Group items tagged

I was lucky to be in Berlin with some colleagues earlier this month for the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival and associated fringe events. There's really too much to distill into a short post-from Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, making the case for " Embracing the open opportunity," to Patrick Alley's breathtaking accounts of how Global Witness uses information, to expose crime and corruption in countries around the world.

A useful summary of some of the key take-aways from the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival, courtesy of Tariq Khokhar From the article: 1. There are some great open data initiatives around the world and two common themes are the need for a strong community of technologically literate data re-users, and the sustained effort needed within governments to change how they create, manage and publish data in the long term. 2. Spreadsheets are code and we can adopt some software engineering practices to make much better use of them. There are a number of powerful tools and approaches to data handing being pioneered by the scientific community and those working in other fields can adopt and emulate many of them. 3. Open data fundamentally needs open source software. App reuse often doesn't happen because contexts are too different. Reusable software components can reduce the development overhead for creating locally customized civic software applications and a pool of high quality civic software components is a valuable public good worth contributing to. Reading time: 15mins

I see that Google are the sponsors of the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival but despite having little knowledge about Google's role and interest in the Open Knowledge , I also feel they are the culprit when it comes to data manipulative for their own profit motives.

With these resources, you can create or participate in collaborative efforts to develop tools and methods for online education.

Many Open Education Resources (OER) have been introduced by governments, universities, and individuals within the past few years. OERs provide teaching and learning materials that are freely available and offered online for anyone to use. Whether you're an instructor, student, or self-learner, you have access to full courses, modules, syllabi, lectures, assignments, quizzes, activities, games, simulations, and tools to create these components.

Thanks. An extensive list of resources. It may have been easier to use the list if it wasn't categorised only alphabetically but also further grouped into categories. It's still a valuable collection.

At the Open Education Working Group we are interested in all aspects of open education, from Open Education Resources (OERs) and new learning and teaching practices, to open source tools and open licenses. One fairly new area that is starting to show real traction in opening up education is open education data.

Micah Lee's whitepaper on open source encryption tools available in an post-snowden era.

Micah Lee's whitepaper on open source encryption tools available in an post-snowden era.

Did you go get some Open Data this week? You need OpenRefine! A wonderful tool that lets you manipulate data files in amazing ways, i love working with it. Open source project spun off from google "OpenRefine : A free, open source, power tool for working with messy data"

Open-source tools

very good information

thanks for pointing to this resource. The Textbook Editor and OER Importer look very promising. Math editing could be very useful, too

The employees who do the actual work in IT can use all the help they can get; these open source tools are handier than most

OpenGeoportal.org is a new site that brings together geospatial professionals, developers, metadata specialists, and librarians to coordinate the Open Geoportal (OGP) project. The Open Geoportal is a collaboratively developed, open source, federated web application to rapidly discover, preview, and retrieve geospatial data from multiple repositories.

A number of universities are partnering on developing geospatial metadata and a tool that can scrape datasets from various sources to display (and overlay!) on a single, federated interface.

New startup that grew out of discussions among the IndieWebCamp folks. Provides a Tumblr-like open source tool (and hosted version) to publish content, then syndicate to other networks.

Gracias por compartir -- Thanks for sharing

So, you need an image for your blog? We've spent some time categorizing our favorite sources for free images and organizing them in such a way as to help you find what you're looking for. Here are the criteria we've examined: Subjects: Does a site focus on specific genres of images, or is it a mass collection of various image types?

Very helpful resource. The categories help to narrow one's search.

Nice! Thanks for sharing. Both useful IRL, and pertinent to the course.

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.

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.

This looks really exciting as an open tool for storing and sharing info without internet! 

The home of the U.S. Government's open data Here you will find data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more. This tool is very powerful for researchers that may not access to the funds and resources of researchers from well funded universities or that of the US Government. This resources breaks the data out into 21 different topics covering areas from education to the ocean. Each section has data sets to choose from and access to grant information as well as articles and updates on each topic. Even it you are someone that does not have the capacity to use these resources, I believe that it is good to know where to find this source so that you can share it with others, or perhaps one day you will have the ability to use this resource more fully.

From the website: "Inkscape is professional quality vector graphics software which runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It is used by design professionals and hobbyists worldwide, for creating a wide variety of graphics such as illustrations, icons, logos, diagrams, maps and web graphics." Inkscape is a very handy drawing tool that can be used for a variety of applications including signs, posters, page layout and other options when a photo editor really isn't the right tool.

"With the emergence of new publishing tools, public libraries are able to be publishers for themselves. In essence, we can build a Maker culture for local publishing. "

Thanks! I did not know about Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. Quite useful!

Two competing views on the future of publishing, and how shifts in consumer behavior to purchasing or consuming electronic content is causing such a shift in the literary world. I found it interesting to read that a number of open source software platforms were identified as the harbingers of today's self-publishing model online. I never knew Wattpad existed - watt an awesome site (pun intended). I agree with the articles viewpoint about the role that public libraries can play in this shifting landscape. A good read.