Group items tagged

An interesting piece thinking about indigenous learning in a modern context.

Great tie in with the RIck Hill video in Module 1. Indigenous learning teaches us about the connectedness that stands in contrast to this MOOC even as we seek it in different forms through this sort of sharing and commenting and "liking."

"[W]e use open source software in our solutions and will use open source software in the future. From time to time, we may face claims against companies that incorporate open source software into their products, claiming ownership of, or demanding release of, the source code, the open source software and/or derivative works that were developed using such software, or otherwise seeking to enforce the terms of the applicable open source license."

from website: "Bioline International is a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries. BI's goal of reducing the South to North knowledge gap is crucial to a global understanding of health (tropical medicine, infectious diseases, epidemiology, emerging new diseases), biodiversity, the environment, conservation and international development. By providing a platform for the distribution of peer-reviewed journals (currently from Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda and Venezuela), BI helps to reduce the global knowledge divide by making bioscience information generated in these countries available to the international research community world-wide." The site offers a range of journals, with full text access. Areas include zoology, health, agriculture, and nutrition. There aren't a lot of journals so the site is manageable. Good source if you are a scientist seeking data/information from areas other than the west.

"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).

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

published by Mozilla, covers all sorts of open news. Interesting feature: unlike most news sites the content is actually CC-by-sa. "The Open Standard provides online news coverage of open, transparent, and collaborative systems at work in technology and our daily lives. Our purpose is to showcase the positive global impact of these systems and inspire more people to seek out, support and adopt open principles of accessibility, participation and experimentation. The Open Standard is published by Mozilla, a global community of technologists, thinkers and builders working together to promote openness, innovation and opportunity online. We will disclose and be transparent if we take a position on or promote the products and services of Mozilla or a partner company."

for example, check out this article about companies collecting data on school kids, https://openstandard.mozilla.org/whos-collecting-kids-personal-data-lots-of-people/

That is scary...

My last week in Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City was markedly different from my week in Hanoi in ways I did not expect. A spirit of entrepreneurship and optimism about the future of education in Vietnam has been palpable. I met with several entrepreneurs in Ho Chi Minh City.

There is a lot of talk about education technology and open education resources having a big impact on learners in developing countries. This article offers a brief glimpse into education entrepreneurship in Vietnam. Vietnam Open Education Resources (VOER) has supposedly pushed Vietnam to have a more developed OER system than any other country other than the US. I would be curious to see how Thiem would measure this claim. Platforms built around OER have potential to lower costs of materials, but they rely heavily on an active base of creators and self-publishers. There may always be an incentive for creators of especially good content to offer it for a price. In addition, just as a movie benefits from the guidance of an experienced director, a textbook or etextbook or any other large-format education content benefits substantially from an experienced curator who could charge for his/her work. I don't see this going away any time soon.

Completely. The short answer is that copyright law gives the copyright holder the right to make access open or restricted, and we seek to put copyright in the hands of authors or institutions that will consent to make access open. The long answer depends on whether we are talking about open access journals or open access repositories.

"At the same time, a fair amount of resistance to OA practices still exists. Publishers object to OA on economic principles, as it undermines the revenue generated by journals. Some researchers feel that it devalues their work as well, lowering it to the level of "a database to be consulted," in Eve's words. He believes the academic community is over-reliant on scholarly publishing's status quo; as he told the crowd at Columbia, "the system reinforces itself through economies of prestige." Even as interest in altmetrics grows, the quality of research continues to be gauged by the number of citations an article gathers and the status of the journal it appears in."

This is a good overview of a project that seeks to demystify and break down resistance to open educational resources.

Open Education Week is a global, community event that seeks to raise awareness about the benefits of free and open sharing in education, especially Open Educational Resources (OER).