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This is really a good initiative. One can only wish that African states finally realize that internet access is no longer a privilege but a right because without it such brilliant initiatives do not spread to all corners of the developing world.

I like the "equalization" word, even if it seems to make it too simple, but it is also making it sound possible

"Like many millennials today, Yale classmates Henry Luce and Briton Hadden left their jobs to create a startup. They found newspapers dry, longwinded and boring and thought they could do better by presenting stories in a faster paced, more personality centered format. In 1923 they launched Time magazine and it became a runaway success."

"The greatest challenge for publishers today is to create new business models. Unfortunately, most haven't even begun the process due to misplaced nostalgia for distribution revenue. In that sense, paywalls represent the greatest threat to old-line publishers."

And also due to the inherent feature of every human being of being resistant to changes. And all of that without taking into account some economical interests.

I found this article interesting to me as it is some how relevant to digital identity and social media. This is an article from magazine The Atlantic that being published on May 2012, by Stephen Marche. At the beginning of the article Marche represents that over-reliance on social networking has turned people isolated by telling a true story about the Playboy Playmate Vickers's mummified body was found a year after she died and in the months before her death, she had not made any calls to her friends or family but kept in touch with the fans from internet sites. Along with the article, Marche represents that social media such as Facebook have made people networked easier than ever, but at the same time it is also making more and more people lonely. Also, Marche has exemplified a social condition, anomie, which is described as a lack of social norms characterized by breakdown of social bonds. Thus this article has provided relevant resource about anomie which has become part of deterioration to interpersonal relationship with social networking.

Creative Commons began providing licenses for the open sharing of content only a decade ago. More than 400 million CC-licensed works are now available on the Internet, varying from music, photos, research findings to entire courseware. Creative Commons provides the legal and technical infrastructure that allows effective sharing of knowledge, art and data by individuals, organizations and governments. Millions of creators world over are taking advantage of that infrastructure to share work that enriches the global commons for all humanity. The book The Power of Open collects the stories of those creators, some such famous creators are like ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative news organization or the nomadic filmmaker Vincent Moon. The breadth of uses is as great as the creativity of the individuals and organizations choosing to open their content to the rest of the world.

College textbooks cost too much - and something needs to be done about it, according to a report from the advocacy group U.S. PIRG. The College Board estimates that the average student in this country spends around $1,200 a year on books and supplies. A single book can cost as much as $200. This is why we need open textbooks!

Cool citizen science in BC!

Learning a new language changes your brain network both structurally and functionally, according to Penn State researchers

Here's some interesting topline figures year 2012 report about the state of intellectual property around the world. It quickly shows us the countries that take the business of innovation & patents seriously. For 2013 World Property Indicators, here's the link: http://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/intproperty/941/wipo_pub_941_2013.pdf

I like how this article breaks down where the patents are coming from in the world. I also like this because it always reminds me of the story (that is likely untrue) that the US patent office was almost closed at the beginning of the 20th century because all the good ideas had already been thought of. Progress marches on!

Librarians love to get free books into the hands of scholars and students who need them. Publishers love it when their books find readers - but they also need to cover the costs of turning an idea into a finished monograph.

this is an article from a few years ago that does a great job of telling the story of a major hack at Diigo--very interesting to see this as a narrative rather than just the headline, lets you understand the story more personally. I thought it was an interesting reflection considering the discussion of risks of a public course, public online life/profile. "Diigo, a social bookmarking and annotation site, is finally back online 50 hours after the domain was first hijacked. It's an incredible story that involves crisis management, blackmail, investigative research, payoffs, a clever thief, and points to potential problems with the domain name registry system that could affect anyone with a website."

Reading now...

A new type of MOOC - dubbed MOOC 2.0 - could disrupt the way courses are devised, altering the top-down university designed curriculum and the professor-to-student course structure that is still part of the MOOC model.

This is about the inequitable global power and how it dynamics the confronting global knowledge production in nowadays.

Underlying this notion of global knowledge production inequities is how developed countries "The Global North" dominate modern knowledge systems. This hegemonic control of global knowledge, driven by increased globalization, places pressure on virtually all societies to adopt global values and services. While this development does have positive implications (e.g. better understanding of modern health practices, nutrition, environmental protection, governance systems, etc), on the negative side, the imposition of cultural forms from the developing world could be considered a form of political and economic domination. This leads to the increasing homogenization of cultures and a threat to local knowledge, and the exacerbation of local differences and inequalities through uneven access to such knowledge and the means for it's application. The production of knowledge implicates and is implicated in power relations, as those with superior technology cannot only generate but also store, monopolize and disseminate information to safeguard their interests. Foucault (1972) suggests that the relationship between power and knowledge has its origin in the ownership of the means of material production and technical expertise. According to Said (1978), Western powers in a colonial and post-colonial context, using agents in developing countries, have been able to develop elaborate cultural and political institutions where knowledge production exists with supporting mechanisms that dominate and suppress African communities. In a critical examination of development policies and programs in Africa, Okolie (2003) considers these to be shaped by knowledge and assumptions about knowledge production that are primarily Euro-American centered, and are consequently "exclusionary and often contemptuous of other ways of knowing" (Okolie, 2003). The establishment of the continent's universities and research centers was primarily driven by Western powers, and the African elites who h

What if Africa is slow to tell her stories.

New plans to improve health outcomes and the quality of patient care through digital technology and innovation have been unveiled by national health and social care organisations today (13 November 2014).

In a short time, Banksy has become a cultural icon with a distinct place in history. [Publishing the story through art.]