Monthly Archives: June 2009

Interview with Connexions Founder

Posted on June 26, 2009 by | Leave a comment

The Guardian has an interview with Richard Baraniuk, founder of Connexions. The interview is in preparation for Baraniuk’s presentation at Guardian Activate Summit on July 1. From the interview:

Staying in the education space, there is still so much that needs to be done to provide universal free access to a high-quality education. In addition to providing free, reusable teaching materials, we need to work towards providing universal free access to the other elements of a complete education, namely student peer groups, mentors, instruction, and testing and credentialing.

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Interview with JISC’s Executive Director

Posted on June 24, 2009 by | 1 Comment

Paul Miller has published an interview with Dr. Malcolm Read, Executive Director of Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The interview covers various issues around OER, such as marketing and standards. From the blog post:

The JISC has played a significant role in funding Open Source and Open Access initiatives in the UK for several years, and has a global reputation. With an injection of funds from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), JISC recently announced a call for proposals to demonstrate the value of more widespread availability of Open Educational Resources (proposals are due by 4 March).

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Wiki List to Catalog University-Based OER

Posted on June 24, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Jared Stein has a new blog post asking for help on a list of OER supported by a university. For the moment, the list is being limited to English-speaking universities. From the blog post:

In addition to listing the institutions and OER/OCW web sites, I’m collecting info on licensing, RSS/Atom feeds, and remixability of OER in each projects (as per @funnymonkey’s request).

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English Children’s Stories Translated into Spanish

Posted on June 24, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Gavin Baker at Open Access News is reporting the launch of Editorial Flamboyent, which publishes Spanish translations of English-language children’s books. From the post:

The illustrations are reprinted from public domain editions collected in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, which are available OA via the University of Florida Digital Collections.

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Learning More about Iran Through OCW

Posted on June 23, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Steve Carson at the OCW blog has a timely blog post on OpenCourseWare resources that gives context to the events surrounding Iran’s recent election. Many of the courses are from MIT’s OCW project, though a few other OCW sites are referenced as well. From the blog post:

The recent dramatic events in Iran bring together numerous complicated issues including the political and cultural history of Iran and the Middle East, the role of women in culture and politics, and the impact of social media on world events. Courses throughout the OCW Consortium can be useful in providing context for the events surrounding the current election dispute.

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Wikipedia’s License Changes

Posted on June 23, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Mike Linksvayer at Creative Commons is reporting that the English Wikipedia has migrated from GFDL to CC BY-SA. The move was approved by the Wikipedia community recently following a proposal by Jimmy Wales in 2007. From the blog post:

Hooray for Jimmy Wales, founder of both Wikipedia and Wikia! (Note the two organizations are unrelated.) CC is fortunate to also have Wales as a member of our board of directors. Without his vision, this unification of free culture licensing would not have been possible.

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OpenEd 2009 Scholarships Available

Posted on June 23, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Scott Leslie has announced the availability of travel scholarships for the Open Education 2009 conference, located in Vancouver on Aug. 12-14. Applicants are required to write a blog post indicating what they would contribute to the conference. From the Leslie’s blog post:

I should also note that the deadlines for getting the secured hotel room rates are fast approaching, and a gentle reminder that we will have limited space for the (included in the reg fee) Barbeque-to-end-all-Barbeques on the Wednesday night, so if you want to come, getting your conference registration in as soon as possible will make that entirely more likely.

Also, David Wiley has announced the sponsors of the conference.

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Ubuntu Media Contest Announced

Posted on June 23, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Greg Grossmeier at Creative Commons is reporting that the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is now starting. Participants select a CC-licensed song, video or photograph. The winners’ works are included in the next release of the Ubuntu operating system. From the Ubuntu wiki:

The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an opportunity to show off high quality free culture content in Ubuntu. At the heart of Ubuntu’s ethos is a belief in showcasing free software and free culture, and with each development cycle we open the opportunity for any Free Culture artist to put their work in front of millions of Ubuntu users around the world. Although the space restrictions are tight, and we are limited to how much content we can include, this is an excellent opportunity for artists everywhere.

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Open Access After the Benthem Scandal

Posted on June 23, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Dorothea Salo has a new blog post addressing open access after the Benthem scandal (reported here). Salo suggests that librarians and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) have a role in monitoring journals for misbehavior. From the blog post:

Am I particularly surprised that there are skeevy publishers on the OA bandwagon? No, not particularly. It’s not like there aren’t any skeevy toll-access publishers (or, perhaps better said, publishers with skeevy practices, on both sides of the aisle). Not to mention that novelty business models tend to attract the skeevy for a while, precisely in hopes that people’s anti-skeeviness heuristics won’t have caught up to the newness. Besides, we knew Bentham was skeevy, just as we have been pretty darn sure Scientific Journals International was up to no good.

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Google Translator for OER Translation

Posted on June 23, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Zaid Alsagoff has a new post regarding the use of Google Translator to assist in OER translation. The short post includes a workflow and example. From the post:

For example, if an Arabic-speaking reader wants to translate a Wikipedia™ article into Arabic, she loads the article into Translator Toolkit, corrects the automatic translation, and clicks publish. By using Translator Toolkit’s bag of tools — translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and ratings, she translates and publishes the article faster and better into Arabic.

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