Group items tagged

Article on trends in publishing and why the university library needs to become a publisher.

"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."

"How often do we read about the importance of teachers in education? It must be every day, it seems. We are told about 'strong empirical evidence that teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student achievement' again and again."

As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able.

George Siemens "shares some Elgg love": "When I survey the landscape of educational tools, I come to the following conclusion: Elgg is the most important tool, currently available, in shaping the future of learning."

"From January 2011 Childnet along with the SWGfL and the IWF will be the UK Safer Internet Centre. One of our jobs as the UK Safer Internet Centre is to get as many people involved in Safer Internet Day as possible! We challenge you to think about the Safer Internet Day theme for 2011: Virtual Lives : It's more than a game, it's your life! It's important for all users of the internet to be aware of the consequences of their online actions - both good and bad! Taking care, being safe and responsible online and offline is an important part of child development. Childnet International is producing a Safer Internet Day resource pack to help educators participate in Safer Internet Day. Below is an outline of the target areas related to this year's theme. We hope this will help educators to get thinking and planning for Tuesday 8 February 2011. Alongside this content will be a short film and banners for VLEs from the European commission promoting Safer Internet Day."

"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."

Not sure I follow this but it's ePub so should be worthwhile!

Can we start to connect this with Moodle? Is it possible? "Now, all of your Google Sites content can be accessed using the Google Data protocol. That means porting over an old webpage or backing up an existing site got much easier! In fact, check out our open-source Google Sites import/export tool that does just that. So what can you do with the Google Sites API? Glad you asked! The API supports most of the functionality found in Google Sites, which includes the ability to: * Retrieve, create, modify, and delete pages and content. * Upload/download attachments. * Review the revision history across a site. * Display recent user activity."

"Now, all of your Google Sites content can be accessed using the Google Data protocol. That means porting over an old webpage or backing up an existing site got much easier! In fact, check out our open-source Google Sites import/export tool that does just that. So what can you do with the Google Sites API? Glad you asked! The API supports most of the functionality found in Google Sites, which includes the ability to: * Retrieve, create, modify, and delete pages and content. * Upload/download attachments. * Review the revision history across a site. * Display recent user activity."

Article on why open access is important. Has a long exploration of the for & against arguments in the comments.

New screen reader from Google. This looks important as it saves on licenses for JAWS and apparently works better in Docs than JAWS.

"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."

Excellent article from Audrey Watters on the rewriting of Mooc history and why it is important that such things are not twisted to develop a new narrative that suits those doing the rewriting.

"Evidence shows that engaged students perform better academically than disinterested students. Measurement of engagement with education is difficult and imprecise, especially in large student cohorts. Traditional measurements such as summary statistics derived from assessment are crude secondary measures of engagement at best and do not provide much support for educators to work with students and curate engagement during teaching periods. We have used academic-related student contributions to a public social network as a proxy for engagement. Statistical summaries and novel data visualisation tools provide subtle and powerful insights into online student peer networks. Analysis of data collected shows that network visualisation can be an important curation tool for educators interested in cultivating student engagement."

I think this is an important stating of the assumptions built into technology and the outcomes resulting from these assumptions and inherent biases. "... we need to understand how the shape of information access controls the intellectual (and, ultimately, financial) opportunities of some college students. If we emphasize the consequences of differential access, we see one facet of the digital divide; if we ask about how these consequences are produced, we are asking about digital redlining. The comfortable elision in "edtech" is dangerous; it needs to be undone by emphasizing the contexts, origins, aims, and ideologies of technologies."

"Today's XKCD comic inspired this article. It details the rise of Tumblr and the subsequent fall of blogs. That's in terms of simply the popularity of the term as it's used across the web. While not an exact measure of blogging or Tumblr, it's an important turning point in the age of the web."

Mike ''MOD'' O'Donnell from TradeMe on why the TPP is bad for copyright and bad for consumers.

(Note - free ebook version) - 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.

"But I think there are two important things that online universities bring to the table: (1) Broadening access to higher education, and (2) Leveraging technology to explore new approaches to learning."

Understand the importance of your digital identity - listing passwords you really shouldn't use!