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"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 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."

Lincoln University becomes the 1st NZ university to declare an Open Access policy.

"Open Cobalt Alpha is the first step in a long term project to make available to all people a free and open source platform for constructing, accessing, and sharing virtual workspaces for research and education. This 3D multimedia wiki technology makes it easy to create deeply collaborative and hyperlinked multi-user virtual workspaces, virtual exhibit spaces, and game-based learning and training environments that run on all major software operating systems. By using a peer-based messaging protocol to reduce reliance on server infrastructures for support of basic in world interactions across many participants, Open Cobalt makes it possible for people hyperlink their virtual worlds via 3D portals to form a large distributed network of interconnected collaboration spaces. It also makes it possible for schools and other organizations to freely set up their own networks of public and private 3D virtual workspaces that feature integrated web browsing, voice chat, text chat, and access to remote desktop applications and services."

Hey guys. Just watched a live session online at Cisco w the developers of this system, still in development, but interesting differentiators vs 2Life, e.g. peer-to-peer, nested worlds, oh and its open-source. Thought yaz might be interested in tracking it.

Jisc resources for Open Access

Account of difficulty with Open Access and misunderstanding / misreporting. Not an argument to stop OA but a plea to make the OA change now mean something to readers.

"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."

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.

"Science has always been based on a fundamental culture of openness.  The scientific community rewards individuals for sharing their discoveries through perpetual attribution, and the community benefits by through the ability to build on discoveries made by individuals.  Furthermore, scientific discoveries are not generally accepted until they have been verified or reproduced independently, which requires open communication."

"How do we get from free and open courseware (and informal learning on sites like YouTube) to a free (or extremely affordable) open-access university?...The future of learning is open--and it's in your hands."

Fabiana Kubke's blog including stuff on open access and open science.

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

Good slides from Terry Anderson on openness in education and some of the disruptions hitting universities.

Very well thought out exposition on how the 'openness' concept has been confused and damaged by the MOOC phenomena. Preview of a chapter to be published in Bonk's book MOOC and Open Education around the world.

Open Access report from southern Africa.

Encouraging open access deposit at Uni Columbia

What happens when an idea goes bad. One uni is trying to trademark OpenEd!