The New Yorker covered the issue of copyright in a recent issue: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/crooner-rights-spat The cover many of the points raised in this course, as well as some of the issues relating to copyright in the digital age. An interesting read!

A really interesting course (also from Stanford Online) that has just started and I believe will be of interest to many doing Open Knowledge! "This interdisciplinary course features talks from thought leaders and innovators from medical education, instructional design, cognitive science, online learning, and emerging technology. Over the course of eleven weeks, we'll consider how to build educational experiences that address the unique learning preferences of today's Millennial medical students and residents. As the volume of new medical knowledge outpaces our ability to organize and retain it, how might educators disrupt outdated practices through thoughtful use of technology and learning design? How might MOOCs, social media, simulation and virtual reality change the face of medical education? How might we make learning continuous, engaging, and scalable in the age of increasing clinical demands and limited work hours? Joining the conversation will be experts from all health care and education stakeholder domains, including patients, and students from nursing, medicine and engineering sciences."

Shule.Info is a project that puts data about Tanzanian schools online, providing information for the overall country, regions, and individual schools. The website is also in both English and Swahili, the language of the majority of Tanzanians. This is a great attempt at making this open data accessible and understandable to the people to who need it. "We all know that education in Tanzania is in a state of crisis. Massive failure rates. Not enough teachers. Not enough books. Poor teaching. And many more problems. So what do you do if you are a parent, brother or sister and want to find a good school? What if you are a council or national government leader and want to track progress? Right now it is very difficult to do so, because data is not easily available. And when you can access data, it is very difficult to understand and use. Open data is in fact relevant to all of us in making beter decisions. It is not just a concept for technical experts. If we knew which medicines were available in our nearest health centres we would save ourselves wasted trips. If we had live traffic updates we could better plan our travel. And if we had data on school performance we would have the chance to make better decisions about our children's education and potentially shape the course of their future differently."

A very interesting paper that discusses issues around OER, as well as some topics already covered in the course is, "Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources" (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). The paper highlights some of the barriers, sustainability issues, and how to improve access and usefulness of open educational resources. I found the paper very comprehensive, with many additional resources. While published in 2007, when conversations around OER were fairly new, many of the points they raise are still in discussion and relevant.

This graphic: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ADayInTheLifeF3.jpg shows just some of the ways that people connect and share online.
While some are educational, these spaces for collaboration cross event further into areas such as services, transportation, and food. In additional to digital content, these networks allow for people to share resources, products & knowledge in 'real life'. To me this shows the endless possibilities of collaborating online and linking people together who otherwise wouldn't be connected.

I recently discovered Tsū (http://www.tsu.co/) which is a social network that gives the user full ownership of anything they create and share, while also giving them a share of the revenues generated by their content. I find it interesting that given the pervasive nature of Facebook that other social networks are developing to address some of the criticisms levied at these mammoth networks. Another such example is ello (https://ello.co) which offers users an ad-free social network or Path (path.com) which places limits on the number of 'friends' a user can have.
I wonder if people think that the networks we decided to use also says something about our perspective and digital identity. What are we prepared to give up in exchange for the benefits of these networks? Through a deeper understanding of the nature of these networks, it may be that we change our approach in using those networks. For example, if Facebook technically owns all the photos we post, but another networks doesn't, perhaps we don't use Facebook to share photos?

"The Kamusi Project is a participatory international effort dedicated to improving knowledge of the world's languages. Our long term mission is to produce dictionaries and other language resources for every language, and to make those resources available for free to everyone."

The project initially arose from the 'Internet Living Swahili dictionary' and has expanded to many additional African languages.

From my experience of living in Tanzania having a comprehensive dictionary is surprisingly difficult, and Google Translate is far from being very reliable! Spoken and written Swahili is often very different and in addition, while Swahili is spoken throughout East Africa there are variations across regions and countries. The appeal of the Kamusi is that it is created and developed by people themselves and so hopefully will reflect the language in use.

Funzi is a learning app that is free to all to use. The content of app is written by experts in their field and will cover many topics including key business & life skills. The app will be available anywhere in the world but initially targeting those in developing counties. The app is currently in a beta testing stage and inviting people to try out the app. You can see more here including link to try it out: http://funzi.fi/