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….

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”

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.

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