edu.science news

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

A lot of work has been completed and we are finally ready to launch the platform and add content. We completed a lot of individual steps:

- Tech: Server Install
- Design: Common Skin for mediawiki and wordpress-blog
- Community Functionality: Blog, User Page, Chat, Voice over IP
- Social Network / Tools: Twitter, Facebook, StuiVZ, Bookmark Tools
- Edu Fuctionality: Quiz, Discussion, Feedback
- Multimedia Fuctionality: Video, Audio, Implementation, TV
- Search for individual edu contents (around 10.000 quality texts from edu.sci projects)
- Recommender: Automatic recommending of “similar content” (wiki plugin programming)
- Testwiki & Testcontent (”courses”)

This should make it possible to finish all relevant steps so the wiki is ready for “real” content in september.