Open content resource from California

A new Web resource for academic open content has been launched by a group of west coast campuses. The Open Educational Resources Center for California is a portal or aggregator, bundling together searches for open textbooks, general educational resources, open courseware, Web 2.0 open media, and open quizzes.  There are other features, too, including [...]

One prediction market ends, another one begins

One proposition in the NITLE Predictions Market ended this week, while another one began.  They concern YouTube educational channels and open access scholarly publication.
One proposition wrapped up after running for several months.  It concerned campus Web video, and asked “When will the number of campuses with channels on YouTube’s Edu directory break 300?” The [...]

Digital Humanities Now launches

The Digital Humanities Now project launched this month, and is a significant initiative for anyone interested in digital scholarship and communication, social media, crowdsourcing, open content, Twitter, and, of course, the digital humanities.  “DHNow”, created by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, describes itself as
a real-time, crowdsourced publication. It takes [...]

Open Knowledge Commons launches

A new initiative to share open digital content is launching. The Open Knowledge Commons (OKC) stems from the Open Content Alliance (OCA), and is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation. The aim:
to establish a chief coordinating body to help organize and facilitate the creation of an open, online digital library
OKC’s leader, Maura [...]

Information issues in 2008: Lynch survey at CNI

Notes on Cliff Lynch’s overview of the information environment, opening the December 2008 CNI conference.
Some information projects are heading into maturity, especially under the header of “cyberinfrastructure”. At the same time individual campus IT infrastructure strategies are developing. Federated identity management is increasingly needed, across campuses, to be able to support cyberinfrastructure. [...]

Web page to spreadsheet to maps: one mashup story

This post describes moving a piece of Web page content across several Web services, namely into a spreadsheet, out to a Web page, then into Google Maps. This documented, illustrated mashup account relies on several Google Apps tools, plus Yahoo Pipes. It relies on open standards, screen-scrapes open content, and requires no purchases.

(thanks [...]

New prediction market: how far will open courseware go?

A new topic has opened up in the NITLE prediction markets: “will the OpenCourseWare Consortium have more than 250 members by April 2009?” This question focused on the growing OCWC, and its ability to win campus support for its open content mission. 114 colleges and universities currently participate.
This topic, or “proposition,” came from [...]

Microsoft to wind down book digitization drive

In a major move for the book digitization field, Microsoft has begun to cut back its scanning operations. Sustainability played a role in the decision:
we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner.
Microsoft is apparently going to rely [...]

Internet Archive now scanning 1000 books per day

The Open Content Alliance book-scanning project just hit another milestone. The Internet Archive, founding ACA member, now scans one thousand books per day.
(via Stephen Downes)

Professors winning global audience through open content

The New York Times reports on one professor who has attained a global audience – through his class content, published as open content to the Web. MIT’s OpenCourseWare makes available a series of Walter Lewin lectures and demonstrations as videocasts.