Heather Ford has a new blog post on encouraging people to edit Nelson Mandela’s wikipedia entry on Mandela Day. The editing is set to take place on the Afrikaans Wikipedia on Saturday. From the blog post:
The Afrikaans Wikipedia has a dedicated community in South Africa working together to build a rich indigenous language resource.
Jarosław Lipszyc has organized an OER conference in Poland on April 23 in Warsaw. Susan D’Antoni of UNESCO, and Rich Baraniuk of Connexions, will be keynote speakers. Of note, the Republic of Poland’s equivalent of the Chair of Parliament will be in attendence.
Mike Caulfield at OCW Blog has posted on some new developments in conference management. Rather than select something like Crowdvine to manage the conference backchannel, OCWC will be aggregating blogs, Flickr pages and tweets with the tag “#ocwcglobal2009.” From the blog post:
We’ve tried various ways of building conference communities online in the past, and most have relied on a third party site. And usually these sites have followed a sort of bizarro Pareto rule — for the 20% of the product that integrated a twitter feed or flickr gallery the other 80% forced and encouraged the typical walled garden approach. Whatever integration was just sweetener to get another signup.
Gavin Baker at Open Access News has posted links to notes on the recent Unlocking IP 2009 Conference in Australia. From the blog All Modern Things (one of the conference attendees):
…I responded that since our (FLOSS) legal foundation is valid, all we can be attacked with is FUD (negative marketing), and even that doesn’t work forever. And calling it “war” is a strange thing, since it is a one-sided war, as we aren’t aiming to topple traditional IP companies — that will just be a completely unintentional side-effect.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged conference, copy right, copyright, event, Internet, open source
Brian Lamb has posted the theme for the Open Education Conference 2009 – “Crossing the Chasm.” Lamb also discusses the keynote speakers, which include Fred Mulder (Open Universiteit Nederland) and Catherine Ngugi (OER Africa). From the blog post:
The call for proposals has been posted with a May 1 deadline, and I fervently hope we will have some very tough decisions to make for the program. Obviously, a gathering is as only as strong as its participants. And speaking for myself, I’m hopeful this event will build on the identity of previous OpenEd conferences to push the notion of how we think about open education. I’m hoping to see a strong presence from the worlds of social media and the open web, not to mention the participation of community educators and activists.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged conference, event, Open Education, opened, research
The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources is announcing three presentations about OER in the next six months. The presentations will be presented at the Etudes Summit, Online Teaching Conference and MERLOT conference.
Posted in Open Education
Tagged education, event, higher education, oer, open textbooks, presentation
John Britton is calling for volunteers during Open Everything NYC 2009. The event will take place on April 18 at the UNICEF house in NYC. Volunteers will receive a free Open Everything shirt. From the blog post:
Open Everything NYC is just nine short days away, please help get the word out by blogging, tweeting, denting, facebooking, emailing, sending to lists, calling, and talking about the event. We’re depending on you to reach the best people in New York, we know you’ll do fine.
Pat Lohmann at the New Mexico Daily Lobo is reporting that students at the University of New Mexico (UNM) created a “textbook graveyard,” which consisted of a pile of textbooks that UNM’s bookstore would not buy back. The protest was organized by UMN Public Interest Research Group. From the article:
“Right now, with the state the economy is in, everyone is having a hard time,” she [Sophomore Lindsay Laine] said. “I think that the Bookstore, and textbooks in general, create a monopoly. Students have to buy them, and the prices that they’re charging are ridiculous. I just think it’s a whole bureaucratic, corrupt system.”
Last week OEN reported on an open access conference in India. Peter Suber at Open Access News has further details about it in a recent post (quoting from Subbiah Arunachalam). From the post:
Dr Prathap mentioned it was only the mindset and our nature to hold on to ‘the intellectual property’ we generated that stood in the way of adopting open access. I pleaded for taking advantage of the web technologies in both accessing the information we need from around the world and making our own work more visible and stressed the need for walking the talk and converting intent into action.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged conference, event, higher education, journal, open access
Glyn Moody has posted a reminder that the Open Knowledge Conference (OkCon) will be taking place in London on Saturday, March 28. The conference topics will center around “open knowledge for development” and “open data and the semantic web.” From the conference’s “Events” page:
The annual Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) is a day of presentations, discussions and workshops related to open knowledge. There is always a wide range of participants – from academics, policy makers and lawyers to geeks, artists and civil society activists.
