Okapi Island featured in SF Examiner

Our Okapi Island virtual archaeology project was featured in the December 28 issue of the San Francisco Examiner:

http://www.examiner.com/x-32230-Archaeology-News-Examiner%7Ey2009m12d28-Cyber-archaeology

More information about OKAPI Island in Second Life:

http://okapi.wordpress.com/projects/okapi-island-in-second-life/

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. 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.