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This is an open textbook that Tony Bates is writing as part of the BC Open Textbook initiative. The topic is Teaching in the Digital Age. It's interesting as it's a work in progress and Tony has been blogging parts of the book to gain feedback as he is writing it. It's a topic that I am interested in. I do think it could use a substantial amount of copy editing, which it may yet receive, as may inconsistencies jump out at me in the TOC alone. I will be continuing to monitor this one as it develops further into his finished book.

Education South Africa - February 2013 With the 2012 Limpopo textbook delivery saga, and the rising cost of printed textbooks, one public school has decided to take a bold step into the future and convert to using E-books for all their learners.

This sounds like a good idea but then the students must have the tablets and computers to be able to read the books. Unfortunately I don't think this will work in many of the poorer rural schools that need it most.

The great idea of this project could be used by every educational organization, as the article say, the cost are clearly low.

"It turns out that students are poorly trained in college to effectively navigate the Internet's indiscriminate glut of information. Another Project Information Literacy study, involving more than 8,300 undergraduates at 25 American colleges, found that most make do with a very small compass. They rely on tried and true resources such as course readings, library databases, Google, and Wikipedia....The skills that students cultivate through traditional assignments-writing essays based on library research-are far different from those required to perform efficient, high-level, accurate research in the digital world. All of those types of research skills take practice under the eye of experts."

This commentary emphasises the need for students to be taught within the curricula on how to be discerning when navigating the surfeit of information on the internet.

Do you own too many devices? Posted: How many tech gadgets do you own? Chances are, you have a PC, Mac or Windows, desktop or laptop and a smartphone. Maybe you both kinds of PCs, a desktop workstation and a portable laptop. Maybe you have a tablet -- large or small? You might also have a Kindle e-reader.

I find myself constantly needing more devices, even though I know one is enough. We do live in this gadget-centric world, and with every year that Apple introduces something that blows away their last invention, I feel the need to acquire it. Though, what's actually stopped me from acquiring anything, is that I know year after year, there will be another 'revolutionary product' that will 'enhance' my life. So for now, it's just a laptop and a phone! Though a tablet does sound tempting...

In my household we have two adults, two children, one Mac desktop, two smartphones, a nexus and an iPad. It seems to work out that we have enough for my husband to be learning and practicing coding on the mac, my son learning Italian on an app, my daughter watching animal videos all while I'm looking up a recipe online. So far so good. I wouldn't add any to it. And sometimes I want to subtract, but we're in a new era and I'm done fighting it. I'm trying to embrace all the wonderful qualities the device era has to offer.

There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open source projects is initially startling.

Case study of a copyright take down notice and discussion of copyright and public domain issues.

This is a really excellent article! Access to the public domain and to the things that are in it (or should be, but never are) is at the root of my interest in copyright. I do wish there was more information about how we can fight back, if that's even possible. (I also appreciate the link to the Public Domain review in the article, and that the Public Domain review has a Tumblr. Something to investigate for my final project!)

Curioso caso. También hay otros casos sobre los problemas que hay, por ejemplo, en los personajes animados de Dominio Público como Peter Pan, Bambi, etc., donde empresas como Disney reclaman que sean de Dominio Público para poder lucrar con ellos, pero se niegan a que otros personajes en específico Mickey Mouse lo sean. Una doble moral. http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2008/08/22/actualidad/1219356003_850215.html http://articles.latimes.com/2008/aug/22/business/fi-mickey22

InformalScience.org is the website and online community of The Center for the Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE). CAISE works in collaboration with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) Program to strengthen and advance the field of professional informal science education by providing resources for practitioners, researchers, evaluators and STEM-based professionals.

This is a project is a production that has come out of a graduate course at the iSchool at the University of Toronto that touches on information overload, literacy and their definition of "post literacy". It is touches on thee multiliteracy that was mentioned in the reading by Kapitzke, and goes beyond into headier stuff. Check out their Pinterest bibliography, and their new recent endeavor with a Beyond Literacy podcast.

This is an interdisciplinary open access publication on sharing after a conference being held in Innsbruck, Austria 2011. I would especially like to recommend the article by Katherine Sarikakis (Sharing, Labour and Governance on Social Media: A Rights Lacuna), who is dealing with invisible 'online labour' on SNS from a political economy perspective. Very interesting one, because, in my opinion, this also applies to open knowledge projects as well.. But also the other articles by Andrea Hemetsberger ('Let the Source be with you!' - Practices of Sharing in Free and Open-Source Communities), Volker Grassmuck (The Sharing Turn: Why we are generally nice and have a good chance to cooperate our way out of the mess we have gotten ourselves into), and the others (half of it in English, the other in German) are definitely worth reading!

I opened my first class session this semester by projecting the word ATTENTION on a screen and telling my students that class begins when they turn off their telephones, close their laptops, and shut their eyes for sixty seconds.

I dare also to share this paper which recently appeared on seminar.net. It deals with my PhD project and tries to link open government data with educational concepts, merging a critical perspective with productive approaches. If any other people in this MOOC are interested in this field, I would be truly glad to discuss these ideas and read/hear your opinions about it!

Using game like concept to teach kids and adults is becoming more and more recognize a great learning and teaching tool. I am also interested on using games for computer cognitive rehabilitation exercixes.

A very thorough paper especially useful for its careful analysis of the "flip side" of open government data. It presents the main objections raised against the OGD "paradise" and also analyses ways in which media pedagogy can alleviate these problems. It culminates in a very important question: » An educational conception towards 'governing students not to be governed (that much)' within formal, obligatory education can too easily act out what it pretends to counteract. Informal settings, however, run the risk of fortifying social injustice and privilege - if largely used by well-educated citizens and semi-experts, as assumed. «

The Global Digital Citizenship Foundation provides dynamic professional learning and Digital Citizenship resources for educators worldwide and creates crowd funding opportunities for student-driven passion projects.

It is well known that the rules that allow for certain educational uses of copyrighted works under certain conditions without permission of the rights' owners vary greatly between countries. But how different are those rules? And how difficult is to access those differences? Can a teacher with no legal background determine alone whether a certain...

The structure of MOOCs is continually evolving. Presently the major trend is the transferal of knowledge from the Western English speaking world, but this is changing. Collaboration and other countries' participation in creating this form of education are developing. I believe this is essential for specific regional needs to be satisfied and understood. It is technology and open education collaborating for the benefit of all, not only those with Western privileges. It's not education for education's sake, but brings in a more entrepreneurial approach - not only in Africa where one initiative has started. This article clearly illustrates these new developments in the MOOC arena, providing examples of projects underway and future plans for MOOC 2.0.

Es interesante notar que la propuesta educativa del MOOC sigue transformándose y expandiéndose. También me resulta desafiante que el terreno de aplicación del MOOC 2.0 sea el Asia (naturalmente, por la proporción de jóvenes) y no México. Esta es una interesante área de oportunidad.

I think MOOC will be much more effective as tool for learning exchanges between countries, especially developing stakeholder, rather than replacing high education.

Places the popular concept of the makerspace within the theoretical context of experiential education.

I have a 11-year old daughter, so a lot of the readings and activities we do in this course usually lead me to compare between how they apply to k-12 "fundamental" education and professional development. We are lucky in that some of her teachers are experimenting with flipped classroom and project-based learning. However, as a parent on the sideline, sometimes I wonder about their activities. How do I or anyone evaluate an activity to know that it is "educational"? This article gives a great definition, "...an experience is educative if it lead to further growth, intellectually or morally..." Another quote I like a lot is "learner to take initiative, make decisions, and be accountable for the results."

Good article on the Maker Movement, and references to the thinking of John Dewey. I hadn't realized some of the Maker Movement extends back to the 1970's. I had the chance to meet Sylvia Libow Martinez a couple of years ago (of Invent to Learn - http://www.inventtolearn.com/) and got a deeper insight into the power of the Maker Movement, Maker Fairs, and how sharing knowledge and collaboration is producing some amazing things in the realm of 3D printing, wearable technology, and changing paradigms for education.

I'll preface this by saying I've shared a few things from the Biodiversity Heritage Library on Twitter. The Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog is a blog that I've been following for a few years. The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a project in coordination with the Internet Archive to digitize historic natural history journals and field notebooks. I find the digitization of field notebooks very interesting in terms of open science. In the module on open science there was a lot of discussion of modern science, but I feel it is equally important to open historic or legacy data.

Our projects live within the 'Zooniverse', the home of Citizen Science on the web. Each is inspired by a science team who provide the initial ideas, the reassurance that what we're doing can make a real contribution and an audience who are willing to use the end result. You can apply to be a volunteer for science study to help science and also improve yourself