Group items tagged

"Ms. Morgan borrows the phrase "free-range learning" to describe students' behavior, and she finds that they generally shop around for content in places educators would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to materials from other universities. They mention lecture videos from Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology far more than the widely publicized Khan Academy, she says."

This first story looks at the development of the Open Educational Resources area. Lou McGill talked to Phil Barker and Lorna Campbell about how the OER field has evolved in the last ten years.

The Association of American University Presses does not support the proposed Research Works Act, the group said in a statement released Tuesday. But it also does not support an opposing bill, the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would require public access to the results of federally financed research no later than six months after publication. The other bill would prevent federal agencies from imposing such mandates.

"Today I resigned from the editorial board of a well respected journal in my field - Genomics. No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings. It has not been an easy decision. Some may feel that I'm grandstanding or making a futile gesture. And it may be a toxic career move. Scientists are expected to contribute to the community by reviewing papers and serving on editorial boards. But I cannot stand by any longer while access to scientific resources is restricted."

Open Textbooks blog post

"As users continue to add tags, a grassroots organizational scheme begins to emerge which has been dubbed by information architect Thomas Vander Wal, to be a folksonomy. A combination of "folks" and "taxonomy", the term has come to mean a non-hierarchical ontology that is created as a natural result of user-added metadata or tagging."

"The European Commission (EC) has awarded a contract to create an open data portal website, where data produced by European Commission services will be freely available. Belgian company TenForce will lead the project to deliver the portal, supported by Leipzig University's Institute for Applied Computer Science (InfAI), and UK-based non-profit the Open Knowledge Foundation."

" Openness - concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information - is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world. As authoritative sources lose their importance, there is need for more curation and other forms of validation to generate meaning in information and media."

The smart funders will work with the pre-existing prejudice of researchers, probably granting copyright and IP rights to the researchers, but placing tighter constraints on the terms of forward licensing. That funders don't really need the publishers has been made clear by HHMI, Wellcome Trust, and the MPI. Publishing costs are a small proportion of their total expenditure. If necessary they have the resources and will to take that in house. The NIH has taken a similar route though technically implemented in a different way. Other funders will allow these experiments to run, but ultimately they will adopt the approaches that appear to work.

"By requiring students to grapple with primary sources and find their own journal articles, she said, she could teach in a way that emphasized process rather than memorization of facts in a book."

"Almost every so-called MOOC violates at least one letter in the acronym. Why are we using this word that doesn't describe the things we attach it to?"

"Open access is framed as a moral issue, but it's actually a business one. Arguments that tax-payer funded research should be publicly accessible can seem obvious; but what if tax-payer funding is not available or is not adequate to cover the costs-as is usually the case in the arts and humanities?"

"Science is very inefficient," says Ijad Madisch, founder of a Web site called ResearchGate. "You try an experiment, fail, try again, fail, try again, it works. And what works is what you publish. All the data about failure is wasted."

"The Open Data Handbook is a valuable resource for everyone interested in open data. It covers many types of data, but its particular focus is open government data. The Open Data Handbook is targeted towards a broad audience. It contains useful information for civil servants, journalists, activists, developers, researchers - basically, for anyone with an interest in open data!"

Ebook standards may lack the glamour that the technology attracts, but the arrival of ePub3 has the potential to transform how the academy creates and delivers its content to students and researchers. Just weeks into the New Year and already there is a new ebooks revelation that colleges and universities need to digest. January saw the launch of Apple's new iBooks2 software which grabbed headlines (see the BBC article here) and sparked heated debate across the academic community. Quietly underpinning the technology of the iBooks software is ePub.  ePub is the 'defacto' ebook standard, with the latest version of ePub3 supporting complex layouts and rich media and interactivity for eTextbooks and professional and scientific publications.

"For many, "open textbooks" seem to be primarily about cost savings, about saving money for both funders and learners, but not particularly about challenging the "form" of what we have known as a textbook. And I agree, affordability is a strong motivator to get into this space, and an obvious selling point for all the stakeholders (well, almost all - commercial publishers don't seem exactly thrilled about it.)"

Polymath Project Mathematics Open Science

When everything is in a state of flux, we need opportunities for ideas to collide, innovations to be shared, concepts to be rehashed and mashedup, and iterative improvements to occur. Education today - at all levels - faces the challenge of tremendous change and unstettledness. Rigid systems break in periods of flux.

There is a growing premium placed on data related to student performance, progress to degree, and prospects after graduation. These measures relative to the cost of attendance seems to equal value these days.