Group items tagged

"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."

"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."

"The Research Communications Strategy work is a JISC funded activity to investigate and coordinate many of the emerging themes, ideas and developments in the field of research communications at a strategic level."

"A disruptive technology, online learning, is at work in higher education..."

Academics working out examples as in a masterclass. Haven't had time to check out yet.

Report in the business value of using immersive technologies for work. 40% saw a positive economic impact. Used mainly for connecting users at a distance.

business value of using immersive technologies for work

Good article from Howard Jarche pulling together threads on how innovation happens and why we need to learn to work in networks.

Coursera now passing student details to employers (with the students permission - opt in). Allows people to seek work through the courses they have done.

(Article not new and thought I had already bookmarked it) Reports on work by OU 'debunking' Prensky native/immigrant thesis. Don't think it does at all and I argued at time that we ad to stop viewing concepts in such dichotomous ways.

Understanding how networks work is an essential 21st century literacy.

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

Short description of the components of a Mooc.

a thought-provoking article that puts forward the thesis that MOOCs and Coursera are the wrong direction for higher education - that personalisation and customisation of learning are the direction we should be working to develop.

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.

"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."

Create a widget to display any RSS feed. Seems to work.

"You can learn just about anything from YouTube…if you're willing to dig through millions of videos. Luckily, Course Hero has done the work for you..."

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.

The University of Waikato, Te Whare Wananga o Waikato is delighted to be hosting a major international conference, "Paulo Freire: The Global Legacy" as a retrospective celebration of his work and its legacy and influence across the globe.