Khan Academy has expanded from just creating videos to include a whole platform through which students can move through the content, including analytics for teachers and parents to track them. And to motivate students to do more, Khan Academy has included what's become quite a common feature of most Web 2.0 apps: badges. There's a Meteorite Badge, Moon Badge, Earth Badge, and Sun Badge, for example.

Now Khan Academy can hardly be chastised for giving students rewards like this. The whole letter grading system is "gamification of learning" to some extent. But as some people have found, this sort of reward system on Khan Academy may encourage completion of material for the sake of badges, rather than for the sake of learning itself. At the Los Altos USD, one of the places where Khan Academy is being piloted in the classroom, teachers note, "The problem here is that sometimes people rush through the exercise without learning it just to get a badge. The creators of Khan Academy added badges to make it more interesting and motivating, not to make you ignore everything else and just aim for the badges."

The open textbook publishing model o ers new collaborative opportunities
for authors, who can join communities of writers on
sites that o er open licensing. Authors, illustrators, and editors can
choose to contribute many types of course content to the growing
fi eld of open educational resources, including essays, animations,
video demonstrations, detailed drawings, and classroom activities-
all without taking on the burden of writing an entire book.
Instead of depending heavily on a single text, instructors can design
content for their courses on an as-needed basis, choosing
from an array of books, articles, videos, audio recordings, and
readings published at a number of venues. They can even encourage
students to move beyond being passive consumers of education
by contributing to their own texts, participating in the creative
and constructive aspects of learning.

The Obama administration is right to direct federal agencies to make public, without charge, all scientific papers reporting on research financed by the government. In a memorandum issued on Friday, John Holdren, the president's science adviser, directed federal agencies with more than $100 million in annual research and development expenditures to develop plans for making the published results of almost all the research freely available to everyone within one year of publication.

Digital technologies have created more than one revolution.
Let's call this one the access revolution.

For the last century, scientific activity has been firmly placed in universities or other academic
organizations, government laboratories, or in the R&D department of firms. Scholars in the sociology and
economics of science, in turn, have made great progress understanding the functioning of this established
system of science (Dasgupta & David, 1994; Merton, 1973; Stephan, 2012; Zuckerman, 1988).

The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

The history of human knowledge is closely linked to the history of civilization-one could even argue that the history of civilization is in large parts based on knowledge creation and its dissemination. In prehistoric times, knowledge was passed from one generation to the next one orally or by showing certain techniques. This mainly applied to basic everyday tasks such as hunting, fire making, manufacturing clothes, or gathering nutritious foods. The creation of this knowledge was not yet structured and it was not recorded, except for occasional drawings like cave paintings. The drastic change in knowledge creation was the invention of a writing system. Roughly at the same time, agriculture came to life. These two inventions combined laid the groundwork for what we today consider civilization. Civilization allowed for the division of labor and hence individuals began to specialize-knowledge creation accelerated.

Throughout the Islamic lands, too, there was no concept of intellectual property for many hundreds of years. All knowledge was thought to come from God. The Koran was the single great scripture from which all other knowledge was derived. A text that embodied the word of Allah, it belonged to no one. There were guardians of its true meaning, to be sure-the great Imams who formed schools at the sites of the most important temples. But the principle means of transmitting Koranic knowledge was oral recitation from teacher to student, in an unbroken lineage from the profit Muhammad himself to his disciples, and from these chosen few forward through the generations.The word "Koran" itself means "recitation," and oral transmission of the living word was always to be preferred over a written transcription. The book was merely an instrument, a lowly tool, to facilitate faithful memorization of the word, and manuscripts were continuously checked and rechecked against oral memory to ensure their accuracy and the authority of their lineage. The Islamic belief that oral recitation, rather than written transcription, best preserved the word of God and kept it pure across the generations meant that the technology of printing was very slow to penetrate into Islamic lands, and it was only widely adopted throughout the Middle East with the advent of the mass newspaper press in the nineteenth century.(Carla Hesse on intellectual property )

the university presses in the United States were by and large founded specifically for the publication of scholarship; in this sense, as Thompson points out, "they were generally seen as an integral part of the function of the university" (Thompson 108). In fact, Daniel Coit Gilman, the first president of Johns Hopkins University, established what is now the oldest continuously operating university press in the United States there in 1878, as a result of his sense that "publishing, along with teaching and research, was a primary obligation of a great university"

Former "young Republican" Larry Lessig talks about what Democrats can learn about copyright from their opposite party, considered more conservative. A surprising lens on remix culture.http://www.ted.com/talks/lessig_nyed

Research often involves teams of scientists collaborating across continents. Now, using the power of the Internet, non-specialists are participating, too. Citizen Science falls into many categories. A pioneering project was SETI@Home, which has harnessed the idle computing time of millions of participants in the search for extraterrestrial life. Citizen scientists also act as volunteer classifiers of heavenly objects, such as in Galaxy Zoo. They make observations of the natural world, as in The Great Sunflower Project. And they even solve puzzles to design proteins, such as FoldIt. We'll add projects regularly-and please tell us about others you like as well.