Monthly Archives: January 2009

SCoPE Seminar on OER Underway

Posted on January 19, 2009 by | Leave a comment

SCoPE announced the upcoming SCoPE Seminar (19 Jan to 8 Feb) on open educational resources. (Thanks to elearnspace). Excerpt:

The availability of Open Educational Resources is increasing almost daily. High quality learning materials from reputable institutions are available in many disciplines for both instructors to reuse or student self-study.

This seminar will explore ways to find resources, issues with creating and licensing them, and techniques for starting to share, both institutional projects and personally.

The seminar will be led by Scott Leslie. Scott manages the BCcampus Shareable Online Learning Resources service, the Freelearning.ca site, and is deeply involved with open content and personal learning.

Live Session:  This seminar will kick off January 19 with a live session via Elluminate at 19:00 GMT, 11:00 a.m. PST (see world clock). We are gathering our resources into a Wiki.

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A Digital Humanities Manifesto

Posted on January 19, 2009 by | 1 Comment

The  Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities at UCLA issued A Digital Humanities Manifesto.  (Thanks to Open Access News). Excerpt from the Manifesto:

5. The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy.

8. The multi-purposing and multiple channeling of humanistic knowledge: no channel excludes the other. This is an abundance based economy, not one based upon scarcity. It values the COPY more highly than ORIGINALS and restores to the word COPY its original meaning of abundance: COPIA = COPIOUSNESS = THE OVERFLOWING BOUNTY OF THE INFORMATION AGE.

10. Co-creation is one of the founding features of the digital turn in the human sciences, because of the greater complexity. But this collaborative turn doesn’t exclude … perhaps there is a space of hermetic works of the mad individual.

12. Process is the new god; not product. Anything that stands in the way of the perpetual mash-up and remix stands in the way of the digital revolution.

13. Dedefinition of the contours of the research community once enclosed by university walls. The field of knowledge and expertise far exceeds these confines. There is no containing it within these walls. The challenge: to construct models of knowledge creation/sharing that confront this increasingly distributed reality.

14. Wiki-nomics is the new social, cultural, and economic reality. Technologies and content are mass produced, mass authored, and mass administered. Social media produce culture.

19. Digital humanities promote a flattening of the relationship between masters and disciples. A dedefinition of the roles of professor and student, expert and non-expert.

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Google published its 100,000 knol

Posted on January 19, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Google announced publishing its 100,000 knol and refelcted on its accomplishment todate in this regard .  

A few weeks ago the 100,000th knol was published, and we figured now is an excellent time to reflect on the first five months of Knol’s existence.

Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Since the start of the project, we’ve seen articles written on everything from sinus infections and Arctic exploration to long distance motorcycle riding and the Amphilinidea.

The Knol interface is now available in eight languages (Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish) and we are excited that our users are helping us translate it into many more languages using the Google in Your Language console. Encouraging people to contribute their knowledge online is particularly important for languages with limited web content, and we are glad to see that knols have been written in 59 different languages to date. It has been very exciting to have people all over the world come forward to help improve online content in their language.

We have worked quickly to incorporate the features most requested by our early authors, such as usage stats showing reader activity on knols and rich media embedding (videos, spreadsheets, forms, slideshows, etc.). All of these improvements are tracked in our Announcement and Release Notes.

We are happy to see that most authors choose to accept moderated edits from their audience and that the volume of suggested edits from readers is steadily growing. So if you find yourself reading a knol and want to suggest an improvement, go ahead and press that edit button! You will be able to make the desired changes directly in the knol, and the author(s) will be able to review and act upon your suggestions. We look forward to seeing this new mode of online collaboration used more widely.

People visit Knol from 197 countries and territories on an average day, from the Aland Islands and Antarctica to Zambia and Zimbabwe. We welcome you to share your knowledge with the world and write a knol.

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Reaction to India’s Bill against open access to publicly-funded researches

Posted on January 18, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) expressed its concern about India’s  recent legislation that would deny open access to publicly funded researches. (Thanks to Open Access News) Excerpt:

Despite appeals from Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), and other public interest groups, the Indian government has refused to modify a secretly drafted legislation that would govern the patenting of the results of publicly funded-research including publicly-funded medical research. As it currently stands, the Bill will harm access to medicines and impede the ability of scientists to conduct innovative research due to a lack of measures to protect the public interest.

The Indian government made only cosmetic changes to the legislation: the Bill still removes publicly-funded innovations from the public sphere and permits monopoly pricing on publicly-funded products without any effective safeguards to protect the public interest. The legislation is modeled on the US Bayh-Dole Act which has led to a proliferation of patenting activity and the creation of patent thickets. These create barriers to new innovative research and fail to protect the interests of American taxpayers who end up subsidizing the discovery of medicines they are often then unable to afford.

Proponents of the Indian Bill claim it will help India to commercialize publicly-funded research by encouraging research institutions to seek patents. As a UAEM white paper on a recent version of the bill argues, the law duplicates the failures of the US Bayh-Dole act and in fact offers even fewer access protections. To read the entire white paper, visit http://www.essentialmedicine.org/bayh-dole/.

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Wikipedia observed its 8th Year Birthday

Posted on January 18, 2009 by | 1 Comment

Jay Walsh, via Wikimedia blog, drew attention, on January 15, to the 8th year mark since the development of Wikipedia, and emphasized its astounding success. Snippet:

Eight years ago today Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia.  It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. Wikipedia has become one of the senior sites on the web, growing from a top 1000 site shortly after its creation to the fourth most visited site on the web in the last few months.

And on its eight birthday Wikipedia exists in 265 languages and well over 10million articles – with thousands and thousands of active editors.

Congratulations to all the volunteers who have built Wikipedia from a grand idea to a truly grand project.  Here’s to many more years!

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The Most Important P2P Trends of 2008 and 2009

Posted on January 16, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Michel Bauwens, via P2P Foundation, enumerated what he reckoned to be the most significant P2P trends in that past year, and predicted that they will remain potent in 2009. Excerpt:

2. The emergence and consolidation of open design communities

Two-three years ago, it seemed as if the open and free hardware model was not working, and advocates were looking for the reasons why. Today, there is a burst of emergence of communities designing physical artefacts, and companies making them (Arduino, Chumby, Buglabs). The Linux model has taken root outside the world of software. Advocates are no longer debating, but creating the crucial tools to make such collective development possible. I’m not going to mention the further development of co-creation and co-design, of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, which were well covered already in 2007.

5. The expansion of Open Access and Creative Commons for Open and Peer to Peer Learning

Open content production, and access to existing scientific and scholarly content has made tremendous progress over the last year. All this is being used in the context of many new initiatives for more peer-oriented learning such as the P2P University initiative. The first inklings of open accreditation have been debated about. George Siemens’ connectivist learning theory has matured.

6. The creation of new third spaces for open collaboration: the hub, co-working, hacker spaces

People in the West work less in offices and factories, rely on mobile offices both while travelling and at home, but to live collective values and for mutual support, they are creating new type of co-working spaces, including franchises such as the Hub, and a multiplication of open hacking centers in major urban centers. Unconferencing and barcamps create infrastructures for temporary gatherings as well and have become ubiquitous including the pioneering development of Equality Camps which brings advocates and web 2.0 savvy geeks together for mutual enrichment. A culture of digital resistance is being created which combines offline and online aspects which mutually reinforce each other.

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Library of Congress leading digitization effort- scanned its 25000th book

Posted on January 15, 2009 by | Leave a comment

The Library of Congress through its “Digitizing American Imprints” program digitized under open principle its 25000th book entitled “The Heroic Life of Abraham Lincoln: The Great Emancipator”.  (Thanks to DigitalKoans) Snippets from the press release:

The program is sponsored by a $2 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Library, which has contracted with the Internet Archive for digitization services, is combining its efforts with other libraries as part of the open content movement. The movement, which includes over 100 libraries, universities and cultural institutions, aims to digitize and make freely available public-domain books in a wide variety of subject areas.

Books scanned in this pilot project come primarily from the Library’s local history and genealogy sections of the General Collections. For many of these titles, only a few copies exist anywhere in the world, and a reader would need to travel to Washington to view the Library’s copy. Now, the works can be accessed freely online or downloaded for closer inspection or printing. Readers can search the text for individual words, making the digital copy an even more valuable research tool than the original.

The Library recognizes the value of digitizing as much of the general collections as funding permits, and it intends to make building this digital collection an integral part of the overall collection-development program. Through a FEDLINK master contract with the Internet Archive, the Library is providing similar scanning services to the federal library community.

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The Burney Collection: 17th and 18th Century Newspapers Free Online

Posted on January 14, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Higher and Further Education Institutions and Research Councils in UK can freely access online the Burney Collection, the largest collection of English newspapers from the 17th and 18th centuries. (Thanks to JISC) Excerpt:

The Burney Collection offers unique insights into two centuries of history through access to over 1,270 newsbooks, newspapers, pamphlets and a variety of other news materials published in England, Ireland and Scotland, plus papers from British colonies in Asia and the Americas.

Digitised through a partnership between the National Science Foundation and the British Library then developed and hosted online by Gale/Cengage Learning, the digital version of the Burney Collection has been purchased in perpetuity by JISC Collections on behalf of the UK academic and research community at a national level, following an open and transparent procurement process.

Until now, access to the Burney Collection has been restricted, both in print and online. Its corpus of printed materials – originally collected by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757–1817) and greatly augmented since its acquisition – has been housed at the British Library. Due to its value and fragility, the Collection was unavailable for general use and the cost of acquiring online access put it beyond the means of the majority of institutions.

The complete Collection (including illustrations) is fully cross searchable, and granular metadata plus an extensive range of search and browse options opens up unrivalled and exciting research possibilities. …

The Burney Collection complements a range of other archive resources which have already been purchased as part of the UK National Academic Archive. These include 18th Century Collections Online, 19th Century British Library Newspapers, 19th Century UK Periodicals Online, and Periodical Archive Online: JISC Collections Selection.

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Partnership to advance Open Standards and Open Source for Geospatial Research

Posted on January 13, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Open Geospatial Consortium  and Open Source Geospatial Foundation signed a Memorandum of Understanding in Valencia to “coordinate in advancing open geospatial standards (OGC’s mission) and open source geospatial software and data (OSGeo’s mission).”  (Thanks to Open Access News) Snippets: 

Mark Reichardt, CEO and President of the OGC, explained that, “Openness benefits markets. Vendors of proprietary software have found that today’s more open and complex “business ecosystem,” which includes both open source software and open standards, is good for their businesses. It’s also good for technology users. It makes sense for the OGC to work with the OSGeo.”

Open source software is software that has been designed and developed in an open, community process. The OGC’s open standards are similarly developed in an open, community process, but they are specifications (for interfaces, encodings and best practices), not software.

Arnulf Christl, President of OSGeo, said, “We look forward to collaborating with the OGC to identify open source technologies that can be used as reference implementations for OGC standards and to identify standards requirements that result from our open source geospatial software development programs.”

The MOU provides for the assignment of up to six one-year Individual Memberships in the OGC.  Memberships will be selected by OSGeo and are subject to OGC qualifications for Individual Membership.

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Public Domain Works Celebrated in Poland

Posted on January 13, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Michelle Thorne, via Creative Commons, drew attention to the commemoration of public domain works in Poland, through press releases and libraries making available works digitally, spearheaded by Poland’s Coalition for Open Education (KOED – Koalicja Otwartej Edukacji). Excerpt:

The newly forged partnership, KOED, is striving to build and promote open educational resources in Poland. Bringing together common supporters of the Capetown Declaration principles, the Coalition is formed by one of CC Poland’s affiliate institutions, the Interdisciplinary Center for Modelling at University of Warsaw, and colleagues Wikimedia Polska Association, Foundation Modern Poland, and the Polish Librarians Association.

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