Group items tagged

Wiki of open source or partly free authoring platforms.

Useful list of OSS or free authoring tools.

List of links to academic blogging how-to's particularly with multiple authors.

"There are countless author and book production platforms to choose from these days. So why would you want to use a new one like PressBooks? In this TOC interview, I sat down with Hugh McGuire (@hughmcguire), co-author of "Book: A Futurist's Manifesto" and founder of PressBooks to help answer that question. I should point out that I'm a fan of the platform. In fact, that's one of the reasons we agreed to have Hugh create and produce "Book: A Futurist's Manifesto" on PressBooks."

"What factors are most important when evaluating a specific IT collaboration? To answer this question, the authors asked an experienced group of IT leaders to analyze collaborations with which they had direct experience and to identify the most important success factors for those activities. The dozen individuals who agreed to participate in telephone interviews represent more than 300 years of experience in higher education. The authors then reviewed the results of the telephone interviews and consolidated and summarized them to create a list of the 12 most important success factors identified by the participants."

Authoring platform designed to lead through from writing to publishing and track all changes along the way.

"Funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, College Open Textbooks is a collection of colleges, governmental agencies, education non-profits, and other education-related organizations that are focused on the mission of driving the awareness and advocacy for open textbooks. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that provide support to authors who open their resources. Through our community outreach, we have found that open textbooks should be: easy to use, get and pass around, editable so instructors can customize content, cross-platform compatible, printable, and accessible so they work with adaptive technology."

PIVOTE is a virtual learning authoring system for virtual worlds. It was developed as part of the JISC funded PREVIEW project, where it was used to develop training material for Paramedic students at St George's Hospital and Kingston University. Although based on the Medbiquitous Virtual Patient standard the feeling of all involved in the project was that the system could be used for any sort of structured learning in virtual worlds. The result was that JISC have funded the creation of PIVOTE - this open source project.

Plugins to support text book authoring. Designed for the open textbook project.

"This post is to mark post conference publication which provides you with a variety of examples on how Moodle is used throughout Ireland and the UK. The publication contains six articles where the authors of each article volunteered to expand upon their conference presentation and share their experience in detail with you. This publication covers a wide variety of topics from optimising the layout of your Moodle course to analysing the usage of your course through Google Analytics. Hopefully this represents the first of many publications along the same line where Moodle users from the conference produce detailed articles sharing their Moodle experience."

Great post exploring the fractured world of CC licensing and why this author is sticking to CC-BY (Part 1 of 2)

Great post exploring the fractured world of CC licensing and why this author is sticking to CC-BY (Part 2 of 2)

"Higher education institutions face a number of opportunities and challenges as the result of the digital revolution. The institutions perform a number of scholarship functions which can be affected by new technologies, and the desire is to retain these functions where appropriate, whilst the form they take may change. Much of the reaction to technological change comes from those with a vested interest in either wholesale change or maintaining the status quo. Taking the resilience metaphor from ecology, the authors propose a framework for analysing an institution's ability to adapt to digital challenges. This framework is examined at two institutions (the UK Open University and Canada's Athabasca University) using two current digital challenges, namely Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Access publishing."

"Google revealed Wednesday that it always requires a search warrant whenever authorities seek access to the content of a user's emails or documents stored in Google's cloud, Wired reported."

Interesting authoring tool. Anyone want to write a book and try it out? :) Noted as a possible alternative to iAuthor

"The internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work "open access": digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. In this talk, Peter Suber - Director of the Harvard Open Access Project - shares insights from his new concise introduction to open access - what open access is and isn't, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold. This event includes questions and responses from Stuart Shieber (School of Engineering and Applied Sciences), Robert Darnton (Harvard University Library), June Casey (Harvard Law School Library), David Weinberger (Berkman Center / Harvard Library Innovation Lab) and more."

"I was roused from my teaching this week by the cacophony of tweets and blog posts on the merits and pitfalls of tweeting another scholar's ideas (the most cited ones authored or collected by Roopika Risam, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Adeline Koh), culminating in "The Academic Twitterazzi" on Inside Higher Ed"

Hackpad - simplest wiki ever to use and co-author with some 'quick link' features 

"Eighth-graders who thought a passage about a pineapple and a hare on New York state tests this week made no sense, take heart: The author thinks it's absurd too."