Group items tagged

"The current crisis, the deepest and longest in the history of capitalism, has opened a debate around the world about what appears, more clearly with each passing day, to be the simultaneous destruction of the two principal institutions of social and economic life: the State and the market. Never in living memory has the economic system been so universally questioned. On the other hand, never before have technical capacities been so powerful, and, more importantly, so accessible to people and small organizations. In fact, never before have so many small businesses taken part in the world market. Nearly free [gratis] P2P communication technologies let them create the largest commercial networks in history. The emergence of free software (which, by itself, represents the largest-ever transfer of value to the economic periphery) empowered them with unexpected independence. Millions of small businesses around the world, especially in Asia, were able to coordinate among themselves this way and hone their products just as new markets were opening up to them. It's "globalization of the small." It's not a marginal phenomenon: never before have so many people around the world gotten out of poverty."

David Wiley discusses openness. Given new media and technology, digital works and the internet, what will we do? The reaction to the invention of the printing press was to limit the dissemination of information. Given the internet will we open up now?

After reading a brief history of copyright law after the advent of the printing press, it is easy to see that copyright has always been an evolving concept. With the internet we again find ourselves needing to redefine what copyright means and who its serving. The Stationers' Company era of copyright offered no protections to the author of the work, and now we offer a lot of protections to the author of the work - and the technologies we use to access works of knowledge and art are unable to do so with the current laws. I appreciate the videos in the current module that detailed the advances some countries are making in evolving copyright law to be more flexible and keep the user in mind.

Private space: Author Cory Doctorow in his study. Here's a story you've heard about the Internet: we trade our privacy for services. The idea is that your private information is less valuable to you than it is to the firms that siphon it out of your browser as you navigate the Web.

Hi I'm Christina Chavez-Reyes. The account listed is a work account. I found this piece insightful about the trade-offs to privacy for using internet services. The author frames the issue as a "war" between "the rebels and the empire" to maximize the value of our privacy. We are often led to believe consumers (the rebels) are powerless against internet corporations (the empire); however, the author suggests a solution to empower consumers that is embedded in the very open source culture which created the issue. It demonstrates the potent innovation that open source culture possesses over other models of production that are explained in course videos.

Seek, sense and share. I have found 'assorted stuff'. A blog by Tim SI tahmer, expert in instructional technology. This guy seems to know stuff about internet and other digital things. I found him on Twitter, https://twitter.com/timstahmer, but haven't spot him here in the Diigo group.

"11 academic publishers, including major players like Taylor & Francis and Oxford University Press, would be raising the cost of short-term e-book loans effective June 1. In some cases the increase would be as much as 300 percent."

I've saved this because it identifies a facet of open knowledge that is becoming increasingly important - the concept of "open manufacturing". Additive manufacturing - or 3D printing as it is more commonly known - is being used in more industry sectors than ever before. New materials and use cases have led to 3D manufacturing in Health, Entertainment, Automobiles, Fashion, Construction etc. I particularly liked this quote from David Rowan at Wired: "The democratisation of manufacturing will empower anyone with a compelling idea to prototype, make and launch a physical product ay speed and low cost".

A book with ideas along the line of participatory culture, "panarchy"... The information revolution - which is as much an organizational as a technological revolution - is transforming the nature of conflict across the spectrum: from open warfare, to terrorism, crime, and even radical social activism.

The essay "The Human Presence in Digital Artefacts" by Alan Galey from "Text and Genre in Reconstruction", an open book on the effects of digitalization on ideas, behaviours, products and institutions (http://stephanieschlitz.com/dh/Text%26Genre-McCarty_vol_2.pdf). Would be of interest to those curious about publishing, literature, digital texts, etc.

Highly recommended to those interested in hypertextuality and the transformation of reading practices in the digital age.

This piece is related to the idea of open knowledge in that it deals with one professor's year-long experiment with synchronous teaching over a Skype connection. While the professor felt that it worked better and more seamlessly than anyone could have imagined, he remains unsure as to whether telepedagogy has a place in our traditional academic settings. While a bit different in scope, idea and execution than a mooc, it is another example of new ways in which traditional learning is giving way to 21st technology. Video conferencing is now an every day part of most businesses, and here is an entire semester's class being "phoned in" via Skype. As the article points out, its usefulness in a traditional setting is up in the air. Yet there would seem to be an obvious utility in bringing this give and take classroom setting to remote locations that might have internet access but not easy access to schools or specific professors. Yet another way to make knowledge or the access to knowledge more open.

Great post .. Well I think it may take time for people to adapt into the digital situations.. And in developing counties situation is even worst than that.. not only with skype , online at all would not work because people think and so use to the didactic pedagogy. All the things are centered with in the teachers presence..

The report describes potential benefits of citizen science for both science and society, especially given the advent of new mobile technologies that enable remote participation. Who really benefits the most from these developments: the amateurs or the professionals?

This is an interesting article that scotches the surface of what happens when digital rights meet physical deceives. Who owns the songs on our iPhones? What about eBooks? Can these be passed down? An interesting discussion follows in the comments - and even though Bruce Willis' name has been erroneously attached, the subject is still worth examining.

Perhaps a bit narrow, but relevant to me. The article touches upon some aspects of privacy and openness bothering librarians. On the one hand people themselves are sharing lots of information about their reading lists, reading habits and favorites. On the other hand, libraries are trying to preserve patrons' privacy and protect their privacy from unwanted eyes.

I enjoyed this reading very much, thanks! Not to spoil the end, but it is a good comment that in order to protect the patrons' privacy, they must do their part too. If they use machines that requires to log in to Amazon, for example (I don't own a Kindle so I don't know it that is true), well, libraries cannot protect their privacy on what they are reading. Which reinforce the idea of the role that libraries should play in educating people about online privacy. the example of combining books that were borrowed by the same person that allows to identify the patron is very powerful and shows how something that looks innocent like a list of borrowed books can be harmful.

I think this article really demonstrates how the meaning of libraries is constantly in flux, and in recent decades has been evolving quicker than it has in perhaps the past couple of centuries. But the library has always been evolving, first mostly accessible to academics and eventually democratizing its mission by bringing literacy to the masses with public libraries. Now we are evolving to decide how open and social the patron habits should be. I think there is a way that libraries can adapt to this change and incorporate ways for patron data to inform the collection and recommendations, but also give patrons the option of being completely private, perhaps similar to an "incognito" browser window. Ultimately, the library should take privacy seriously and give patrons options that do not deceive. Thanks for sharing!

This article sets the scene for the special issue on research data and publishing. Research data - that material commonly accepted by the scholarly community as required evidence for hypotheses and insights, for verification and/or reproducibility of experiments - has become an increasingly critical issue for publishers given recent developments in funders' mandates, technological advances, policymakers' interests, and so forth. This is from a special issue of Learned Publishing, vol 27, September 2014. This special issue is open access.