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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.

a huge citizen science project in the USA, formalizing the sharing of the traditional (and ancient) practice of Phenology. Phenology is an important way to be connected to the natural world around you--basically observation of seasonal changes. People have been collecting observations for all of human history--this project seeks to help standardize recording of the data so that it can be shared en mass, creating huge and flexible data sets for many different current and future scientific experiments. "Nature's Notebook is a national, online program where amateur and professional naturalists regularly record observations of plants and animals to generate long-term data sets used for scientific discovery and decision-making."

oh, and an important thing is that (unlike some cit sci projects) the resulting data is shared freely online, check out some stats and visualizations at https://www.usanpn.org/data

Public Knowledge Project - Download

one solution to help inequality problem?

Good crowd-funding project that tries to help solve the digital divide problem by providing infrastructure to those who lack the money to purchase a computer. In addition to providing the physical infrastructure of the computer to allow those without one to catch up to society, perhaps another solution to conquer the digital divide is to educate those who have just received computers how to use the internet to look for information, consume, produce and distribute the information.

Honestly I think public libraries need WAY more computers.

We rely on your support to further our mission to understand birds and other wildlife, to involve the public in scientific discovery, and to use our knowledge to protect our planet. Each day, bird watchers report tens of thousands of bird observations to citizen-science projects at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, contributing to the world's most dynamic and powerful source of information on birds.

Birding has been at the forefront of citizen science projects. In South Africa there are similar projects to the ones Cornell is doing. they are being run through the Avian Demographic Unit at UCT and strongly supported by Birdlife South Africa. Birdwatching is one of the areas where an ornithologist is often on an equal footing with amateurs, and sometimes behind professional guides, when it comes to field identification. It is therefore a suitable field in which citizen science can play an important role.

A very large library of music for video and other projects. It appears that they are changing their model a bit but still offer free licenses for YouTube projects and some student projects. Other uses will have a fee associated. The quality of music is very high and I have used this site a good deal in the past for student work.

"Team Open is a project to collect and share stories of the power of Creative Commons licenses." (http://teamopen.cc/all/) This site is a project by Creative Commons to advertise the power of creative commons licensing; it includes trading cards (!) for donating, and powerful stories about how CC has been used for good in the world and why it is such an important movement. This is a great piece of advertising for CC, and it really captures some of the ways that CC can be used. I think all too often, copyright is not seen as something "sexy" or interesting, but using clear language, simple but elegant graphics, and some really captivating stories, this site is a very useful tool.

"In a plan to scan all of its publications to the cloud, the National Library of Norway is digitalizing its books, and it and plans to make them all freely available to users with a Norwegian IP address. The library plans to have the project completed in about 15 to 20 years."

This is such a great initiative! And it falls under common sense, why would the documents obtained by legal deposit not be available for all the population of a country? Seeing my own country, Canada, reducing the acquisitions under legal deposit while others makes it more visible and accessible makes me want to weep.

New Visions in Citizen Science by Anne Bowser and Lea Shanley: * different models that support public contribution, potential challenges, and positive impacts that projects can have on scientific literacy, research, management, and public policy. * Illustrate how citizen science functions at its best demonstrating how open innovation can address agency-specific challenges in new and compelling ways.

"Around the globe, thousands of research projects are engaging millions of individuals-many of whom are not trained as scientists-in collecting, categorizing, transcribing, or analyzing scientific data."

Super interesting area. I worked this topic into a presentation on educational innovation as one of the leaders in its directionality and its success.

tell me more about...I'm a sociologist and how we shape today we make the history of tomorrow...

Arabic initiatives in open knowledge

"It is the first TEDx talk of the founder of Free Software movement. Stallman, RMS for short, has changed the world with his vision of freedom for the digital age. He launched the GNU operating system, used with Linux as a component, and inspired the development of Creative Commons licences and Wikipedia project. In this talk, Stallman describes how nonfree programs give companies control of their users and what users can do in order to recover control over their computing."

This is a pdf document that explains all about societic project for the UE.

"To help students start new software projects without breaking the bank, GitHub, Bitnami, Crowdflower, DigitalOcean, DNSimple, HackHands, Namecheap, Orchestrate, Screenhero, SendGrid, Stripe, Travis CI and Epic Game's Unreal Engine are launching the GitHub Student Developer Pack, a new program to give students free access to their tools." A great example of Open Access to developer tools and software.

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.

Prezi introducting the fluencies outlined and sourced from www.fluency21.com

Last week Tim Gowers, Cambridge University mathematician and open access advocate who led the recent boycott of Elsevier, announced an exciting new open access initiative for mathematicians on his blog. The project, called the Episciences Project, will make it super quick and easy to set up open access journals called "epijournals".

This is a project to make financial information and results on global development open and easy to understand