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Very good collection of useful sites + instructions how to find Creative Commons licensed items

Quite interesting guide on how to find relevant OER of different types and natures. «Reusing existing Open Educational Resources (OER) can save significant time and effort. The OPEN partners recommend TAACCCT grantees invest up-front time finding OER to reuse rather than starting development of new educational resources right away. A significant benefit of OER is that they provide source material to build your development efforts around.» Ricardo twitter: @ricbruno71

Really helpful go-to collection of links with explanations for each, and more than just image references (videos, sounds, etc). Great resource, thanks for sharing.

The European Commission is organising an High-Level Conference on "Education in the Digital Era". It'll take place in Brussels on the 11th December. Discussion will also take place online. Themes will be adrressed in advanced, promoting an online debate feeding into the conference, and during the day allowing anyone to follow-up and contribute to the debate on spot. Bookmark the page and go back to it during the comming weeks. Ricardo Twitter: @ricbruno71

"By leveraging technology, we can open new doors to scholarly inquiry for ourselves and our students. Through new collaborations, we can create exciting shared spaces, both virtual and physical, where that inquiry can take place. The library is a natural home for these technology-rich spaces.

This article is fantastic, and speaks to just about everything I'm passionate about as an aspiring academic librarian. I'm somewhat worried about how smaller universities-my chosen workplace-will adapt to these newer models of scholarly communication and publication, and generally with how the academic conversation is changing. These exciting developments in what the university means have the potential to widen the already extensive divide between smaller and larger schools. I know the challenges section at the end talks a little bit about convincing decision makers to fund these projects, but has anyone read anything about how these changes can be made specifically by smaller or poorly funded universities?

We live in a digital world with too much information and not enough knowledge. How do we find our way through the mass of information available via the internet on our laptops, mobile phones, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to meaningful interaction?

Two weeks ago, News Corp Australia's Miranda Devine published Wendy Bacon and comrades lay into Sharri Markson on Twitter in defence of The Australian's media section editor Sharri Markson, who had been criticised for a column she wrote about the dangers of mixing activism and journalism.

I totally agree from the point of view of this article related to learning and being a Journalism teacher. Just great!

"Social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), microblogging services (e.g. Twitter), and content sharing sites (e.g. YouTube and Flickr) have introduced the opportunity for wide scale, online social participation. Visibility of national and international priorities such as public health, political unrest, disaster relief, and climate change has increased, yet we know little about the benefits and possible costs of engaging in social activism via social media. "

This article reminds me to the activism of a Spanish councellor to promote activism through social net against the independence of Cataluña in Spain: http://www.elmundo.es/cronica/2014/10/12/54390135ca474179608b4571.html

"Unnoticed by most of its readers, Wikipedia continues to undergo dramatic changes, as its sister project Wikidata introduces a new multilingual "Wikipedia for data" (http://www.wikidata.org) to manage the factual information of the popular online encyclopedia. With Wikipedia's data becoming cleaned and integrated in a single location, opportunities arise for many new applications."

As we consider the opportunities and challenges around open knowledge on the web, I find it interesting to consider situation antithetical to such openness such as China. This blog highlights some of the words and phrases that have been blocked by the Chinese government on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, along with possible explanation for why they may have been blocked. The Chinese government employs over 2 million workers to monitor the internet in China. (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-24396957)

"People giving a foreign 'face' to a cause are standing between us. Media who pretend to write stories about groups whose voices are never heard but write almost universally through the lens of western men instead, are ensuring that all interpretations and solutions come from the same small segment of society. Wars are told from the point of view of arms dealers and politicians, disasters are interpreted by NGO's, most issues are never covered at all. Official channels decide what will or will not be revealed and media are rewarded for their obedience by access to more official information. New media in its current form has made this worse instead of better. Journalists write about those powerful in social media to have their stories amplified by the same people. The news - celebrity symbiosis has only escalated as writers vie for page views. We are at risk of having increasingly narrow news coverage as platforms like Twitter move to increase amplification of already powerful accounts and hide the less powerful opinions from view."

Schlitz M, Vieten C, Miller E. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2010 July-Aug;17(7-8):18-36. "In this paper, we examine how increasing understanding and explicit awareness of social consciousness can develop through transformations in worldview." In order to develop a participatory culture which allows for participation by people from different cultural, educational and political backgrounds to the dominant Western culture in the digital domain, it is argued that Worldview Literacy needs to be cultivated, and tolerance learned for different worldviews. This would facilitate participation by all, and prevent the silencing and exclusion from agency of those from different backgrounds.