The Argument for Free Classes via iTunes

The Argument for Free Classes via iTunes
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/the-argument-for-free-classes-via-itunes/
The New York Times Business Innovation Technology Society (Bits) Blog recently featured a piece by Brad Stone about the increasingly popular iTunes U, Apple’s catalog of lectures from colleges and universities around the world. Launched two years ago, there are now 600 schools participating. iTunes U makes more than 250,000 individual classes available to the public. Martin Bean, vice-chancellor of Open University, a distance-learning institution based in Britain, states, “‘There are still a lot of universities in the world that define the value of their experience as somehow locking up their content and only giving people access to the content when they enroll in the program….The courage comes from taking the next leap of faith. Universities no longer define themselves by their content but the overall experience: the concept, the student support, the tutoring and mentoring, the teaching and learning they get and the quality of the assessment.’” Open University has “more than 375,000 downloads a week,” and recently had its 10-millionth download.

OKAPI Spotlight- November 2009

Every month, OKAPI Spotlight features Open Knowledge news at UC Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Lizzy Ha. To receive more frequent updates, join our email listserv .

On Campus

The Future of the Forum: Internet Communities and the Public Interest
Saturday, December 5, 2009, 9am-6 pm at Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall
http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/fotf/
The UC Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), with support from craigslist and The Institute for the Future, will be hosting a one day symposium. The symposium will focus on the how social media tools and the Internet are reshaping the public forum. Participants include: Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia; Jim Buckmaster, the CEO of craigslist;  Laura Sydell, National Public Radio; Dick Costolot, COO of Twitter; and other ‘pioneers of Social Media’!

Due Processing: Incarceration and the Digital Divide
West Hays and Alayna Johnson
December 2, 2009: 12:00pm – 1:00pm at Banatao Auditorium, 3rd floor, Sutardja Dai Hall
http://www.citris-uc.org/events/RE-Dec-02
Winners of the Big Ideas 2009 program, undergraduates West Hays and Alayna Johnson will be presenting their project, which focuses on bringing computer literacy to San Quentin. The project’s goal was to establish an ‘all-access’ computer lab, as well as teach two computer courses: one focused on basic computer literacy, the other focused on advanced computer-aided design (CAD). Launched in 2005, the Big Ideas @ Berkeley Initiative “provide[s] funding, support, and encouragement to interdisciplinary teams of UC Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students who have “big ideas.”

Improving Access to Education
Gary Lopez, Executive Director, Monterey Institute for Technology and Education
December 9, 2009: 12:00pm – 1:00pm at Banatao Auditorium, 3rd floor, Sutardja Dai Hall
http://www.citris-uc.org/events/RE-Dec-09
http://www.montereyinstitute.org/about.html
Founded in 2003, the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE) was established to “to address the lack of high-quality high school and higher education content available on the Internet.” Funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, MITE created the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC) and NROC community. Mite also created “HippoCampus, an Open Educational Resource (OER) website for high school and college teachers and students that presents NROC content as a teaching tool, and for homework help and study.”

Around the World

2009 Sparky Awards
Deadline: December 6, 2009
http://www.sparkyawards.org/
Sponsored by Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), New Media Consortium (NMC), Center for Social Media, and the Open video Alliance, students are invited to submit their entries to the third annual Sparky Awards. Entitled Mind Mashup, students are encouraged “to submit videos of two minutes or less that creatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information. The contest is well suited for adoption as a class assignment as well as an opportunity to promote library services – including media services or information commons, where students can edit video, browse media, work collaboratively, and learn about copyright and balancing features such as fair use”

The Conscious Un-Conference
Saturday, December 5, 2009: 8:30am – 5:30pm at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C
http://www.ushmm.org/social/blog/
George Mason University’s New Media Center and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will be hosting a free, one -day un-conference. This one day event will focus on “the problems, practicalities, and opportunities of using social media to further the missions of ‘institutions of conscience’—those concerned with violence and atrocities, human rights, and related issues.”

Big Ideas Fest 2009
Making Education Relevant: Finding solutions to our toughest challenges in education
December 6th – 9th 2009
http://www.bigideasfest.org/
Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) will be hosting the Big Ideas Fest  in Decmeber. This 3-day conference will focus on “a movement that supports innovation in education at a time when the need to accelerate high-quality learning is truly essential for our country and our future.”Education stakeholder are invited to “join  us alongside 250 other education innovators to be inspired, share knowledge, and transform “big ideas” into solutions that scale. “

NMC and UOC Release Call to Action for Open Education

Mara Hancock, the Director of Educational Technologies at UC Berkeley, was one of 40 international participants at the Open EdTech Summit. The Open EdTech Summit was held in Barcelona, from October 19-20, 2009 and was sponsored by the Open University of Catalunya and the New Media Consortium (NMC). “During the small group breakouts, summit attendees generated fifty action items that could be taken right now to help realize the goal of creating an institution truly responsive to the needs of students in the 21st Century.” The summit concluded with  the release of  OET communiqué: Create the University of the Future, which is a call to action for open education. This call to action lists the following  ”major tasks that are perceived as critical to achieving open education:”

1. We must encourage the reuse and remixing of rich media.

2. We must embrace the full promise of mobile devices as learning platforms.

3. We must award credentials based on learning outcomes.

4. We must enable a culture of sharing.

5. We must take care that open resources include the context that will enable its use and understanding.

Open Access Week Activities at UC Berkeley

October 19-23 is Open Access Week. In honor of this week, there will be on-campus events celebrating this growing movement! Below is a list of activities happening on campus this week. Please go here, to see the original announcement.

• E-Scholarship (CDL) for UCB Anthropology/Archaeology: Take Control of Your Publications with eScholarship (4:30pm Monday)
• The Future of Open Access (4pm Tuesday)
• Live Webinar from the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) on the promise and perils of OA publishing. (9am Pacific time Tuesday, in the Bioscience and Natural Resources Library Seminar Room, 2101 Valley Life Sciences Building)
• Academic Writing and Publishing 2.0: eJournals, Blogs, Wikis, Tweets (noon Wednesday)

And a related event:

• Article-level Metrics at PLoS: What are they and why should you care? (noon Monday November 9)

Take Control of Your Publications with eScholarship

An Open Access Week presentation open to all Anthropology faculty and graduate students, ARF affiliates, and other interested students and faculty

Catherine Mitchell

Director, CDL Publishing Group

University of California

Monday, October 19, 2009

4:30 – 6.00 p.m.

Archaeological Research Facility, 2251 College Building, Room 101

• Keep your copyright

• Reach more readers

• Publish when you want to

• Protect your work’s future

…all with no fees

eScholarship offers a robust open access* publishing platform that enables departments, research units, publishing programs, and individual scholars associated with the University of California to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship, including:

• Journals • Conference Proceedings

• Books • Working Papers

• Postprints • Seminar/Paper Series

Initiated in 2002, eScholarship  is an intiative of the California Digital Library. It now houses over 30,000 publications with more than 9 million full-text downloads to date. The rate of usage of these materials has grown dramatically in the past 7 years, now often exceeding 170,000 downloads per month.

http://www.cdlib.org/programs/escholarship.html

Come learn how you can get started publishing with eScholarship today!

“Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions…OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance.”

Source:  Peter Suber:  http://www.openaccessweek.org/wp-content/uploads/a-very-brief-intro-a4.pdf

UC Berkeley joins five-member open access pact; BRII extended for another year

UC Berkeley, along with Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have formed a five-member pact, in order to “provid[e] ‘barrier-free access to information’ — from DNA-sequencing data to medical research to sociological studies — to academics and the general public alike.” In order to fulfill its promise in the pact, the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII), which was launched as a pilot program in January 2008, will be extended for another year.  BRII “subsidize[s] scholars who choose to make their work available online at no cost to readers.” Click here to see October 2 article from Berkeleyan.

OKAPI Spotlight- October 2009

Every month, OKAPI Spotlight features Open Knowledge news at UC Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Lizzy Ha. To receive more frequent updates, join our email listserv .

On Campus
Human Rights Advocacy, Mobilizing Action in the Visual Age
October 27, 3-5pm, reception to follow
UC Berkeley Faculty Club, Seaborg Room
http://humanrightsadvocacy.eventbrite.com/
Following up on last May’s successful conference, the Human Rights Center will be hosting “Human Rights Advocacy, Mobilizing Action in the Visual Age”, a one day even that will “revisit some of the most popular topics to emerge during” the “Soul of the New Machine” conference last May. The conference will foucse on and if the Internet and new media [can] “change the course of events in real time, promote accountability and drive democracy.”

“Take Control of Your Publications with eScholarship”
Catherine Mitchell- Director, CDL Publishing Group
Monday, October 19, 2009: 4:30 – 6.00 p.m at Archaeological Research Facility, 2251 College Building, Room 101
http://blogs.lib.berkeley.edu/whats-new.php/2009/10/17/open-access-week-october-19-23
In honor of Open Access Week, the Director of the California Digital Library (CDL) will presenting eScholarship, “an initiative of the CDL,” which began in 2002. It currently “houses over 30,000 publications with more than 9 million full-text downloads to date.” OKAPI’s Ruth Tringham is the sponsor of this event, which is open to all faculty and students. A number of other events will be happening on campus this week in honor of Open Access Week. The list of events can be viewed here.

Drupal BADcamp
October 17 – 18, 2009
Sutardja Dai Hall at UC Berkeley
http://badcamp.net/register
http://groups.drupal.org/berkeley
Hosted by the Bay Area Drupal Users Group, this free 2-day event will bring together Drupal enthusiasts. Anyone  interested in Drupal is invited to come, regardless of the skill level. “Drupal, an open-source content management system that is powering more and more of the web every year.”

Luscious Complexity: Transcending the Doohickey
Camille Utterback
October 5, 2009: Sutardja Dai Hall, Main Auditorium, 3rd Floor
http://atc.berkeley.edu/bio/Camille_Utterback/
Recently awarded the MacArthur award, Camille Utterback, a new media, artist, will be discuss how interactive art can engage the public without “without incurring frustration in participants”.

Around the World
Mobile Myths and Reality: A New Series on Deconstructing Mobiles for Development
http://mobileactive.org/mobile-myths-and-reality-new-series-deconstructing-mobiles-development
Featured at MobileActive.org, a blog focused on the use of mobile technology for social impact, this introductory post focuses on how mobile technology is not as perfect as it could be for social change in the developing world. This series will “take a very honest and realistic look at the promises of mobile tech for development and social change, and where these promises are falling short — and of, course, why, and what to do about that.”

Open Access Week
October 19- 23, 2009
http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/enews/09september.shtml
http://www.openaccessweek.org/
October 19 – 23, 2009 is Open Access Week! In the past, the Open Access event only occurred for a day. This “an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public.” Last year, 120 campuses in 27 countries celebrated Open Access Day. Organizers of the even include SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for FreeCulture. This year, in order to ‘enhance and expand the global reach of this popular event,” other organizers will include eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries), OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook), and the Open Access Directory (OAD).

The Conscious Un-Conference
Saturday, December 5, 2009: 8:30am – 5:30pm at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C
http://www.ushmm.org/social/blog/
George Mason University’s New Media Center and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will be hosting a free, one -day un-conference. This one day event will focus on “the problems, practicalities, and opportunities of using social media to further the missions of ‘institutions of conscience’—those concerned with violence and atrocities, human rights, and related issues.”

The New York Public Library to Make 500,000 Public-Domain Books Available to the World
http://www.nypl.org/press/releases/?article_id=340
The New York Public Library is working with Kirtas Technologies to make 500,000  public domain books available to the public through a Digitize-on-demand program. The public can browse and order different works at Kirtas’ website. “What makes this approach to digitization unique is that NYPL incurs no up-front printing, production or storage costs. It also provides the library with a self-funding, commercial model helping it to sustain its digitization programs in the future. Unlike other free or low-cost digitization programs, the library retains the rights and ownership to their own digitized content.”

Big Ideas Fest 2009
Making Education Relevant: Finding solutions to our toughest challenges in education
December 6th – 9th 2009
http://www.bigideasfest.org/
Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) will be hosting the Big Ideas Fest  in Decmeber. This 3-day conference will focus on “a movement that supports innovation in education at a time when the need to accelerate high-quality learning is truly essential for our country and our future.”Education stakeholder are invited to “join  us alongside 250 other education innovators to be inspired, share knowledge, and transform “big ideas” into solutions that scale. “

OKAPI Spotlight- September 2009

Every month, OKAPI Spotlight features Open Knowledge news at UC Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Lizzy Ha. To receive more frequent updates, join our email listserv .

On Campus
Campus Celebrates Constitution Day
September 17, 2009
Online Archive: http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/constitutionday/welcome.html .
“Technology, Democracy, and the Law”
September 17, 2:00 – 4:30 pm, Bancroft Hotel, 2680 Bancroft Way
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/1952.htm .
In honor of  Constitution Day, the campus will be hosting a series of lectures and forums on campus. One of the forums will be “Technology, Democracy, and the Law,” which will feature  Professor Steven Usselman of the School of History, Technology, and Society at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Commentators will include Professor Robert P. Merges, Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, UC Berkeley, and Lee Tien, Senior Staff Attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. ” The UC has also created an open archive for the public and campus community to explore. The archive is comprised of important documents, as well as providing other information, relating to the US Constitution.

Art Technology, and Culture Lecture Series
Beginning September 14; Mondays 730-900 at 160 Kroeber Hall.
http://atc.berkeley.edu/
The UC Berkeley Art, Technology, and Culture Lecture Series, returns this year, beginning with Mark Hosler on September 14. Mark Hosler “is a founding member of the group Negativland, which since 1980 has created records, video, radio and live performance using appropriated sound, image and text.” Mark Hosler is a huge supporter of reforming copyright laws, “ublishing on these issues for Billboard Magazine, Keyboard Magazine, College Music Journal, NYU Law Commentator and others.” All lectures are free and open to the public, and will at 160 Kroeber Hall.

Information Access Seminar
Fridays 3-5 at 107 South Hall
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/ias
Open to the public, the Information Access Seminar began again last month and will continue through the school year. “The program is a blend of seminar, colloquium series, and, occasionally, tutorial. The topics are very loosely anchored in the theme of access to network accessible information.”

5 Major Research Universities Endorse Open-Access Journals
By Ben Terris
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Five-Major-Research/8042/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
UC Berkeley, along with Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and MIT, ’signed a compact agreeing to the “timely establishment” of mechanisms for providing financial support for free open-access journals.’

Around the World
Utah State U.’s OpenCourseWare Closes Because of Budget Woes
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Utah-State-Us-OpenCourseWare/7913/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
We are sad to report that  Utah State University’s OpenCourseWare project has ended due to budgetary reasons. The project was funded by William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and State money. The project simply ran out of grant money from the Hewlett Foundation and wasn’t able to secure the $120,000 it needed to keep going even though there was much support for the project. ” ‘It’s just a bad timing issue,’ ” said Mr. Marion Jensen, former director, of the project to The Chronicle of Higher Ed.“ ‘The recession hit. People wanted to keep us up, but the economy was just such that we could not find money anywhere.’ ” We express our condolences and would like to thank Mr. Jensen and the OpenCourseWare project for being a leader in the Open Education movement.

Open Access Directory
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/About_OAD
Launched in April 2008, the Open Access Directory (OAD) “is a wiki where the open access (OAD) community can create and support simple factual lists about open access to science and scholarship. OAD provides a lists of various repositories and archives with open data and texts and pertaining to different areas if studies.

UNESCO Digital Library Majaliss opens up classical Arabic literature to public
http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=29118&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
UNESCO recently launched the Digital Library Majaliss project, which aims to ‘provide free access to hundreds of thousands of pages of classical Arabic literature and to demonstrate, at the same time, the innovative use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for reading, teaching and learning.’ The project is accessible online and on CD-Roms.

Big Ideas Fest 2009
Making Education Relevant: Finding solutions to our toughest challenges in education
December 6th – 9th 2009
http://www.bigideasfest.org/
Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) will be hosting the Big Ideas Fest  in Decmeber. This 3-day conference will focus on “a movement that supports innovation in education at a time when the need to accelerate high-quality learning is truly essential for our country and our future.”Education stakeholder are invited to “join  us alongside 250 other education innovators to be inspired, share knowledge, and transform “big ideas” into solutions that scale. “

Townsend Lab Public Release

We are pleased to announce the public launch of the Townsend Humanities Lab. The Townsend Humanities Lab provides humanities scholars with a rich set of tools for interdisciplinary research and collaboration. OKAPI Program Manager Noah Wittman worked for two semesters with the Townsend Center as an advisor and media architect, helping conceptualize, gather requirements, and develop and pilot prototypes. Congratulations to the Townsend Center for the Humanities and Chapter Three on this significant accomplishment!

Townsend Lab
http://townsendlab.berkeley.edu

About the Lab
The Townsend Humanities Lab offers a community-driven suite of digital tools to support interdisciplinary research and collaboration among Berkeley scholars and their affiliates.  Driven by a powerful content-management system, and hosted by new “cloud” computing services, the Lab provides project space and a suite of Web 2.0 resources to all Berkeley scholars with interests in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

The Lab offers tools for project organization and communication (event listings, file sharing, news broadcasts, and RSS feeds), as well as newer collaborative tools for text annotation, image annotation, visualizations, mapping, and collaborative authoring.  Images, documents, audio and video files can be uploaded, shared, and placed in circulation among designated project groups within the Lab.  Furthermore, all content on the site can be tagged by keywords to facilitate project organization and to enhance the interaction across diverse interest groups.

More:
http://townsendlab.berkeley.edu/about

OKAPI Spotlight- August 2009

Every month, OKAPI Spotlight features Open Knowledge news at UC Berkeley and around the world. To contribute, email Lizzy Ha . To receive more frequent updates, join our email listserv .

On Campus
Opencast Matterhorn Project Awarded Funding from Mellon and Hewlett Foundations
http://www.opencastproject.org/content/opencast_matterhorn_project_awarded_funding_mellon_and_hewlett_foundations
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/07/28_matterhorn.shtml
The Opencast Matterhorn project recently received 1.3 million dollars from the Andrew W. Mellon and William and Flora Hewlett foundations. Scheduled to be launched next summer, this project will focus on developing software that “will support the scheduling, capture, encoding and delivery of educational content to video-and-audio sharing sites such as YouTube and iTunes, so that learners can access lectures when and where they need it” Software will also include various tools (bookmarking, annotations, etc.) that will help users become even more engaged with the content.  The Opencast Project is made up of 12 institutions from all over the world, including UC Berkeley.

The Google Books Settlement and the Future of Information Access
Friday, August 28, 2009, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/20090828googlebooksconference
The School of Information invites the campus community and public to attend a one-day conference that will be focusing on the recent “Google Books Settlement.” The conference intends to “address major issues arising from the proposed settlement,” such as: “the right of the public to have access to works embraced by such a settlement, the questions of privacy inevitably arising from creating and controlling access to such a collection, the potential for and restrictions on research into the content and use of such a collection, the quality of the content and the metadata surrounding it.”

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
http://dishmag.com/issue96/homestyle/10099/boinc-how-your-computer-can-benefit-all-of-mankind/
Supported by the National Science Foundation, BOINC is an “open source software for volunteer computing and grid computing. BOINC encourages individuals, scientists, universities, and companies to use their computer  “idle time to [help] cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research.” By utilizing computers to participate in various research projects, problems that would other wise take many years to solve can now be solved in a shorter amount of time.  Although this project sounds susceptible to viruses and hackers, Dr. David Anderson, head of the project, assures users that the level of security is and the project is protected from potential hackers.

Around the World
New Open-Access Monograph Series Is Announced
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/New-Open-Access-Monograph/7613/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
It was recently announced that Open Humanities Publishing (OHP) will be “joining the University of Michigan Library’s Scholary Publishing Office (SPO) to create five new open-access monograph series with a focus on critical and cultural theory.” All content will be given a Creative Commons license, and will be accessible digitally and as a book. Readers are also encouraged to remix, tag, annotate, etc all content. Established in spring 2008, Open Humanities Press (OHP) is an open-access scholarly publishing collective made up of individuals from all over the world.

Net2 Redesign: Project Gallery Ideas
http://netsquared.org/blog/amy-sample-ward/netsquared-redesign-challenge-gallery
NetSquared is redesigning their community platform. They are asking for feedback from the public. “There’s already over 400 Projects in the online showcase with more posted all the time – this redesign hopes to make looking for new innovative ideas easier and more intuitive.” NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoup Global, was developed in 2005 and has continued to work to “mobiliz[e] individuals and communities, provid[e] Web-based tools, and award financial support to leverage social action projects”