By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Cetis 2013 Keynote - Digital Citizenship: Underpinning Open Education
Josie Fraser, SocialTech, April 1, 2013
Keynote from the recent zombie!Cetis "on digital literacy and in particular, digital citizenship, as critical agendas in terms of supporting access and protecting gains in open education, and enabling participation in society." Speaker Josie Fraser addresses the question of how we ensure people are best able to take advantage of all that the internet and web web offer. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Rockefeller University Press: CC-BY is not essential for Open Access
Richard Poynder, April 1, 2013
I've been arguing this for years and won't belabour it here. But I will quote Richard Poynder: "CC-BY is not essential for OA, or even for text and data mining, and will alienate some of OA’s friends. So why insist on it?" Yes, this aligns me with some commercial publishers such as Mike Rossne who would much rather publish open content under an NC (non-commercial) license. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Small Open Online Communities
Keith Lyons, Clyde Street, March 20, 2013
Keith Lyon reports that Danny Munnerley makes the point that the C in SOOC stands for Community rather than Course. A SOOC is a variant of MOOC, with the S standing for 'Small' (see slide 7 of this presentation). I've seen this sentiment a lot. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lumen Learning: A Red Hat for OER
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, March 20, 2013
I'm  a few days late covering this item (blame my day job, which takes up more and more of my time in the office these days) but I'm sure readers would be interested to know that David Wiley, one of the major voices in open content, has returned to the well again with another venture, this one called Lumen Learning. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. French scholars say ‘oui’ to open access
Paul Jump, Times Higher Education, March 28, 2013
The Times Higher Education reports "Sixty senior figures from the humanities and social sciences in France have published a statement in national newspaper Le Monde in support of open access." It adds that the statement Who Is Afraid of Open Access? has received more than 2,000 endorsements from individuals and (mostly) organizations. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. POERUP elevator pitch: 26 countries in 26 minutes
Paul Bacsich, Slideshare, March 28, 2013
Interesting presentation surveying 26 open educational resource (OER) initiatives in 26 countries, including Europe, North America, Australasia and the Middle East Gulf region (conspicuously missing are reports from South America, India and China). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Students and OERs: Exploring the possibilities
Lorna Campbell, Lorna’s JISC CETIS blog, March 27, 2013
This post is a summary of a presentation from Toni Pearce, vice-president (further education) for Britain's National Union of Students. I have no doubt that her comments are reflective of the opinions of students, but reading them makes me want to dissolve 'students' as a distinct category for research and opinion on learning technology and policy. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. New Learning in Canada #oer
Jenni Hayman, March 27, 2013
I had a wide-ranging discussion earlier this week with Jenni about open educational resources, what an e-learning application would look like and where e-learning is going in general. This post summarizes her thoughts after the conversation, and I think it reflects the tenor of our discussion quite well. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Source Project Mimics Yahoo Pipes on Your Own Machine
Klint Finley, Wired, March 18, 2013

One of the problems with Yahoo Pipes or IFTTT is that they can turn it off whenever they feel like it - this is what happened to people using IFTTT with twitter recently. More...