edu.science news

Students are often the first indicator for a major social change. Therefore it is telling, how fast the student protests fire up all  around the world. Protests in Austria, being the first country where there are protests at nearly all major universities, may ignite responses far beyond what students and critics alike may have thought possible. Public opinion and the media are mostly in favor of  reforms so that there is an interesting political dilemma for education ministries… Check out the protest page Unsereuni.at (Austria) .

— Links —-

www.unsereuni.at
twitter.com/unibrennt
#unsereuni #unibrennt #audimax

www.flickr.com/unibrennt
www.youtube.com/unsereuni
www.ustream.tv/channel/unsereuni

When talking about electronic information, devices are always at the core of acceptance. This has been shown by Apple, who successfully competed against illegal Download-Sites with the iPod in combination with iTunes. Here some readers for mobile reading that I found on Amazon - not much, but a start. But never forget: most of the Smartphones can also be used as mobile readers….

Journalists need to stop being so lazy and unimaginative. Here are 22 ideas for changing the way news is produced. Dan Gillmore from the Guardian formulates them in his blog-article:

The new rules of journalism

The Creative Commons Licencing model is explaned in this great series of posts from Advisign. Interesting for the German-speaking netzien.

• Teil 1 “Sinn und Zweck von Creative Commons”
• Teil 2 “Wie funktioniert eine Creative Commons – Lizenz?”
• Teil 3 – “Eigene Creative Commons-Lizenz erstellen”
• Teil 4 – “Vorteile, Gefahren & weiterführende Links”

Klaus Graf argued in his german weblog Archivalia, that wikipedia is also about science (not only popular science), because science is also about structuring of information and not only about scientific theory. This said, only about 1% of all articles published can be scientifically used…

Klaus Graf hat in seinem Weblog Archivalia einige interessante Kriterien zur wissenschaftlichen Verwendung Wikipedias angelegt:

Selbstverständlich geht es in der Wikipedia auch um Wissenschaft, sogar nicht nur um Populärwissenschaft. Zur Wissenschaft gehört nicht nur die Theoriefindung, sondern auch das Strukturieren von Informationen als Teil des Erkenntnisprozesses. De facto gibt es jede Menge wissenschaftlich verwertbarer zitierfähiger Artikel in der deutschsprachigen Wikipedia (auch wenn diese nur einen winzigen Bruchteil des Gesamtbestands ausmachen, möglicherweise unter 1 %). Link zum Artikel.

To build an eLearning system that is in consistency with user’s needs, it helps to watch the latest trends and developments. This is especially true for all developments on the p2p front, as file sharing behaviour is a good indicator for what users want. Now, don’t get me wrong - this does not necessarily mean that this is also exactly what they will get - but it helps. The acceptance of a given system - not only “forced” usage - directly affects the time and effort going into it by it’s users - and that is the difference between an empty system with educators being the only ones providing content (except through “forced” cooperation by students) and a living community…

This said, the latest developments in the endless PirateBay saga again show, how an idea or behaviour, once accepted by the majority, will be continued even if the original impulse is no longer there. Similar to the Napster case, derivate providers take up seamlessly where PirateBay left off. The only effect is to drive the providers underground and make it more difficult to get out of this vicious circle.

For those, who did not follow the case, here the short version: after the verdict, which will be appealed, Global Gaming Factory X bought the domain. Since then, more and more torents are copied over to the three new incarnations: OpenBitTorrent (OBT), PublicBitTorrent (PBT) and finally TheHiddenTracker (THT), which uses Anonymizers to protect the developers and users from further legal claims (see Telepolis for further details). This leaves the crusaders from the RIA and MPAA empty-handed while the transition is nearly complete.

So it is not useful to build up eLearning Systems which leave user’s needs out and force them to build up their own websites for digitalization, ressource sharing and so on outside of the eLearning system - a total waste on both sides. If the system would be flexible, allow for privacy and some flexibility, would be at least part-open and trying to aid users (e.g. backup of their social web data, publications, FAQs, assignment readers etc), this could change. A prerequisite would be, that the access to the data is guaranteed for any student for life…

So why is this happening? One of the main reasons why this is happening is the distrust of students for their own institutions. The collaboration of institutions with law enforcement without even trying to protect it’s users - e.g. by providing self-hosted mailboxes (whose user data is much better protected) or choose not to save traffic data in logs (as some providers in the nordic countries choose to do) makes collaboration difficult and hampers the will to participate which is necessary for any system to flourish.

So, a new approach would be wise - at least that’s what I think. Comments welcome.

Do you no longer own a TV, get your news directly from the net and perhaps have a website or blog? Then you might be a digital native in the best sense of the word.Check out these two great blog-posts (koehnetopp / netzpolitik in German).

Digital literacy is another important term in this respect. It  is the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and create information using digital technology (wikipedia). Since C. P. Snow’s Rede-Lecture “The Two Cultures” in 1959, the problem of digital illiterates in all field of society is widely known and discussed. Especially the divide between the humanities and the sciences makes understanding and cooperating difficult and poses real problems for our socienties (see e.g. censorship debate in Germany 2009).

See also: eLearning Papers n° 12: Digital Literacy – the evolution of the 21st century Literacies

• Allan Martin: Digital Literacy for the Third Age: Sustaining Identity in an Uncertain World
• Montse Guitert, Teresa Romeu: A digital literacy proposal in online Higher Education: the UOC scenario
• Chiara Sancin, Valentina Castello, Vittorio Dell’Aiuto, Daniela Di Genova: T-learning for social inclusion
• Maria Elisabetta Cigognini, Maria Chiara Pettenati: Designing e-tivities to increase learning-to-learn abilities
• Michelle  Veugelers, Petra Newrly: How to strengthen digital literacy? Practical example of a European initiative “SPreaD”

We presented the launch of the edu.sci portal at the FNM-A (Forum Neue Medien Austria) Conference at the WU Vienna (July 1st 2009). We got a lot of interesting feedback and impulses for further tools to integrate.

Interesting were also the keynotes, which support the conclusions we drew from operating elib.at since 2005. While we do focus a lot more on content than the usual project in beta, we did accurately position our project at the border between the closed LMS / repository of an institution and the “free” web. This should allow us to operate as a stepstone in both directions…

Much to do, not enough time.

For German-speaking readers:

Manipulation des Index . Wissen.schaf[f]t.Freiheit?! Eine tour de force durch die schmutzige Welt der Information von Gernot Hausar.

Abstract: Der Index in seinen verschiedenen Ausprägungen war schon immer sehr eng sowohl mit dem Zugang, der Zerstörung als auch der Kontrolle von Information verbunden. Dieser Aufsatz zeigt in diesem Zusammenhang Aspekte dieses komplexen Themas auf und versucht, die historische Kontinuitäten in der Debatte um den freien Zugang zu Information und die Informationshoheit aufzuzeigen.
Dieser Text nutzt neben den klassischen Werkzeugen der Wissenschaft auch das Stilmittel der Satire, um Sachverhalte besonders deutlich herauszuarbeiten. Ich bitte den geneigten Leser, mir dies zu verzeihen.

We don’t have to re-invent the wheel - so after playing arounbd with a variety of Facebook-Plugins, following this post are the ones which seem to be promising. The reason for facebook-integration is clear: convenience!!! While it is a privacy problem to a certain extent, it is also the fastest way to get people from all over the world connect and compare their individual courses - and that is one of the goals of the edu.sci project. If similar courses would share - or people at least take a look at - other course resources, we expect a benefit for all involved. Therefore we provide edu.sci as a platform and facebook, StudiVZ et al as the social connection. Think about it - this is much more powerful than a closed system… and we will be integrating it when we start building the first courses for a real semester in september.

Here the promised list:

Ask Questions, Get Answers – Ask people on Facebook and perhaps they will help you with your coursework

Easy Bibliography Generator – If EndNote or Citavi are too expensive, BibTEX is not for you and you need a formatted bibliography (MLA, APA, Chicago, Turabian) tomorrow - try this.

Notely – Notely is a time management system with to-do lists, calendar etc and helps you organizing you coursework. To Do List is a little plugin for lists.

Scholarium – This is a new plugin for an eLearning system which lets you look an your friend’s timetables, rate profs, find co-students etc. It is similar to StudiVZs functionality…

Zoho – Zoho Online Office is exactly that - writer, spreadsheet, presentation application easy to use through your browser - for 1 person or groups.

Web: More