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

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.

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”