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Ted Curran

The Net Generation's Informal and Educational Use of New Technologies | in education - 0 views

  • undergraduates in this group are high users of new technologies in their daily lives
  • the 18-24 year olds in this group were consumers, not producers of content using new technologies – few had created blogs (47%), wikis (16%) and podcasts (8%).
  • it is also important that students be critical consumers of online content, are able to assess the value of content, and are able to put it to good use in their academic endeavors
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  • The research reviewed reported that 18-24 year olds do not transfer their expertise with technologies to academic contexts
  • students in this group use Instant Messenger when completing assignments, and Google Docs for archiving and group work, even if their professors are unfamiliar with Google Docs
  • The findings of this pilot survey, along with the research reviewed, indicate that undergraduates’ application of new technologies for academic purposes can be likened to the five stages of technology adoption – Awareness, Adoption, Adaption, Appropriation, and Invention - reported in the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow research
  • undergraduates’ creation of online content for educational purposes was low in both this and prior research
  • a small sample of 26 undergraduates of education at an urban private university in 2008, and can therefore not be generalized to all other contexts
Ted Curran

Open Content for Private Foundations.pdf (Study by Harvard U) - 0 views

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    Open content licensing may not be a red-hot issue in the foundation sector, but it is emerging as a salient one with consequences in many fields. It is an inherently complex issue. In an attempt to learn more about the licensing practices that are used in the world of private charitable foundations - and specifically to learn the degree to which open content licensing may or may not be appropriate in that sector and why - the Berkman Center and the Hewlett Foundation commissioned the FDR Group, a nonpartisan public opinion research firm, to conduct a qualitative research study.
Ted Curran

To Share or Not to Share: Is That the Question? (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

  • The use of open materials by faculty is something of a continuum, with those who closely guard their intellectual property and privacy on one end, with faculty who seek out and use open content and technologies in the middle, and with those who actively contribute to open content on the other end.
  • All the faculty I spoke to could think of at least a few contexts in which they would not be willing and/or able to share or participate openly.
  • For example, few faculty are willing to embark on large, time-intensive projects, such as writing textbooks, without some guarantee that they will be compensated for their personal investment (time
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  • Research faculty may need to closely guard patentable research under the terms of their institutional contracts, even if their inclination drives them to share openly
  • Science faculty, for example, often publish their research with multiple authors and may be more used to a collaborative model, whereas humanities faculty write for publications that favor a single-author model.
  • Commonly, faculty will lock down some content (research or texts) under intellectual property laws but feel morally obligated to share in another aspect of their field.
  • Two factors delineate a faculty member's attitude toward openness: a nature influence and a nurture influence.
  • the strength of a person's inclination toward sharing
  • On the one end are the keepers, faculty who ask themselves: "Why would anyone outside my course want to know what I think?" At the other extreme are the sharers, faculty who believe that their contribution to the conversation, content, and/or community is invaluable.
  • The second factor that influences attitude toward openness is how strongly the person feels a moral responsibility to share freely with his or her community.
  • Many said something to the effect that they felt it was their duty as an educator to share
  • that everyone in education should share
  • Open faculty see sharing their ideas and expertise as a way to quickly validate or refute ideas, to promote important academic programs, and/or to mentor those instructors with less experience or to be mentored by those with greater experience or more creative ideas. Open faculty value the ideas and content shared by others in their networks and feel an obligation to share alike. This sense of moral responsibility to share is so strong in some faculty that it bothers them when ideas and content are closely guarded. They see this as an affront to their values.
  • In the category of faculty who are strong sharers and strongly open, we find project leaders and thought leaders.
  • What's the difference between those faculty who share with colleagues locally and those who share on the web? Technology skills.
  • Open faculty are learning some of these technology skills from formal workshops and professional training, but many spoke of learning technology skills from other open faculty (or even students) during on-the-fly informal learning sessions.
  • Many of the faculty I spoke to suggested (strongly) that participation in open digital activities (e.g., blogging, writing open-source software, being a curator of open-source materials) should count toward tenure and promotion.
  • Naturally, administrators worry about open digital faculty. What if they say something the institutional leaders don't agree with? What if their work with students on the web creates a liability? Administrators can do three simple things to minimize these issues: If a faculty member writes or shares content openly on the web, using space provided by the college, the inclusion of a simple disclosure statement can provide some separation between the individual and the institution (for example, "These views/materials are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my institution"). To guard against liability, administrators can make sure that open faculty receive training on copyright issues with materials used, privacy issues with students, and security issues with web technologies. These days, most campus activities involve the potential for liability. All administrators can do is make a good-faith effort to protect the institution by ensuring that faculty have a solid grounding in the potential risks. Today's students live much of their lives in the digital world. Faculty have the potential to model and promote good Internet behavior to future workers and leaders. Administrators can support open digital faculty by making an effort to understand what the faculty do: read some of what they write; take them to lunch and discuss their latest projects; try to understand that these faculty are public ambassadors of the institution and stealth faculty developers on campus. In gaining the trust of open digital faculty, administrators will more likely be seen as advisors than as adversaries.
Ted Curran

BSP:: Bentham Science Publishers Ltd. - 0 views

  • "Open access will revolutionize 21st century knowledge work and accelerate the diffusion of ideas and evidence that support just in time learning and the evolution of thinking in a number of disciplines." Daniel Pesut (Indiana University School of Nursing, USA)
  • They are an outstanding source of medical and scientific information." Jeffrey M. Weinberg (St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, USA)
  • "Open access journals are extremely useful for graduate students, investigators and all other interested persons to read important scientific articles and subscribe scientific journals. Indeed, the research articles span a wide range of area and of high quality. This is specially a must for researchers belonging to institutions with limited library facility and funding to subscribe scientific journals." Debomoy K. Lahiri (Indiana University School of Medicine, USA)
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  • "Open access journals represent a major break-through in publishing. They provide easy access to the latest research on a wide variety of issues. Relevant and timely articles are made available in a fraction of the time taken by more conventional publishers. Articles are of uniformly high quality and written by the world's leading authorities." Robert Looney (Naval Postgraduate School, USA)
  • "Not only do open access journals greatly improve the access to high quality information for scientists in the developing world, it also provides extra exposure for our papers." J. Ferwerda (University of Oxford, UK)
  • "In principle, all scientific journals should have open access, as should be science itself.
  • "The widest possible diffusion of information is critical for the advancement of science. In this perspective, open access journals are instrumental in fostering researches and achievements." Alessandro Laviano (Sapienza - University of Rome, Italy)
  • "Open access journals are probably one of the most important contributions to promote and diffuse science worldwide." Jaime Sampaio (University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal)
  • "Open access journals make up a new and rather revolutionary way to scientific publication. This option opens several quite interesting possibilities to disseminate openly and freely new knowledge and even to facilitate interpersonal communication among scientists." Eduardo A. Castro (INIFTA, Argentina)
  • "Open access journals are freely available online throughout the world, for you to read, download, copy, distribute, and use. The articles published in the open access journals are high quality and cover a wide range of fields." Kenji Hashimoto (Chiba University, Japan)
  • "Open Access journals offer an innovative and efficient way of publication for academics and professionals in a wide range of disciplines. The papers published are of high quality after rigorous peer review and they are Indexed in: major international databases. I read Open Access journals to keep abreast of the recent development in my field of study." Daniel Shek (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
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    This is a list of quotable testimonials about the value and quality of open educational journals from some respected institutions worldwide.
Ted Curran

AcademicCopyrightInformation - Keck qwiki wiki @USC - 0 views

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    Academic Copyright Information Disclaimer: The purpose of this wiki webpage is to provide links to information about copyright and "fair use" to help faculty and students make informed decisions about copyright issues. Nothing on this page is intended to serve as legal advice. If you have legal questions about copyright, you should consult a lawyer or the general counsel's office in your institution. Nothing on this page should be construed as representing the policy or opinion of the University of Southern California. Please send comments to RayMosteller Related: CopyrightInformation - AlternativeCopyrightOptions - UscCopyrightInformation - EducationalResources Copyright and Fair Use Case Law Academic Publishers vs. Georgia State University - Lawsuit filed April 15, 2008 Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko's Graphics Corp. - 758 F.Supp. 1522 (S.D.N.Y. 1991) Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services, INC. - No. 94-1778 6th Cir. 1996 decision vacated Key Court Case Summaries on Fair Use Columbia University Copyright Advisory Office - Columbia University Libraries / Information Services Fair Use Checklist Copyright Scenarios Court Case Summaries - Regarding Fair Use Fair Use Resources Cornell University Copyright Information Center Cornell Copyright Policies, Guidance, and Policy Interpretations Cornell Electronic Course Content Copyright Guidelines - Press release Cornell Electronic Course Content Copyright Guidelines - (PDF) Course Reserves Copyright Guidelines - (PDF) Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States Copyright Resources Cornell Copyright Decision Tree - (PDF) Indiana University - Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI) Copyright Management Center Fair-Use Issues Fair-Use: Overview and Meaning for Higher Education Fair-Use Guidelines Key Court Case Summaries on Fair Use Teach Act and Distance Learning North Carolina State University Intellectual Property Student Privacy Law (FERPA) Penn State Uni
Ted Curran

Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability | Friesen |... - 0 views

  • The term open educational resources was first adopted at the 2002 UNESCO Forum
  • “the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for noncommercial purposes” (UNESCO, 2002, p. 24)
  • he notion of openness, for its part, has been given legal force and definition through the set of copyright licenses released by Creative Commons, also in 2002
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  • A second general difference separating learning objects from their open educational counterparts is indicated by the absence of any explicit reference to the openness or the open and noncommercial character of the resource.
  • What is significant in each definition is precisely what is included and excluded: Each definition highlights (either directly or indirectly) modularity as a technological and design attribute for the object and its content, emphasizing the “self-contained,” “building block” or “object-oriented” nature of the technology.
  • Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT)
  • this project recently met its original ambitious goal of placing all of MIT’s course content online by 2007
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  • the funding for the operations of many of the projects is either provided by a parent institution
  • by a governmental organization
  • or by a combination of these types of sources.
  • he many projects that have fallen inactive or been discontinued
  • the nature and the enormity of the sustainability challenge online educational resource collections face.  
  • The clear sustainability lesson from both this listing of inactive projects and the earlier listing of active efforts is the importance of ongoing, operational institutional or consortial funding for educational resource collections and the difficulty of realizing alternative funding models. Online educational resource initiatives of this kind, one can conclude, need to be seen as processes or services rather than as products that persist of their own accord.
  • Only projects that are large-scale, well-funded, and able to benefit from a first-mover advantage (i.e., being one of the first of their kind) seem to have any chance of developing collections whose scope extends to all educational subjects
  • The issue of sustainability of OER projects, unsurprisingly, was one of the top concerns
  • awareness raising and promotion; communities and networking of creators and users; and capacity development, specifically as it relates to the development and pedagogical application of OERs.
  • The necessary preconditions for viability – awareness, capacity, community, cultural change – are identical with what would be the results of success.
  • a vicious circle of “chicken and egg.
  • the majority of the use of this material not only takes place outside of the USA, it also occurs outside in the context of reuse and adaptation by teachers or instructional designers.
  • it is educationally valuable without detracting from the educational value of the face-to-face activities on which the collected content is based.
  • This finding provides clear evidence of multiple areas of significant benefit accruing to MIT the institution from the open courseware project, and it provides a positive illustration of important possibilities for change.
  • “OCW use is centered on subjects for which MIT is recognized leader
  • 32% of faculty say that putting materials online has improved their teaching
  • 35 percent of freshmen who were aware of OCW prior to deciding to attend MIT indicate the site was a significant or very significant influence on their choice of school” (cited in Wiley, 2006, p. 6).
  • David Wiley presents a conclusion that may be of the utmost significance for OER: “The time will come when an OpenCourseWare or similar collection of open access educational materials will be as fully expected from every higher education institution as an informational website is now” (2006, p. 6).
  • Simply put, this is enlightened institutional self-interest.
  • student recruitment
  • the potential for improving teaching and for better supporting learning
  • a kind of viral marketing of the quality of teaching and learning in areas of strategic institutional interest
  • They need not risk financial and cultural capital on creating yet another collection or repository, but instead can invest it in the quality and accessibility of their course offerings.
  • Open CourseWare Consortium and its OCW finder
  • It only asks of its members a contribution of 12 courses to its growing collection of over 10,000 courses
  • The point, as Wiley explains, is that “this strategy of openness” holds out the promise of “catalyzing further innovations” (2006).
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