Group items tagged

Education, and in particular higher education, has seen rapid change as learning institutions have had to adapt to the opportunities provided by the Internet to move more of their teaching online1 and to become more flexible in how they operate. It might be tempting to think that such a period of change would lead to a time of consolidation and agreement about approaches and models of operation that suit the 21st century. New technologies continue to appear,2 however, and the changes in attitude indicated by the integration of online activities and social approaches within our lives are accelerating rather than slowing down. How should institutions react to these changes? One part of the answer seems to be to embrace some of the philosophy of the Internet3 and reevaluate how to approach the relationship between those providing education and those seeking to learn. Routes to self-improvement that have no financial links between those providing resources and those using them are becoming more common,4 and the motivation for engaging with formal education as a way to gain recognition of learning is starting to seem less clear.5 What is becoming clear across all business sectors is that maintaining a closed approach leads to missing out on ways to connect with people and locks organizations into less innovative approaches.6 Higher education needs to prepare itself to exist in a more open future, either by accepting that current modes of operation will increasingly provide only one version of education or by embracing openness and the implications for change entailed. In this article we look at what happens when a more open approach to learning is adopted at an institutional level. There has been a gradual increase in universities opening up the content that they provide to their learners. Drawing on the model of open-source software, where explicit permission to freely use and modify code has developed a software industry that rivals commercial approaches, a proposed

Post by Chuck Severance on why he feels CC-BY has failed. Some good comments too. This is an area that still needs to be worked out but whether that's by new licenses or by 'letting go' I'm not sure.

Christina Hendricks ponders the CC-BY conundrum - how open are we comfortable with? Citing the example of Apple making bucks from others CC-BY work and adjusting the text she explores the dilemmas of adding NC, ND & SA to the deed.

Interesting post on why CC-BY is more valuable than CC-BY-NC, in fact why the latter is seriously restrictive in an academic context.

"Published February 25, 2013 Matthew P. Long & Roger C. Schonfeld In this report, we present the results of Ithaka S+R's study of the scholarly practices of academic chemists. This study, funded by Jisc, presents information meant to empower research support providers in their work with chemists. The report covers themes such as data management, research collaboration, library use, discovery, publication practices, and research funding.   The report describes the findings of our investigation into academic chemists' research habits and research support needs. The digital availability of scholarly literature has transformed chemists' research by creating an environment where they can easily search for journal articles and chemical information. However, they often feel overwhelmed by the amount of new research available, and they need better tools to remain aware of current research. Furthermore, despite their heavy use of technology for research, many academic chemists have been slow to adopt new models of sharing data and research results such as online repositories and open access publishing. Our interviews highlighted the importance of the research group as a unit of academic life, and revealed some of the challenges inherent in working in groups that span institutions and national boundaries."

The Department of Education's (ED) Office of Educational Technology today released a draft issue brief - Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics - representing the results of a months-long discourse among 8 academic and 15 industrial data mining and learning analytics experts conducted by SRI International. The brief, inspired by ED's 2010 National Educational Technology Plan (NETP), articulates the challenges and opportunities of Big Data in improving student outcomes and overall productivity of K-2 education systems. It focuses on three key research areas - educational data mining, learning analytics, and visual data analytics - and offers a set of corresponding recommendations, categorized by various stakeholders. ED is now seeking public comment on the draft.

"At the end of the twentieth century, intellectual property rights collided with everyday life. Expansive copyright laws and digital rights management technologies sought to shut down new forms of copying and remixing made possible by the Internet. International laws expanding patent rights threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS by limiting their access to cheap generic medicines. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries; but recently, groups have emerged around the world to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counter-politics of "access to knowledge" or "A2K." They include software programmers who took to the streets to defeat software patents in Europe, AIDS activists who forced multinational pharmaceutical companies to permit copies of their medicines to be sold in poor countries, subsistence farmers defending their rights to food security or access to agricultural biotechnology, and college students who created a new "free culture" movement to defend the digital commons. Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property maps this emerging field of activism as a series of historical moments, strategies, and concepts. It gathers some of the most important thinkers and advocates in the field to make the stakes and strategies at play in this new domain visible and the terms of intellectual property law intelligible in their political implications around the world. A Creative Commons edition of this work will be freely available online."

"What I mean by 'enterprise LMS' is the legacy model of the LMS as a smaller, academically-facing version of the ERP. This model was based on monolithic, full-featured software systems that could be hosted on-site or by a managed hosting provider. A 'learning platform', by contrast, does not contain all the features in itself and is based on cloud computing - multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS)."

We envision communications infrastructure that is owned and operated cooperatively, by the whole of humanity, rather than by corporations and states.We are using the power of peer-to-peer technologies to create a global network which is immune to censorship and resistant to breakdown.We promote freedoms, support innovations and advocate technologies that enhance and enable digital self-determination.

By this autumn, every university in England will have published a new set of information about every undergraduate course on offer. These Key Information Sets will include data on areas such as contact hours, graduate salaries and student satisfaction. But with little fanfare, one institution has already put itself ahead of the game by displaying information about its graduates in a way that could set a benchmark for the sector. The University of Oxford has created an online tool for comparing data about its graduates' careers and salaries. Tucked away on its main careers website and organised into a set of user-friendly tables, it allows immediate comparisons of the salary and employment status of its alumni from 2008-09 and 2009-10 - undergraduate and postgraduate - sorted by subject area, individual course and even constituent college.

Great looking site built by 1st years. "AllAboutLinguistics.com was created by first-year linguistics students at the University of Sheffield, supported by staff in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics. The website formed part of the students assessment, after they completed a course called Introduction to Linguistics, and it aims to share the knowledge they gained from this module with anyone outside the University who is interested in language and its study - especially A-Level students thinking of going on to study linguistics at University. We asked students to build the site because as beginners in linguistics themselves, they were in a good position to help explain the discipline to you."

This study is an exploratory case study aimed at analysing one academic's teaching in terms of conceptions of teaching and its effect on student involvement or engagement. The research has been done by drawing on Gonzalez' dimensions of online teaching and data generated by the LMS and data analytics in general. There is growing interest in the use of academic analytics. However, most of the reported work is being done at the level of institutions/groupings of courses. Improving teaching can only be done through changing the conceptions of teaching/learning held by the academics. Can individual teaching staff, reflecting on their courses, learn anything important from examining their courses through analytics? How can this be done effectively? What do they find? This study uses an academic's approach to teaching + use as an indicator of involvement, therefore, an improvement of teaching.

"A report issued by the United States Government Accountability Office on June 6th confirms a trend of the educational publishing industry: textbook costs to students at higher education institutions are rising 6% per year on average, and have risen 82% over the last decade. The study, ordered by Congress, looks at the efforts of publishers and colleges to increase the availability of textbook price information and "unbundled" buying options as required under provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA"

While DRM has largely been defeated in downloaded music, it is a growing problem in the area of ebooks, where people have had their books restricted so they can't freely loan, re-sell or donate them, read them without being tracked, or move them to a new device without re-purchasing all of them. They've even had their ebooks deleted by companies without their permission. It continues to be a major issue in the area of movies and video too. Join us in working to eliminate DRM! This is the fourth year we've run the international Day Against DRM. In previous years we've focused on music, held events at the Boston Public Library and more! On May 4th, the Defective by Design DRM Elimination Crew will of course be running an event in Boston. But for this day to send a strong message against DRM, we need people all over the world to join us and hold their own events! As well as attending or running events, you can join other activists in blogging about DRM, putting up banners on your Web sites and blogs, talking about DRM on your social networks and more.

"That the acronym MOOCs rhymes with "nukes" seems apt. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs - led by two profit-making start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, founded by entrepreneurial Stanford professors - are a new disruptive force in education. "

"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"

Options for using Twitter. "It is organized by the categories WATCH (easiest degree of difficulty, TALK (moderate), and PRODUCE (highest degree of difficulty). We did our best to put each box in the appropriate place. Therefore, some of them are in between different degrees of difficulty, etc."

"As we near the halfway point in 2012, perhaps it's time to look back at some of the major stories, trends and developments in social media since the start of the year. Check out this neat infographic that highlights some of the biggest stories in social media, broken down month-by-month starting in January and ending in May. The infographic was created by NowSourcing, a social media firm based in Louisville, Ky."

"Within a week of the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, a library surfaced in the midst of the protest. Staffed by volunteers and comprised entirely of donated materials, the People's Library offers books and media to the public, provides basic reference assistance and has built an online catalog of their holdings. In this paper, I analyze the People's Library in terms of larger discussions of libraries, technology and activism. Drawing on personal experiences volunteering at the Library as well as text from the Library's blog, I argue that the People's Library offers two counter arguments to conventional claims about the public library: first, that libraries are being existentially threatened by the emergence of digital technologies and second, that a library's institutional ethics are located solely or predominantly in the content of its collection. Using the People's Library as a kind of conceptual case study, I explore the connections between public libraries, digital technologies and activist ideologies."

Excellent account by the excellent Audrey Watters on the really expensive, really disruptive conference populated by really rich and really cool people (well at least that's what they think when they look in the mirror).