By Tim Goral. Online lectures, classroom capture, MOOCs, e-books and other digital content mean that questions about intellectual property rights are on the rise. Kevin Smith will help guide attendees through the legal landscape in his UBTech featured session “Yours, Mine or Ours? Intellectual Property in a Digital Age.”
Smith is the director of copyright and scholarly communication at Duke University.
Although that title may be a bit out of the norm, Smith says it is becoming more common, especially at larger research university libraries. More...

By Lynn Russo Whylly. Fourteen years ago, as a Victor E. Cameron professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University in Houston, Richard G. Baraniuk was frustrated that he couldn’t find the ideal book for his class. He knew there were tens of dozens of other professors out there with the same concern, so rather than write a book to suit his own needs, in 1999, he solved a wider audience’s needs by founding Connexions, a platform for making high-quality educational content available for free on the web and at a very low cost in print.
Baraniuk, now Rice’s director of the Connexions and OpenStax initiatives, is UBTech 2014’s keynote speaker on Monday, June 16, where he will talk about “Disruptive Innovation with Open Education.” Through his research in machine learning, he is working to enhance textbooks for OpenStax College, a nonprofit organization supported by Rice that is committed to improving student access to free, quality learning materials. We spoke with Baraniuk about the future of open educational content. More...

By Jonathan Thon - The Black Hole. Early in February 2014, a member of the South Dakota State Legislature submitted a bill for consideration that would prohibit administrators of public schools in South Dakota from reprimanding teachers who chose to teach their students about intelligent design in the science classroom. South Dakota is not the first place where such bills have been introduced. However, teaching of intelligent design has largely been outlawed after the Kitzmiller v. Dover case in 2005 which ruled that intelligent design was, in effect, biblical creationism in disguise. More...

By Léo Charbonneau. Do you follow emotion over reason – your heart over your head? Behavioural scientists recognize these as dual cognitive processes and the reality is that we use both in our everyday lives to cope with the world around us. However, in politics specifically, in the past 30 years or so, there is no question that emotion has been favoured over reason, and that’s not a good thing, according to Joseph Heath, director of the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto and a professor in both the school of public policy and governance, and the department of philosophy. His argument takes a bit of explaining – bear with me. More...