Karen Fasimpaur notes a recent Education Week article, which reports that 46 U.S. states are working towards common academic standards in Math and English. Fasimpaur is encouraged by news and its potential for open textbooks. From the blog post:
Having common standards could be a real boon for the open textbook movement as well. Being able to develop textbooks around common standards that could then be adopted in one version by all states is a much more reasonable proposition.
Glyn Moody links to a news story in the Financial Times which reports that the University of College London is opting for open access. According to Moody, UCL is “the first of the top tier of elite European universities to make all its research available…”. Details are still forthcoming. From the article:
Paul Ayris, head of the UCL library and an architect of the plan to put all its research on a freely accessible UCL website, said he had backed open access because the existing system of having to visit a library or pay a subscription fee to see research in journals erected “barriers” to the use of research. “This is not good for society if you’re looking for a cure for cancer,” he said.
Here is the new logo for the Open Educational News Blog! It will soon be up!
With 9 successful entries – check them below – our team had many options to consider.
The winning entry – authored by Chad Sanderson – got the majority of votes. We thank all the participants of this challenge for their contributions and beautiful work! Congratulations Chad!
Gavin Baker at Open Access News points to a recent post on the blog Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. The blog post discusses factors in deciding where to submit journal articles, including open access. From the blog post:
…an increasing number of journals are now open access, which means that anyone, anywhere can download the PDF with minimum fuss and at no cost. Acta Palaeontologia Polonica is one of these, and was among the first in palaeo. Other notable journals in this category include PLoS Biology and PLoS ONE, and Zootaxa. If you’re prepared to wait a year before your paper becomes open access (i.e. wait until everyone who’s interested has long had a copy and all the buzz has died down so that no-one cares any more), then the list of open access journals grows to include venues like Science and Proc. B, but personally I am inclined to feel that this is stretching the definition well past breaking point. There are good and valid reasons for wanting to publish in these venues, but their open-access-but-not-in-any-way-that-matters policy is not one of them.
Stephen Downes shares a quick quotation from a recent OLPC News blog post and argues that it could apply to OER:
There is a second fallacy, which is also very important, which we might call the miracle transformation fallacy — i.e., the notion that, if we could get little green laptops into children’s hands, it would miraculously transform their lives. This fallacy falls within an approach known as “media determinism,” the notion that a particular media or technology will automatically have a certain effect no matter what context it is deployed in. However, a long history of experience with all media indicates that they are heavily influenced by the context of their use.
Allison Domicone at Creative Commons has announced that audio from their second Creative Commons Community Call (on May 27th). The call takes place between the CC board and donors who have contributed more than $250. The audio is available at Archive.org. From the blog post:
Donors were invited to join members of CC’s staff and board, including CEO Joi Ito and new Board Chair Esther Wojcicki, to discuss organizational updates, including CC Zero, GreenXchange, the future of the CC Network, and an update on the Wikipedia migration to CC BY-SA. We also took questions and comments from participants.
Glyn Moody has a recent blog post pointing to the June 2009 Open Source Business Resource journal, which is entirely dedicated to women and open source. From the issue’s opening editorial:
Whether you look at industry studies, online articles, or perhaps even around your own company, you’ll see that women make up a small percent of the people working in free/libre and open source software (F/LOSS). Over the years there’s been a growing interest in why so few women participate in this rapidly growing community and, more importantly, what can be done to help encourage more participation. Fortunately, members of the community – both male and female – are actively ramping up their efforts to attract more women to the F/LOSS community.
Tony Hirst has a new blog post ruminating on passing e-mails “by reference.” The term is related to programming and a bit difficult to explain succinctly, but it means referring to content by some kind of symbol, link or other type indirect method. The idea is that the contents can change without changing whatever is pointing to it. At the end of the post Hirst suggests how the idea of pointing to things by reference could change open educational resource distribution. From the blog post:
This suggests a strategy to me for releasing OERs: having somewhere where I can request a resource that addresses a particular topic. OER publishers can then use that list to provide information about what materials the community needs and what they are likely to reuse… In this case, I’d like a mini tutorial on pass by value vs. pass by reference, in the abstract (i.e. not tied to the syntax of a particular language).
Update: Clarifying comments from Hirst below.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged higher education, Internet, library, oer, Open Education
Peter Suber at Open Access News is reporting on a case study concerning the conversion of a closed journal to open access. The journal was Annals. Computer Science Series at the “Tibiscus” University of Timisoara. From the article:
With the rapidly increasing amount of research papers, a new challenge came up: the need of storage of many research papers. Classical databases weren’t enough for such an action because older deposits had to be easily reachable, through simple searches in browsers. It is the moment when article databases (or archives) and repositories appear and, more, they had to be in accord with the frame established by the Open Access Initiative.
Update: As mentioned in the comments, the journal is located at the “Tibiscus” University of Timisoara in Romania, not Budapest. OEN regrets the error.
Peter Suber at Open Access News is reporting that an NPR podcast on open government data is now available. The podcast is a broadcast of the The Kojo Nnamdi Show with guest Clay Johnson from the Sunlight Foundation. From Sunlight Foundation’s press post:
Sunlight Lab’s Director Clay Johnson was a guest on the nationally-syndicated The Kojo Nnamdi Show, a program produced by National Public Radio-affiliated WAMU FM, where he joined a panel discussion on how non-profits and cities like Washington, D.C., are enlisting help from civic-minded developers to help make government data more open and usable.
