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Ricochet is an open source effort to make it possible for you to chat privately. In this article we get some insight on why this program is important. Ricochet should be introduced in an user friendly version this November.

Ricochet is an open source effort to make it possible for you to chat privately. In this article we get some insight on why this program is important. Ricochet should be introduced in an user friendly version this November.

Nature Communications has announced it will go open access only from 20 October in a bid to show the world that quality papers do not have to be paid for.

I've chosen to link to the article on Wired which discusses the move as the explanation is easier for those who (like me!) have little experience of academic journals to understand. One of the most important points I've taken from reading this article (and the PDF study explaining the reasons for the move to Open Access, which is linked from the article) is that to date, articles which have previously been published to Nature Communications using the OA model have earned more citations than those published under a subscription model. I'm interested to learn more about the mentioned Creative Commons 4.0 license, which I'm not yet familiar with. If anyone with experience using (or publishing to) academic journals would like to add any relevant points to the potential impact of the magazine's choice to go OA, I would really appreciate the insight!

"Here is a true story about how copyright infringement costs [a] small photography business thousands of dollars every year. Or, maybe it isn't. It could also be a true story of how copyright infringement earns thousands of dollars every year. I can't be sure."

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".

This is an excellent article which explains how Sugata Mitra's teaching models helped to transform a failing school in Mexico. It's a story which completely changed my attitude to learning and education and inspired me to discover as much as possible about cloud-based and student-centred learning.

Thanks for posting. I have heard of similar ideas from my girlfriend who works with learning disabled people, helping them make goals and follow through with them. The way the criticized traditional 'top down' eduction system is set-up, learning disabled people end up with the impression that they are failures and burdens. This goes beyond learning disabled people though, anyone who finds no inspiration for math, English and the sciences is bound to under perform at school, fail at the competitive aspect of it and get told their failures as a result, implicitly or explicitly. I also found that at design school when I realized that math and English were important for the projects I was working on I started to learn effectively and enjoy doing so. This is after failing my secondary education (pre university in New Zealand). You say this changed your attitude towards cloud learning, have you done much else as a result?

"The entrance to GitHub is the most Instagram-able lobby in tech. It's a recreation of the Oval Office , and the mimicry is spot-on---except for the rug. Instead of the arrow-clutching American eagle that graces Obama's office rug, it shows the code-sharing site's Octocat mascot gazing into the digital future, just above the motto: "In Collaboration We Trust."

A neat article outlining the significance of digital literacy within the industrial revolution. "Digital literacy is about learning to use the most powerful tools we've ever built."

Further illustrating Dr. Willinskys point: Taylor Swift is a trendsetter. From her transition from country to pop, to her honest lyrics, she has ushered in a golden age for singer-songwriter appreciation and market power. This week, she made another bold move-she pulled all of her music from Spotify.

Satya Nadella's rapid reinvention of Microsoft continues. In yet another bid to make up lost ground in the long march to the future of computing, Microsoft is now open sourcing the very foundation of .NET-the software that millions of developers use to build and operate websites and other large online applications-and it says this free... Not much to add on this that won't outright plagiarize the author, but anyone who knows anything about software and operating systems knows this is huge. Open source software is traditionally more nimble and able to deal with various threats in a more timely fashion, whereas Microsoft has to get a team on it, perfect it, and roll out updates to million of customers who may not even know what to do with it once it hits their inbox. Anyone with a Linux machine at home can search, copy and paste the code to fix almost any problem they discover, and be back at work within minutes. The parallels to Open Knowledge are numerous.

A book containing the twitter statuses of people supposedly working on a novel is presented in this link. I am wondering if this is theft of intelectual property. While writing tweets may be public domain knowledge, making money by copying the exact phrasing into a work of your own seems like plagiarism. What are your takes on this?

uhm weird

A good example for module 4. I guess, as long as the 2nd creator made a permission to use those tweets before publishing it into book. But that person should also exercise the intellectual property guidelines or norms before anything else.

This is a neat idea. You start a sketch on your tablet and send it out into the world. Someone else sees your sketch and is inspired to do something else to it. Through successive iterations you have a new sketch that many people have collaborated on. It turns into something unexpected and new.

There is a project called Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/), which is a software that allows children and teenagers to learn to program graphically, can share their programs and work collaboratively. Thank you for sharing. -------- Existe un proyecto llamado Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/), el cual es un software que permite a niños y adolescentes a aprender a programar de manera gráfica, pueden compartir sus programas y trabajar colaborativamente. Gracias por compartir.

The article provides brief history of information overload and its effects. The author provides 10 activities that help to cope with information overload, each of them is consists of several activities. The article includes also a paragraph on the role of librarians and other information professionals in dealing with information overload. The article pays special attention to filtering the received information, RSS overload techniques, phone overload, e-mail overload, multimedia overload etc.

Micah Lee's whitepaper on open source encryption tools available in an post-snowden era.

Micah Lee's whitepaper on open source encryption tools available in an post-snowden era.

This is an interesting post. Thank you for your sharing. As mentioned in this post, new research shows that electronic readers promoted more deep reading and less active learning. However, from my own experience, I feel like electronic reading leads to less deep reading but more active leaning. For me, I will never choose to read electronically if I have the physical version of the book because reading from digital devices, such as e-readers, tablets and smartphones, make me feel it's not like reading, it's more like looking through some online content or some one else blog posts. When read electronic books, it easy for me to skip around, and lose focus, attention or patience. I always need to read a second time for fully understanding a paragraph, when I read electronically. Also, with out the convenient of highlighting and making notes, reading electronic books prevent me from better understanding the content and thinking deeply. However, reading electronically, especially reading online might promote active learning because in some online reading website or softwares, there's interactive section on the side where readers of the book or article post their own opinions or form a discussion. This promote people to read, think and learn actively and collaboratively.

"electronic readers promoted more deep reading and less active learning" Some of my observations. I believe the future is for electronic reading only.

For me, maybe I am old school, it depends on the mood. I am wired towards both the print and electronic books. I cannot wait to have a printed book in my hand this Christmas holiday. The smell of the new selection of books and the paging through is a wonderful experience.

"It's hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire. Computers, and computing, are broken." Love this one, because it explains in easy words the technological background why things (not) work as they work...

Some preliminary findings from the MOOC Research Initiative.

Interesting that most people who do well in MOOCs are generally people who have a "growth mindset" and are not necessarily the people in most need of learning. I think any research on MOOCs is interesting since it is such a new phenomenon and it's going to be interesting to see how they evolve.

Very interesting indeed that it is not necessarily those people who are most in need of learning who do well in MOOCs. The question is how MOOC's can, indeed, become more beneficial and attractive to those who need them the most. Access to internet in rural areas around the globe, and availability of cheap computers are both key.