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 As the volume of new medical knowledge outpaces our ability to organize and retain it, how might educators disrupt outdated practices through thoughtful use of technology and learning design?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.