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A short guide for using Twitter for academic purposes, aimed at beginners.

thanks Kevin. Very useful. I'm new to twitter but i strongly believe in it as a "right" tool in research and teaching context

Thanks for sharing it! I'll tweet the post

By Cory Doctorow - Share this article This article is based on a keynote speech to the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, Dec. 2011. General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them.

This is a charged essay on the challenges to computing freedom in light of copyright, digital rights management (DRM), piracy (SOPA) and related issues. The author argues for the need to examine and, at user's discretion, shut down backdoor programs that monitor and/or enforce limits of fair use.

Open educational resources (OER) have been defined by the Hewlett Foundation as teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

"The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was a three-year research and implementation initiative that took place between March 2010 and August 2013. Hosted by the University of Cape Town, the programme engaged the Universities of Botswana, Namibia and Mauritius in a process aimed at better understanding the dynamics around scholarly communication in the Southern African higher education environment and advancing the open access agenda for the purpose of increasing the visibility of African research. This work was made possible by a grant from the Canadian International Development Research Center (IDRC). This report synthesizes research and findings from the four institutional case studies conducted at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia. It provides an overview the scholarly communication activity systems at work in these four Southern African universities."

Thanks for this article. I think it gives a great overview of the current landscape of scholarly publishing in Africa, and concisely states the problems of visibilities (or the lack thereof).

Adobe has just given us a graphic demonstration of how not to handle security and privacy issues. A hacker acquaintance of mine has tipped me to a huge security and privacy violation on the part of Adobe. That anonymous acquaintance was examining Adobe's DRm for educational purposes when they noticed that Digital Editions 4, the newest version of ...

The Internet is challenging its users privacy, and privacy carries a different meaning in the Digital Age.

It seems internet users might just have to become "comfortable" with software companies now having access to large amounts of information about them…the new normal

"The Macaulay Library is the world's largest and oldest scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video recordings. Our mission is to collect and preserve recordings of each species' behavior and natural history, to facilitate the ability of others to collect and preserve such recordings, and to actively promote the use of these recordings for diverse purposes spanning scientific research, education, conservation, and the arts." A great example of what citizen science can build!

"This paper interrogates and situates theoretically from a Marxist perspective various aspects and tensions that inhere in the contemporary academic publishing environment. The focus of the article is on journal publishing. The paper examines both the expanding capitalist control of the academic publishing industry and some of the efforts being made by those seeking to resist and subvert the capitalist model of academic publishing. The paper employs the concepts of primitive accumulation and alienation as a theoretical register for apprehending contemporary erosions of the knowledge commons through the enclosure effects that follow in the wake of capitalist control of academic publishing. Part of my purpose with this discussion will be to advance the case that despite a relatively privileged position vis-à-vis other workers, academic cognitive labourers are caught up within and subject to the constraining and exploitative practices of capitalist production processes."

Este juego puede descargarse para celulares y tabletas, fue desarrollado por un matemático interesado en el desarrollo del pensamiento matemático de niños y adultos, y es totalmente gratuito. The video describes a videogame to develop matemathical thinking for children to adults, with educational purposes.

Terasem Movement, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit charity endowed for the purpose of educating the public on the practicality and necessity of greatly extending human life, consistent with diversity and unity, via geoethical nanotechnology and personal cyberconsciousness. Terasem accomplishes its objectives by convening publicly accessible symposia, publishing explanatory analyses, conducting demonstration projects, issuing grants and encouraging public belief in a positive technologically-based future.

The competencies discussed by Dr. Jenkins in the Module 3 video, for those who are interested, are: "Play - the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving Performance - the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery Simulation - the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes Appropriation - the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content Multitasking - the ability to scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details. Distributed Cognition - the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities Collective Intelligence - the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal Judgment - the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources Transmedia Navigation - the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities Networking - the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information Negotiation - the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms."

Watch Jo introduce YouCubed We will feature short, high quality video ideas, featuring Jo & friends. Watch to learn about ways to build self-confident, math-loving children and students. *** One of my favorite resources; although, I'm still trying to figure out "open access" (or not). As CCSS evolves, it is great to see research that is purposeful and linked to classroom practice - teachers can use it and make sense of it - direct impact in classrooms.

An article that contains a link to a video with a nearly 1 and 1/2 hour debate on the purpose of education and the future of online learning. One of the participants is Sebastian Thrun, who is the CEO of Udacity, a service that offers free courses.

A federal database publicly disclosing companies' payments to doctors went live this week, drawing a splash of attention to the $3.5 billion given to physicians over 5 months last year. Although one purpose of the site is to shine light on potential conflicts of interest in research, the site may fall short of that goal.

An alternative perspective on some of the hype around makerspaces and hacking, looking into how it supports and extends the neoliberal agenda.

It is curious to see that everytime some new technology rises, there are someone saying that it will mean the end of the system (call it capitalism, for instance) and a new real democracy era will arise. Nevertheless, once and over again we see that the technology arrives to everyone's door, but always controlled by someone else. You might have your own car, which was almost imposible in the early 50's, but you depend on how expensive gas is and how many barriers you find in your way; you have internet in your pocket, but every movement you do and every site you visit are being saved in someone's server with we don't know what exact purposes. But we keep hoping and saying, once and over again, that democracy, the real one, will some day florish with a new magical device. I honestly think it is in human nature to try to control and manipulate others; even people that honestly see themselves as good collaborative human beens, when they are under a tense situation, they don't hesitate to hide the truth, manipulate or lie to find adepts to their cause. So only with a genetic mutation we will reach that golden dream!

Kevin you mentioned this article to me several weeks ago and I did read it and really appreciated the recommendation. I think it is important for us to think about other perspectives to makerspaces to really understand how libraries should (and do) fit into this changing landscape. The library landscape is definitely changing, and some are really latching on to this idea of makerspaces, and others latching on to the more traditional services that libraries offer. I think that we really need to understand how the concept of makerspaces can fit into developing strong civic skills, critical thinking and appreciation of the arts to really make it fit into libraries, and focus less on the "production" and "innovation" appeal that makerspaces have. I do think that skills that can be honed in makerspaces have the potential to create great global citizens, but only if it is accompanied by deep critical thinking and a broader understanding of the world.

"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.