"New technology and innovative business models offer proven opportunities for enhancing the sharing of scholarly information - research papers, primary data and other evidence, creative activity and other products of research and scholarship - across institutions and audiences. This scholarly communication - understood as the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use - promotes a shared system of research and scholarship. ACRL sees a need to vigorously re-orient all facets of library services and operations to the evolving technologies and models that are affecting the scholarly communication process. There is wide variance in the background understanding of and engagement in scholarly communication as a critical perspective and worldview for academic librarians. This Scholarly Communication toolkit was designed by ACRL's Scholarly Communication Committee as a resource for education and advocacy efforts in transforming the scholarly communication landscape."

"Funded by tertiary institutions rather than individual researchers, this new model seeks to provide open access not just to traditional academic publications but to all forms of scholarly output."

An important perspective on open access. From the article, "Despite being freely available on the Web, research articles are not by default linguistically or conceptually accessible to the global public(s) they are partially intended to reach with the move to OA."

"MOOCs offer opportunities but are also pose the danger of further exacerbating existing educational divisions and deepening the homogeneity of global knowledge systems."

"This paper provides a brief overview of the ideas and principles underlying the connected learning movement, highlighting examples of how libraries are boosting 21st century learning and promoting community development by partnering with a range of organisations and individuals to incorporate connected opportunities into their programmes"

"Social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), microblogging services (e.g. Twitter), and content sharing sites (e.g. YouTube and Flickr) have introduced the opportunity for wide scale, online social participation. Visibility of national and international priorities such as public health, political unrest, disaster relief, and climate change has increased, yet we know little about the benefits and possible costs of engaging in social activism via social media. "

"Emergency and conflict in countries such as Syria, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan have made us more aware of the long-term serial disruption and psychosocial damage faced by people caught up in emergency and conflict areas. Open, distance and flexible learning (ODFL) has sometimes been employed in these regions to maintain a degree of continuity in education. For the most part, however, this role has been ad hoc, short-term and often bearing limited relation to the psychosocial and educational needs of the displaced or traumatised populations it serves."

Clay Shirky's look at the current Amazon/Publisher wars: "The legacy system is mainly characterized by a refusal to deal in small-batch authorship, a model that made sense when the unit price of a book was any number above zero, but makes no sense today. If ten million people think something is dreck, and fifty people like it, those fifty should get what they want."

A short guide for using Twitter for academic purposes, aimed at beginners.

Excellent addition -- thank you for sharing it.

A brief article that looks at some of the research emerging from the massive amounts of student use data collected in MOOCs. Points toward directions for future improvements. Still a great deal of focus on the video lecture, as opposed to participant connections.

Great post to help us balance the conversation, Colin. As you probably noticed, I'm one of the those evangelists for self-determined learning, but I do respect the point. I'd argue that traditional schooling has often sapped us of the ability to self-direct, and as teachers, we should be trying to gradually move our students in this direction -- for their own long-term benefit. One way we tried to do this in OKMOOC has been to draw a fairly clear line in the Activities as to what to do, but allow for as much (or as little) flexibility in those activities as a student is comfortable with. It probably still won't work for everyone, but that's part of the experiment. Thanks for being part of this!

"The Open Source Malaria project is trying a different approach to curing malaria. Guided by open source principles, everything is open and anyone can contribute."

"So what does knowledge mobilization mean for education? It asks us to reimagine what it means in exchanging knowledge. It requires us to embrace being open and unselfish in our learning and knowledge exchange. It requires admitting that a large part of what continues to happen in our world isn't good for our students, our teachers, our communities - or our world. It means creating change in our education systems or risk the return to the tragedies of the early 20th century."

"For the past couple of decades, scholarly publishers have been populating their websites and content stores with a wealth of valuable research material. Such efforts have resulted in vast amounts of information online but the quantity of scholarly information is far too great for researchers to simply browse, find, digest and use everything. For this reason there has been an increasing interest amongst publishers in the topic of semantic enrichment, enhancing information with intelligent structure, tagging and vocabularies to improve discoverability of related and relevant resources. "

This would be a good addition to the next addition of our core reading list.

Here's a link to book: http://www.openingscience.org/get-the-book/

"As a result, it's not so simple to say that we shouldn't trust the cloud anymore, and that whatever happens to us is our fault if we do. It's an argument ignorant of the online-only reality consumer technology is hurtling toward more and more every day. Already, the cloud is the primary data store for a lot of people, for better or worse. Is it really so unreasonable to expect that the privacy, security and protection of our data should keep pace?"

"This article argues for a model of university-level (graduate and undergraduate) publishing education that builds upon a vocational self-identification of incoming students, nurtures a community of practice and professional discourse, and in doing so generates and renews the very culture of publishing. In times of transition and disruption, this is a role uniquely suited to the university, where an environment of collaborative research, development, and innovation can be cultivated. "