever. Like we've talked about throughout the course, we need to be sure that technology doesn't drive change and that we don't simply adopt technologies because of their vogue; but whatever tools we end up using absolutely need to become more open and collaborative, or we risk losing student engagement and, ultimately, students themselves.

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"In this webinar, veterans of the open Internet policy battle will handicap the options, and the consequences, of the various roadmaps to new rules, and the FCC decision that will affect billions of dollars in investment and likely determine the development of the Internet for years to come."

Politicians and companies don't talk about this subject for now in Brazil. But I think that it will raise soon and I am afraid of result.

Interesting that this is in the news a lot and yet when I talk to people, I would say that more than half aren't completely sure what it means. Interesting, considering how important the issue is.

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"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.

"The current crisis, the deepest and longest in the history of capitalism, has opened a debate around the world about what appears, more clearly with each passing day, to be the simultaneous destruction of the two principal institutions of social and economic life: the State and the market. Never in living memory has the economic system been so universally questioned. On the other hand, never before have technical capacities been so powerful, and, more importantly, so accessible to people and small organizations. In fact, never before have so many small businesses taken part in the world market. Nearly free [gratis] P2P communication technologies let them create the largest commercial networks in history. The emergence of free software (which, by itself, represents the largest-ever transfer of value to the economic periphery) empowered them with unexpected independence. Millions of small businesses around the world, especially in Asia, were able to coordinate among themselves this way and hone their products just as new markets were opening up to them. It's "globalization of the small." It's not a marginal phenomenon: never before have so many people around the world gotten out of poverty."

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The Digital Humanities field is addressing this at the academic level. There is so much resistance to collaboration when sharing means someone else may publish your idea first, while at the same time, multiple operating/networked computers can leveraged to do a lot more work and discover a lot more when people work together. HASTAC is a good resource for learning about digital collaboration in the Humanities. In fact they have just launched a competition about building trust in collaborative environments focusing on education, youth and privacy issues.

This article relates to Module 1 and the lack of online privacy that we have with the increase of social media. This also affects intellectual property, and nothing is ever concealed or anonymous.

The principle of the Panopticon still works in today's "big data" society. As we get more and more assesses to information on the Internet, our personal information is also being exposed to others. However, as an user commented, "there is a place for surveillance -- but not when its scope and power has the ability to undermine our networks and connections that are essential for fostering healthy human development and communities -- which is the best protection against harm". The invisibility of the power, to some extent, builds up the self-suiveillance.

Cisco predicts that by 2020, we'll have 50 billion connected devices. To put the in perspective, if current population projections are accurate, that's between six seven connected devices for every person on the planet. Of course, this many data-generating devices will be a treasure-trove of opportunity- but also a complete nightmare from a data processing point of view.

Counting the hydro smart meter on my house, I'm already at 6 connected devices. The Apple Watch will likely replace my Fitbit next year http://www.apple.com/watch/

Most of our way of living are using internet, this has become the greatest impact on the things that we do and affects the advancement of the technology these days. There are pros and cons of it, but all the time we create network over the cyberspace.

This is old, but still relevant to the discussion of module2. Twitter made a big difference in tracking down the suspects of the Boston bombing.

Support for Open Archives Initiative activities has come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Digital Library Federation, Microsoft Corporation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and from the National Science Foundation (IIS-9817416 and IIS-0430906).

starting from the Actor Network Theory (see Latour, Callon, Law) obbligatory passage points turn to distribuited passage points when the authors start describing boundary objects....