Freely Available Scholarly Educational Technology Journals - for Higher Education
James Farmer is compiling this list, which he is storing on his (slightly malfunctioning) Wiki. More...

Reed Elsevier Gives in on Free Research
Fallout continues from Elsevier's agreement to allow authors to publish their articles own on their own web sites (how odd that sounds!) including this article describing it as "a major concession to the 'open access' lobby." Not that there is such a thing as "the open access lobby" per se. More...

A New Kind of Academic Freedom
Interesting item from Syllabus (though sponsored by HP, so read with the appropriate grain of salt) discussing the evolution of wireless access on campus. In some ways a bit dated (for example, discussing the 'current' 802.11b standard) and a bit wide-eyed (for example, observing that students will access the net from unusual places) but still a good way to catch some of the promise wireless brings to educational computing. More...

Freedom 0
Movable Type has launched version 3.0 of its blogging software and is getting a bit of a rough ride from the blogging community. Chief among their concerns is its new pricing policy, which as Mark Pilgrim reports in this item, may result in people paying hundreds of dollars to maintain their blogs. More...

Free for Education Home Page
AEShareNet has launched a license called Free for Education. In essence, "The Free for Education mark indicates that material may be freely used for educational purposes. The mark may be applied by anyone to any material in which they own the copyright provided they agree with the conditions set out in these pages." Those of you who follow this stuff are aware that I have had a running dispute with Create Commons about exactly the same issue, as a Creative Commons 'education' license was being proposed. More...

The Value of Consciousness and Free Will in a Technological Dystopia
Allan McCay, Journal of Evolution and Technology, 2018/09/21
"According to Harari, we face a bleak future, and may become economically useless, as a result of being superseded by non-conscious AI and/or enhanced humans." This paper argues that we will not be economically useless, but bases this conclusion on an incorrect understanding of AI as algorithm, which leads to the mistaken conclusion that there is a special economic benefit to free will. More...

'Be a Freeporter!': Enabling a Mobile News Publishing Community
Interesting presentation outlining the idea of a network of independent, interactive 'freeporters' (see more on my thoughts about their gear below). More...

Practicing the Liberty He Preaches
It's at the end of the article, and you have to be looking for it, but it's nice to see this little bit of honesty from Lawrence Lessig as "he was gratified that remixes of his book had popped up (free-culture.org/remixes), although it took some getting used to. 'I confess when it first happened, I had to take a deep breath and reconvince myself of the principles here,' he said." This is well worth noting. More...

Why Pay For A CMS When You Can Get It For Free?
Pretty simple advice, which I enthusiastically endorse. The author writes, "If she put on the green eyeshades, she would realize that she could save the entire cost of the CMS system while providing the faculty and students with better function." If university officials are wondering where to find out about free content management systems (because, of course, they do not advertise nor submit their software for review by the popular consultants), here is a site that lets people take them for a test drive. More...

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
This, of course, made me curious to see how my own online book, The Learning Marketplace, is doing (even though it's more of a compilation than a book) and it was interesting to see that it has been downloaded about 450 times since I released it in January. More...