I shared this in the discussions section over in the MOOC home area. This is a fascinating piece of research about the attitudes of student knowledge sharing, mainly graduate students in research. I'm a stat nerd, and I especially dig that the number of downloads is shared.

Sad and interesting situation here, scientist publishes his research, and in the comments, his work is called into question and it costs him a job. Brings into question the integrity of pre-publication peer review, and casts a shadow on the future of comments. Frequently, the comments are made by anonymous users, which itself should be a problem, even if the comment brings to light errors in the research. Now it seems, entire websites have sprung up with the sole purpose of debunking the hard work of others, sometimes needlessly. It's a good read.

While not exactly on topic, and newspapers are not generally considered Scholarly publishers, they do engage with the public, and frequently act as a liaison between journals/researchers and the public. In the past ten years or so, people have gotten used to accessing, for free, newspapers and television reports as a way to inform themselves. While this is good for the individual, it is not so good for the publisher. Many traditional news outlets have been struggling to find a way to generate revenue in a way that neither smacks of consumerism, nor excludes the average citizen from participating. IN the UK, the liberal-leaning newspaper The Guardian has begun selling 'memberships', and hosting events ranging from lectures to classes on things as diverse as photography and creative writing.

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.

By: Matthew LeBar Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are often described as the future of education - or at least a significant part of it. But there may be a significant problem with them: a very small proportion of students who start them actually finish. This poses a serious threat to their legitimacy.

Transcript attached. Snowden unable to attend in person.

Interesting reading in this Module, esp the article about having an additional anonymous online persona. It's interesting in that reddit not only allows users to register using obviously fake names, but also declines to require any authentication, but still offers it as an option. I participated in the reddit community for about a year, and in that time connected with numerous individuals, most of which I never learned 'who' they were. Personally, I was never harassed, bullied or otherwise hassled, save for one or two PMs from various mods when I had run afoul of their guidelines.