My Take on the Proposed 5th R of Openness
Darren Draper, Drape's Takes, March 13, 2014
Darren Draper offers a reasonable take on what out to be a fifth 'R' of openness: 'Retain'. Maybe this is what's needed - or maybe what's needed is actual ownership of the digital things we access and use. More...
Research on Distance Education for First Nations/aboriginals, from IRRODL, Vol. 15, No. 1
Tony Bates, online learning, distance edcuation resources, February 28, 2014
Tony Bates reviews an article from the latest issue of IRRODL (International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning) dealing with the impact of distance education on Firts Nations / Aboriginal communities in Canada. More...
OPEN Public Commonwealth Support System of Distance Education (PCSSODE)
E-learning, like everything else in China, must be developed on a huge scale. This paper outlines one aspect of that project, a public commonwealth support system of e-education (PCSSODE). More...
Open Affordances Panel
Some great coversation during the Open Affordances Panel on Friday with Ross Mayfield, Ziauddin Sardar and myself, hosted by Ulises Mejias. Here's an excerpt: "I think the most profound impact of the internet is going to be on Islam. Up to now, the tools for education and the tools for interpretation have been in the hands of a select group of scholars. More...
Batch Identifier Infrastructure
An open source tool for generating unique persistent digital object names and other identifiers has been released. Called "noid" (nice opaque identifier), it can be used as an identifier strategy no matter which naming scheme you choose (for example, ARK, DOI, Handle, LSID, PURL, or URN). More...
SPARC Open Access Newsletter
In this, the 80th issue of the newsletter, two major developments in open access are highlighted. In what author Peter Suber calls "the largest single step toward free online access in the history of the OA movement," the National Institutes of Health (NIH) plan to support open access was endorsed by the U.S. Congress. More...
Sun Plans Patent Protection for Open-Source Solaris
When I gave a talk about open source in Moncton last week, I was asked about the legal risks of open source. After all, Linux doesn't come with any protection against patent lawsuits. I mumbled something about assuming your own risk. But on reflection, it seems to me that what this represents is not an issue but a business opportunity - providing legal shelter for large corporations wanting - but afraid to - use open source. It's an advantage that was not lost on Sun. The company recently announced that it would make its Solaris operating system - a flavour of Unix, very similar to Linux - available for free. More...
Open education resources (OER) provide significant cost savings to low-income students and strengthen instruction and learning, according to a recent study from Achieving the Dream, a national nonprofit that supports evidence-based institutional improvement. More...
The Rising Star - MOST Workshop
This site will be where to find presentations from the Maritimes Open Source Technologies held here on Wednesday. In the mean time, my own slides are available, along with the audio in MP3 - part one and part two (about 6.5M each). By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, November 12, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]. More...
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